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Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate. Additional terms and conditions apply. Hey everybody, I'm Kyle Rusdahl. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make the day make sense. Hey, I'm Kimberly Adams. I'm joining you all from the Toronto airport. This is Economics on Tap, our weekly happy hour. And it is Friday, May the 2nd. We made it through another week. Has Marketplace bought you like a guest pass to an airport lounge in Toronto so that you're not sitting out there in the general assembly area?
I have my own lounge access. Thank you very much. You should have expensed it, yo. That's all I'm saying. Come on, man. You know I'm too bougie for that. Well, that is true. That is true. You're a little bougie. All right. Anyway, we will do what we always do on a Friday. We'll do a little news and a game. We will talk drinks. I will fess up here that I'm having water because I got a date with my wife later and showing up inebriated would be frowned upon, shall we say. You, Ms. Adams?
I have some local Canadian wine from the Niagara region. I have been drinking all sorts of Canadian wines all week, and they're quite tasty. Very big fan. And in fact, Canadian gin the other day, if I could look it up. I had a sip of Canadian gin. I did indeed. Heretic gin is what it was called, and it was tasty. Heretic gin. Yeah.
Appropriate for me because Jen is the devil. That's right. All right. I'm going to take a very quick stroll through the chat. Let's see. There is Christopher Grouse here in Nevada. Hop Tropical IPA. That's very nice. Market Clitch. Lemon Spindrift spiked. Awesome. Brian Joyce wants to know what lounge you're in.
None of my business, actually. It's Plaza something or the other. All right. Fair enough. If you're here, swing by. Say hi. That's right. If you're in Toronto, you know where to find Kimberly. Stephanie Moore Fuller, pink grapefruit juice and Wilderton non-alcoholic botanical spirit.
My goodness. Great Lakes Midwest Brewing IPA. Excellent. They are fancy. Holy cow. We have somebody on this chat from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands drinking water from now. Be lowy. That's awesome. That is awesome. All right. Let's get to the news, shall we? What do you have, Ms. Adams?
I have the de minimis shipping exemption going away. It's a huge story. Like, I really feel so the article I have is from Politico, but it captures this really big point that I think is important because we've talked about tariffs. We've talked about how the tariffs will impact people and how people will feel it. But a lot of times it's like somewhere in the supply chain or it's kind of like out there in the ether or, you know, prices are going up.
But is that inflation or is that the tariffs? And you can't really tell. This one, people will be able to see it. And so this is what Politico says. It represents the first visible evidence of how tariffs are driving up the cost of home goods, clothes and other everyday items as Americans are spending billions of dollars with online sellers. Because what's going to be happening is a lot of these sellers, as these prices go up, they are going to be like putting a line item.
on there to let people know why the price has gone up and so i think this is where i think it's been kind of hard up until now for people to conceptualize what is
Is price increase because of tariff? What's companies taking advantage? What's other factors? And this is stuff that people are used to getting cheaply, like whether it be something for your house or a cheap outfit or something that you used to get from China that now is going to be significantly more expensive. And you're going to know exactly why. And I think this will be the real test of the support that Trump has for his tariff policy.
I, you know, I don't, but do you think he cares? That's the question, right? I don't think he cares, but, and, and, you know, what he's been telling his supporters is just trust me, you can, it's going to be painful for a while, but you got to trust me. You got to believe in the cause. Um, and I think as long as it was sort of like a,
kind of out there thing that you couldn't feel personally or you didn't know if you could or you could make a counter narrative that you could blame the cost increase on something else. You've inherited Biden's economy or, you know, like, oh, this is just companies being greedy or, oh, it's because the Democrats are, you know, blocking Trump's agenda. There's all sorts of other narratives that you can attribute cost increases to. This one's going to be really hard to explain away.
Which, of course, explains, as we all know, and we talked about on this podcast, why he was so angry with Jeff Bezos. Right? Yeah. Yeah. What you got? All right. So mine is, and maybe, you know, this has been in the ether for a while. President Trump has this thing out for Harvard. He's taken away a bunch of money. Harvard has said, we'll see you in court. So he comes out in the last 24-ish hours on his social channel and says, we are going to take away Harvard's tax-exempt status. Hmm.
Here's the thing about that. That's literally illegal. 26 United States Code subparagraph 7217 says, and I will quote it in relevant part here, it shall be unlawful for any applicable person to request directly or indirectly any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer. Right? So that's the president, the applicable person.
telling the IRS to take away Harvard's tax-exempt status. The reason I bring it up is they've been able to gaffe off, they, the White House and his advisors, have been able to gaffe off a lot of what he does with unitary executive theory, and he's, you know, it's Article II powers and all this jazz. This is like black-letter law illegal. And it was also, just for the history buffs among you, Article II of the impeachment articles against Richard Nixon. So...
Hmm. And look, this all comes down to Republicans in Congress. And we know that Republicans in Congress have no spine and they have surrendered all of their Article one powers. I just think it's interesting. It doesn't get much more clean cut than this. You know?
You know, when all of those, that first round of USAID cuts were happening and like all of my friends who work in like the NGO sector and the foreign like aid sector in D.C., they were not only like losing grants and they were worried about that and losing funding, but they were sort of talking amongst themselves, very worried that the next round of sort of like anti-foreign involvement backlash or anti, you know,
the political retribution was going to be exactly this, that the administration was going to start going after the nonprofit status.
their political enemies. Now, there was some talk in previous administrations, the Biden administration, the Obama administration, about some of these churches, for example, where they got very political and were from the pulpit advocating for political causes, telling people to vote. And there were some calls saying, hey, this is a clear violation of the tax law. These churches should have their tax exempt status taken away. And Democrats did not want to touch
They didn't want to touch it because it was like too toxic, could be viewed as political retaliation. And they stayed away from it. We're not seeing that same hesitation from this administration, obviously. And so there's big concern among the nonprofit sector throughout multiple sectors that this is going to be another tool of political retribution used by this administration.
Let's remember, he said, I forget when it was. It was in a speech. I can't remember if it was while he was in office or out of office. Must have been out of office. Remember, he said, I am your retribution. Literally, quote from the president of the United States. Anyway, that's the news. We'll take a quick break. And when we come back, half full, half empty. Drew Jostad is on deck. All right. That is the break that we had. We're back. Sorry.
I'm juggling a lot of screens right now, man. No, you're doing great. You're doing great. And also, you have to have a wine glass in one hand, so I totally appreciate it. And a microphone in the other. Anyway, we're back for around a half full, half empty. Drew Jostad is going to save me from myself. Drew, please. All right. In the recent budget proposal, the Trump administration is attempting to cut $6 billion from NASA funding and shift more funds to Mars-focused missions. Are you half full or half empty?
Oh, I'm half empty. I want to go to the moon first. I think we need to go to the moon first. You know, Mars is great, but I think we have to go to the moon. I also think we need to go to the moon, but I'm more worried about like all of the cuts for research funding and all of the other things that NASA does that are being kind of decimated by this move and all the other moves and like the climate stuff that NASA does, just research and...
You know, kind of the wonder of science and the wonder of the universe that we get from NASA so often. And yeah, obviously I want to go to the moon and I think the moon is more important, at least in the short term, than Mars. But it's the other stuff that really gets to me. So half empty. Totally. Next up, are you familiar with something called a world ID? Yeah.
I am not. Okay, so the World Network is a product, I think, that comes from a startup called Tools for Humanity, co-founded by Sam Altman, you might have heard of. So the product is basically an app with a cryptographic key that proves that you're a human and not a robot. In order to get that key, you have to go to a world store and get your irises scanned, or
Are you half full or half empty? These are the orb stores, right? The orb store. Yep. Yes. I've seen, I saw this like in passing and I'm like, Sam Alton's orb store. What? I didn't actually read it. So that's what this is about. I mean, this is pretty dystopian. Like you give one of the richest people in the world, like your,
Iris, I didn't hear biographic information. Yeah, hard pass. Absolutely half empty. Absolutely not. All the damn way empty. Totally. Next topic. I have a meeting happening next to me. That's right. You know, they've got a podcast happening next to them. Who cares? Whatever, right? Yeah, it's a meeting.
Okay. From MoviePass, they are now going to be introducing something called Mogul, which is a fantasy league for film. Instead of picking athletes, you pick movies, actors, and directors. Are you half full or half empty? Pick them for what? To, like, you compare, like...
whose actors or whose movies on their team made the most money or got the most Oscar nominations or like all these different stats that you can use to track the success of a film similar to a fantasy sports league.
I'm going to go half empty on this one because like it's just another thing to gamble on. Another thing that people are gamifying. And now we don't need another thing for people to just like take risks on this environment. Yeah, I'm half empty mostly just because I don't care enough. You know, sue me. Anyway, what else? We got an audience poll on the last one. OK. All right. Audience poll. God, it's good that you're keeping track.
Yeah. Are you half full or half empty on mini-retirements? Oh, so this is an interview I did with Isabella Quye at the New York Times about people in the earlier stages of their working life taking off for a while. Call it a sabbatical, right? Which is kind of what it is. Obviously, there's a
There's a privilege element to this, right? If you're an hourly worker making $7.25 an hour, you can't save enough to federal minimum wage, by the way, which is now below the poverty line. You can't make enough. But if you have been able to save, there are some younger workers in this economy who are taking mini-retirements. They're either using it as a change of pace or just as a break. Setting aside the privilege part of this thing, you know, I'm all about the whole let's work to live, not live to work thing these days. Well, says the old guy. You know what I mean?
I mean, if you can do it, I can imagine that being nice and probably would be better for everybody's mental health if folks could take a little bit of a break when they need to. I mean, and think about why sabbaticals exist in academia, right?
It's so that people thinking about big ideas can almost like rest their brain for a bit and think about those big ideas apart from the day-to-day grind of like teaching and grading papers and all that other stuff. And like the folks I know in journalism who have taken time off to do fellowships and things like that, they really come back with different perspectives and different lenses. And I think that kind of stuff is helpful. What do you think? This,
This is so interesting. Two very quick from the chat, and then we'll give you the poll. Oscar Brannon says, been retired for 11 years already. Of course, I'm 72 years old. How much do you love that a 72-year-old guy is listening to this podcast? Number two, Jason Schottman says, my dad did that in his 30s. We didn't have a lot of money, but he had a good time, and he met his wife during that experience. So, yay. You know? Nice.
That feels like a good outcome of a mini retirement. Totally. So here's the poll. 82% of you are half full on mini retirements, 17% half empty on 140 votes. So there you go. Okay. Where are you, Lynn? Half empty or half full?
Oh, if I had been able to before, you know, having all the burdens that come with being an old married guy, like wife and mortgage and kids and all that jazz would have been great. Would have been great. Wish I had. But, you know, I was back then I was very firmly in the live to work thing. I was, you know, that's what I did back then.
Yeah, I kind of feel like sections of my freelance career were almost like mini retirement sabbaticals where I wasn't working that much because I didn't need to make that much money to live. And that was really interesting and restful for me. Anyway, all right, cool.
All right. That is a wrap on this week. We're going to be back on Monday. If you would like to send us a question or comment, you can leave us a voicemail at 508-UBSmart or email us at MakeMeSmart at Marketplace.org. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker. Our intern is Ola Malek. Today's episode was engineered by Charlton Thorpe.
The team behind our Friday game is Emily McKeown, Jamila Huxtable, and Antoinette Brock. Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodner is the director of podcast. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital and on demand. Hannah Sanborn was a single mom with newborn twins struggling to find affordable childcare. Her best friend Briar Rossi was burned out at work and looking for a way out.
So they came up with a plan. I was like, look, your leave's coming up like two weeks. Like, I'll put in my two weeks. Wow. And like, we'll just start it. We'll just do it. I was just like, let's do it. We're getting you out of this situation. We're getting me out of this situation. You tell me how much your rate is and I will pay it every week.
I'm Rima Grace, and this week on This Is Uncomfortable, how Hannah and Briar went from colleagues to best friends to lifelines. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.