Make Me Smart January 25, 2024 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

I’m good to go.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, let’s go.

Kimberly Adams 

Hey, everybody. I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well so, two things. Number one, you’re very loud in my headphones. And number two, I just dropped something on counter here in the studio. So anyway, my fault. Anyway, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Thanks for joining us. It’s Thursday today, the 25th of January.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, today, we are going to listen back to some audio of big news stories of the week. We’ve got some clips lined up. So, let’s get to our first one.

Shawn Fain

“Joe Biden bet on the American worker, while Donald Trump blamed the American worker. We need to know who’s going to sit in the most powerful seat in the world and help us win as a united working class. So if our endorsements must be earned, Joe Biden has earned it.”

Kai Ryssdal 

You or me?

Kimberly Adams 

I’ll take that one. Sure. That was United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain announcing that the union endorsed President Biden’s reelection, and it has some symbolic value because Biden’s image as pro-labor is very, very important to him. He very famously walked, you know, the strike lines, you know, which no sitting American president had ever done before. And so, this gives Biden’s pro-labor image a boost and also allows the union to put resources towards getting out the vote for Biden, which is a pretty big deal. Interesting, union membership is still on the decline overall, despite like this big year for unions that we had last year. But you know, as the share of the American population, fewer and fewer people are actually in unions, you know, and the endorsement does matter in terms of allocating resources, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that those in the union are going to vote in that way. So, in both 2016 and 2020, the UAW endorsed Democratic candidates, and our wonderful producers got a breakdown of how UAW members actually voted. And so, according to a piece in The Conversation, “In 2016, 38%, of union members voted for Trump compared to 58% for Clinton.” And I will say, I went to a steel mill during that election. And it was very fascinating talking to those guys because the union had endorsed Clinton, and they were all planning to vote for Trump. Anyway. And then, “according to the University of Michigan researchers, in 2020 40% of voters in union households voted for Trump compared to 56% for Biden.” So, it’s not always a translation into votes, as much as it is resources and money.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, absolutely. And so, this can’t possibly have come as a surprise to anybody that the UAW was going to endorse. I thought the thing that was interesting was how vocal Shawn Fain was on Fox News yesterday. On Fox News yesterday, he says again, the only word for this is dumping on Donald Trump, for his very distinct anti-labor stance. I thought that was, you know, going right into the belly of the beast, as it were.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, that is fascinating. I wonder. I’ll be really interested to see those numbers on the outside of this because Trump did not do much for organized labor, for sure. I know it’s probably generous. And yet, that demographic, as in the demographics of Americans who tend to be part of large labor unions, not necessarily the smaller ones, do tend to skew in the demographics that tend to skew towards Trump. And so, it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in 2024.

Kai Ryssdal 

Totally. Alright, Drew. Next one, please.

Janet Yellen

“The President and I understand that many Americans have long felt a deeper pessimism about the economy, going back far before the pandemic. Due to the longer-term trends that I described, life is still harder than it should be for the middle class in this country. To change this, our modern supply-side strategy is designed to build off of our historic recovery and continue charting a new course.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Janet Yellen, of course. If you did not know who that was, really? Speaking today at the Economic Club of Chicago. I will say that CNN, not CNBC, not Bloomberg, CNN took that speech for literally about 90 seconds and then bailed out. And you could hear the anchors come back saying all right, that was Janet Yellen, you know, as she got into it. Anyway, so obviously, she is touting the president’s economic record. She is talking about the data that came out today, gross domestic product showing that the economy grew better than 3% in the last quarter of 2023, which was way better than anybody expected. It is an interesting moment for the President and his Secretary of the Treasury, to be positioning themselves, in the economic, in the politics of this economy, right? Because there does seem to be something of a tipping point about mood and it might be coming at a great time for Biden. Don’t know. Don’t know. Yeah. I’m going to break the fourth wall here. I think you should share with the audience a nutshell of what you and I were talking about before we turned the mics on.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. So, I literally five minutes before we sat down, got back from spending my afternoon in the parking lot of a grocery store talking to people about this economy and the election, and asking them questions like, what is a good economy look like to you? Do you think we’re in a good economy? How is your economy doing? And people acknowledge that the headline numbers are good, but it does not matter. And they’re like, this economy still sucks. Housing is too expensive. Our wages aren’t keeping up. And you know, this dichotomy always shows up in data around this where people will say their own personal economy is fine, but the economy overall sucks. And today, what I’m hearing from people because I was in a slightly affluent neighborhood. They were saying, “overall economy, not great. My personal economy is fine. But I know a lot of people around me who are not fine.” And they are seeing it because you know, this place that I was, had a lot of relatively high-income people there. It was like an organic grocery store or whatever. Because for, you know, breaking the fourth wall again, commercial grocery store chains tend to not like you hanging out in their parking lot, FYI. So anyway, we end up at these private stores. But the sentiment is still really negative. People don’t like their options. They don’t want to vote for Trump. They don’t want to vote for Biden. Several folks said that they plan to stay home because they just can’t stomach either one of them. And I was listening to your, I guess it was a final that you did on the regular show about the “vibecession” being over with Kyla Scanlon. And I don’t know, man. I wonder if we’re just seeing more of that bifurcation of the economy where it’s some parts of it, the upper income parts of the economy, we’re like, okay, we’re ready to move on the top line numbers are good, those numbers are what affects us. Because we are in the stock market. We are in the jobs that are recovering. But everybody else is just like, um, I mean, I talked to a substitute teacher who’s like, I’m never going to be able to buy a house, you know? So, I don’t know, I’m kind of up. And I’m interested to talk to more people as we get closer and closer to the election to get more insights because it’s all over the place right now. Totally is. All right. Next up, this clip is from an interview I did earlier this week with a GOP political strategist named Heath Garrett. I’m working on a story about political messaging around the economy, and he said something about how most people again, don’t really pay attention to those top line national numbers. They pay attention to their personal economy, which made me ask him about what happens when there are so few local news outlets covering the local economy, and everyone is getting their economic news from national outlets about the national economy. And he said that has political implications too, the sort of lack of local journalism.

Heath Garrett

“There’s very little coverage. And so, by the time you run for Congress or the U.S. Senate, in the past, you would have been conditioned by some degree and knowledge that everything you do is going to be transparently vetted one way or the other by local journalism, and that is lacking.”

Kimberly Adams 

Just to pile on this point about sort of the demise of local journalism. This week, the LA Times announced it’s going to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom. A good friend of mine is one of them. A recent study by Northwestern Medill School of Journalism found that, “More than half of U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news.” And, you know, I was thinking about it from this framework of what happens when the national economy becomes your local story whether or not it’s relevant. But he was making the point that without local news, these candidates can make it to the national stage without any kind of check on their behavior, or whether or not they’re legit. I mean, see George Santos you know? Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. So, I thought that was really interesting.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep. These are not great times for journalism. Nobody listening to this needs to hear us say that because they all know it. Because they are consumers of journalism, which by the way, we appreciate.

Kimberly Adams 

Thank you.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yes. All right. Where are we? One more? One more. So, this is from a special show that we did on Marketplace yesterday, sort of setting up a series we’re doing on the government’s intervention in the economy under President Biden and Congress, in which they are spending a ton of money to eventually get the government more involved in the economy, specifically with infrastructure and, and green tech spending and those kinds of things. And anyway, this is an interview I did. She is a history graduate student at Cal State Northridge. Her name is Natalie McDonald. And I asked her, she is a specialist in the New Deal, and I said, “Listen, why does the New Deal matter today”? Here’s what she said.

Natalie McDonald

“If we know what was accomplished during the days of the New Deal, what is possible when the government invests in the country and Americans, there’s hope that we might be able to accomplish something similar in the future.”

Kai Ryssdal 

So that’s a pretty aspirational piece of tape. And that’s how we ended, almost how we ended the show yesterday, because look we can do things. We can freaking do things if we want to. The question is, do we want to? Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

That was a really interesting show episode. And I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of it. I was curious when you were talking to folks. Did they talk about sort of the disparate impact of the New Deal? Because I know like the narrative, at least in my community, when people talk about the New Deal is how like, actively it left out Black people. Did that come up when you were talking to folks?

Kai Ryssdal 

It actually did not. And that in retrospect, is something I should have thought of. And actually, maybe what we can do actually is in future episodes, not talk about talk about accessibility and involvement as we go forward, right? Because that’s going to be a thing, right? Because there are going to be a ton of new jobs there. There are already and will be a ton of new jobs and the catch is who gets those jobs. And how do we make sure that that everybody gets those jobs, you know.

Kimberly Adams 

Right. Right. Go back and listen, y’all. It was really interesting. It’s more thinking about the New Deal than I’ve ever done in my life. Except for when watching Annie.

Kai Ryssdal 

It is a hard knock life. Anyway.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, for sure. That’s it for today. Join us tomorrow for Economics on Tap. The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 Pacific, 6:30 Eastern, and I hope that you will tune in.

Kai Ryssdal 

Courtney Bergsieker produced today’s episode. Drew Jostad engineered it. Ellen Rolfes news lettered it. Thalia Menchaca interned it.

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera senior produced it. Sure. Okay. Bridget Bodnar director of podcasted it, and Francesca Levy executive directed of digital it. I can’t.

Kai Ryssdal                

I kind of hosed you. I’m sorry. I hosed you. Thanks for trying though.

Kimberly Adams 

I did my best.