In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Decades later, while still a divisive idea, the conversation around guaranteed income is starting to simmer, and pilot programs looking at universal basic income, a similar idea, are popping up around the country. On the show today, Stacia West, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, explains why King called for a guaranteed income, why UBI is gaining traction today, and what early results from pilot programs are showing us about its impact.
Then, we’ll get into the haggling over the child tax credit on Capitol Hill and check in with the world’s second largest economy. Plus, one historian was wrong about Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for the American economy.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
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Why the Fed won’t hop on the rate-cutting bandwagon just yet
What summer heat waves mean for prisons
The good, the bad and the ugly of election polling
A shadow looms over the Fed
The long game of high interest rates
The growing troubles at OpenAI
A Trump-Musk bromance
How Big Food changed the way we eat
Biden doubling down on tariffs
How the Palestinian financial system is tied up in Israel
Private equity, endless shrimp and Red Lobster’s decline
Neoliberalism’s sleight of hand
Getting deep about deepfakes
The price tag on friendship
Whaddya wanna know about key inflation measures?
The great Bumble fumble
From “Million Bazillion”: What are labor unions?
The value of “third places”
What grocery aisle gossip can tell us about the economy
The lowdown on joint fundraising committees
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