What Congress doesn’t want to talk about (tax hikes)
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The federal deficit is growing, and a former U.S. Treasury secretary is offering a solution: raising taxes! We’ll get into why talking tax hikes is a big no-no in Congress and why spending cuts may not cut it this time either. And, foreign nationals aren’t allowed to contribute to U.S. elections. But a loophole is seemingly allowing some foreign-influenced companies to do just that. Plus, the story of an astronaut and a dangerous ultimatum.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
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- “Joe Manchin’s debt crusade” from Politico
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- “All these government shutdown close calls cost money” from Marketplace
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- “Foreign-Influenced Corporate Money in State Elections” from Open Secrets
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- “What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?” from Ars Technica
We love to hear from you. Send your questions and comments to makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh yeah. |
| 0:02.0 | Oh yeah, good for you. |
| 0:05.0 | Oh well, I guess we'll start. |
| 0:07.0 | Just like what? |
| 0:10.0 | Hey everybody I'm Kaya Rousdahl. |
| 0:11.0 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart. |
| 0:13.0 | Where ready or not, we make today make sense. |
| 0:16.0 | And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Wednesday. |
| 0:19.0 | It's January 24th. I can't believe we're almost at the end of the month. |
| 0:22.8 | I know it's crazy those of you participating in dry January seven more days. |
| 0:26.8 | Okay so news and then some smiles and and then we'll be on our merry way. |
| 0:32.4 | What do you got, Ms Adams? |
| 0:33.2 | Yours looks more interesting, aren't you? |
| 0:36.3 | So mine is a two-fer. One is an article out of Bloomberg, an interview with Robert Rubin who was Treasury Secretary during the |
| 0:47.4 | Clinton administration also a longtime creature of Wall Street in which and |
| 0:52.0 | this is the headline Rubin warns of enormous risks from America's |
| 0:55.4 | fiscal trajectory, which fine, he did that. |
| 0:59.3 | The really interesting part is that he says out loud in this piece that Congress is going to have to |
| 1:04.0 | consider tax increases to get us to where we need to be. That is to say that we |
| 1:09.1 | can't really cut all that much more because Americans want and demand things |
| 1:12.4 | and if you're going to cut that's going to get dicey politically in a big bad hurry. So that was |
| 1:17.0 | really interesting and I commend the article to your attention. Why I bring it up |
... |
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