The risky business of corporate political spending
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Companies in the United States spend billions in political donations each election cycle with the aim of gaining more influence in government. But all that spending comes with risks. We’ll get into it. And, we’ll explain why many Americans impacted by recent hurricanes will have to wait for disaster assistance from the Small Business Administration and how former President Trump’s plans for mass deportations could send shockwaves through our nation’s food supply chain. Plus, why are tech companies like Amazon and Google investing in nuclear energy?
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Why companies spend all that campaign donation money” from Marketplace
- “SBA disaster loan program out of money after hurricanes, Biden says” from Axios
- “Trump’s proposed mass deportations could ‘decimate’ the US food supply” from Grist
- “Trump Faces Tough Questions From Hispanic Voters, but Largely Defends or Dodges” from The New York Times
- “Big Tech has cozied up to nuclear energy” from The Verge
- “Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors” from CNBC
Join us tomorrow for Economics on Tap. The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Finished up my interview good to go. |
| 0:03.0 | Ha ha! |
| 0:06.0 | That's really fast. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello everyone I'm Kimberly Adams. |
| 0:11.0 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today |
| 0:13.5 | today make sense. Kai is out today so joining me is the wonderful marketplace is |
| 0:17.8 | Amy Scott welcome back Amy. Hey everybody it's nice to be back and |
| 0:22.4 | thanks for joining us today it's Thursday |
| 0:24.1 | October 17th. Today we're going to listen back to some of the big stories of the |
| 0:28.6 | week and some audio that's just been lingering in our brains so let's get get to it. We're going to start off today |
| 0:34.4 | with some talk about corporate political spending. If you haven't been listening |
| 0:38.4 | on Marketplace Morning Report to their office politics series, you definitely should. And for that series I |
| 0:45.0 | chatted with a law professor named Ben Edwards who teaches at the William S. |
| 0:49.7 | Boyd School of Law and he was talking about the tough decisions that corporate |
| 0:55.2 | leaders often have to make while choosing whether or not to spend on political |
| 0:59.6 | donations. It's always a mixed bag for them. They may find a particular state political candidate to be a bit loathsome, but if they hold economic views that are very favorable for the corporation, they might hold their nose and give the |
| 1:16.3 | donation because they want to achieve some limited corporate objective. |
| 1:20.8 | But when they do that, even if they get the law or the regulation that they wanted it may come with a lot of other nasty baggage |
| 1:28.8 | Yeah, that nasty baggage Edwards was talking about could look like dissatisfied |
| 1:34.1 | employee, investors, or backlash from customers because you want to you know |
| 1:40.1 | make donations, you know corporations are people apparently you and these corporations |
| 1:45.0 | legally want to make want to make want to spend their money in a way that you |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marketplace, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Marketplace and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.