Time for a national debt history lesson

Marketplace

American Public Media

Business, News

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Senate just narrowly passed the latest version of the GOP tax and spending bill, and the House will vote on it tomorrow. Nonpartisan experts at the Congressional Budget Office say the bill will add more than $3 trillion to the national debt, which is already a whopping $36.2 trillion. In this episode, a few economic historians tell us how we got here. Plus: Construction spending falls again, Home Depot goes after large-scale pros and the stock market rallies.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A trillion here, a trillion there.
0:03.8	Pretty soon it all adds up.
0:05.9	We'll talk debt and data, and then we'll go fishing.
0:10.7	From American public media.
0:12.9	This is Marketplace.
0:18.8	I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the first day of July. Good as always to have you along, everybody.
0:30.3	As we begin the second half of 2025, it feels like an appropriate moment to consider the six months gone by in this economy, or actually better yet, the 90 days since President Trump announced his barrage of tariffs back at the beginning of April and made uncertainty the macroeconomic word of the year so far.
0:51.3	We touched on manufacturing yesterday. We're going to get the June unemployment report on
0:55.6	Thursday. Today from the Census Bureau came construction spending data for May. Not great. Down 3 tenth percent
1:05.0	more than expected. Also the fifth consecutive monthly decline. Marketplaces of Brie Bennishoor has the wise and the
1:12.4	wherefores. Some of this slowdown in construction spending is a delayed hangover from the
1:17.5	construction party we had a couple years ago. At the end of 2023, there were one million
1:24.8	apartments under construction. Robert Dietz's chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders.
1:30.5	After that surge in apartment building, the market came back down to Earth.
1:35.3	2024 saw a 25% decline in apartment construction starts.
1:42.1	There was a big slowdown in the apartment development market due to
1:45.8	the high cost of financing. Higher interest rates make it more expensive to build. Meanwhile,
1:51.8	the demand side of things hasn't exactly been thrilling builders either. Vacancy rates are higher
1:57.4	than normal in more than half of all major metro areas. According to Liu Chen,
2:01.4	senior economist with Moody's analytics. A lot of these metros have current vacancies sitting about
2:06.4	8%, 9%. Chen says a lot of Sunbelt cities in particular have high vacancies that are holding back
2:12.7	construction. And good news for renters, they're holding down rent growth too. And there's a more recent addition to the building Buzzkill in general, good old uncertainty.
	...

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