The NPR Politics Podcast - Tax Revenue Is Down, Spending Is Up, And The Deficit Is Bigger

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

The federal government's deficit nearly tripled in the first nine months of the fiscal year, a surge that's bound to raise concerns about the country's rising debt levels.And NPR spoke with young voters from rural North Carolina about the issues on their mind.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley, politics reporter Ximena Bustillo, and politics reporter Elena Moore.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Riva from San Jose, California, and I'm with my soon-to-be six-year-old daughter, Jadzia. Hi, I'm Jadzia. She just finished her first one-kilometer freestyle swim. We're about to celebrate with ice cream. This podcast was recorded at 1247 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, July 14th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but we'll still be practicing for the swim to Alcatraz. Enjoy the show.

The swim to Alcatraz? It's so cold. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And NPR's chief economics correspondent, Scott Horsley, is here. Hello, Scott. Great to be with you. The president is emphasizing the economy as the heart of his reelection campaign, and so are his allies. It's all part of the Bidenomics push. Bidenomics is driving competition and choice. It shows that the president's policies, Bidenomics, is working. Bidenomics is working. Guess what? Bidenomics is working. Bidenomics is working. And guess what?

Bidenomics is working. That's advisor Ali Zaidi, acting Labor Secretary Julie Hsu, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and of course, the big guy himself. And taking ownership of the economy comes with some risks. The federal deficit nearly tripled in the first nine months of the fiscal year, compared to the same period last year. That adds nearly $1.4 trillion to the national debt. So, Scott, what happened? How did the budget get so out of whack? Well, it's a combination of increased spending and reduced tax receipts. That's a recipe for a yawning federal deficit. Revenues are down about 11% in the first nine months of the fiscal year. Remember last year,

the stock market didn't perform very well. People weren't selling a lot of stocks at a profit. So their capital gains taxes were smaller in 2023. Now that could turn around next year. The stock market's doing better now, and so maybe we'll get an influx of capital gains taxes in 2024. At the same time, the government's spending about 10% more money. Social Security recipients got the largest cost of living adjustment in four decades at the beginning of this year. That was to help keep pace with last year's inflation rate. And so we see spending in those areas is all up pretty substantially. I know that people who care about

the deficit are shouting from the rooftop saying, somebody pay attention, care about this. But Mara, do voters care about this? I don't think so. They used to care about it. They used to care about it a lot more than we had a president, Donald Trump, who didn't care about the deficit, who talked about how he loved debt. And it turns out we just went through a big fight about spending that was supposedly about the deficit, which, by the way, Republicans in Congress only care about when there's a Democratic president in the White House. But no one talked about a grand bargain to to finally bring the deficit down, to do something about entitlements. What the Republicans proposed in the debt ceiling deal was very small potatoes.

They didn't address any of the big drivers of the deficit. So I would say that people care about jobs. They really care about inflation. But no, the deficit is not as big a deal politically as it used to be. Is there a risk for President Biden in owning up to embracing Bidenomics? Or is this a necessary thing to just like tell people what he's actually doing? I don't think he's taking a risk because the Republicans are going to hang all the bad things about the economy around his neck anyway.

He might as well jump in with both feet and take full ownership of all the good things, which he's trying to do. And the problem with this economy is it's very confusing. There's a lot of good things. Inflation is coming down. Blue-collar wages are going up. Job creation is going up. Wages are on average up 4.4 percent, while prices were only up 3 percent. So wages are finally growing faster than prices.

That means workers are actually seeing their buying power increase for the first time in a while. We are also in this weird political moment where a president's approval ratings and the economy have been disconnected. They used to be completely connected. And I think Biden has no choice but to take credit by calling this economic moment Bidenomics or the result of Bidenomics, because presidents get the blame for everything bad anyway. They might as well take credit for the good stuff. We're going to leave it there for now. Mara and Scott, thank you so much. Good to be with you. Thanks a lot. And we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, young voters who live in rural places.

And we're back with Elena Moore and Ximena Bustillo. Hello. Hey there. So you both have been reporting on an intersection in the electorate that does not get much attention. Rural voters lean red, young voters lean heavily blue. And yet there are plenty of young rural voters in this country, and both parties want their support. And you traveled to a state that is getting a lot of attention from the presidential candidates and from the parties, North Carolina, to talk to this very interesting group of voters. So what made you want to do this story? We decided to go to North Carolina for several reasons. But so the thing about young rural voters that's really fascinating is, like you said, young voters lean Democrat, rural voters lean Republican, but young rural voters are more split. And data from Tufts actually showed that in the 2020 election, the margins between Trump and Biden among rural young voters, among voters under 30, it was only like three percentage points. It's really close. So there's a little pocket here that for political

nerds like ourselves is fascinating. So we got this group together. We chatted up a ton of people around the state. We talked to friends of friends. We talked to student leaders and put a group together to see where everyone's head was at. So you basically built your own focus group of young rural voters. Ximena, tell us about some of the people you met. Yeah, it was definitely a people-finding mission. I think we called like 50 people in this process, but ultimately we ended up with six students that happened to be a college student. One was a recent grad of different colleges across North Carolina, and they all came from some sort of rural area in North Carolina or currently live in a smaller town in North Carolina. They also were pretty

evenly distributed in terms of political ideology. We had two that consistently vote Democrat, two that consistently vote Republican, and two that are more undecided and independent. But one tends to lean a little bit more to the right and the other tends to lean a little bit more to the left. So basically a very good sample of what the American electorate looks like in this group. So what are the issues, even though they come from this broad cross-section of ideology, what are the issues that they all said matter to them? Yeah, so there definitely was a really big focus on just wanting to build up their own communities, whether that is bringing jobs back, talking about the lack of infrastructure, lack of access to quality food, just really lack of opportunity. One of the students we talked to,

Reagan Bunch, really focused on how she wants to be able to come back home and wouldn't leave if she didn't have to. There's just not a lot of industry. You either work for the school system or you're working in tourism or you're working low-level, entry-level jobs that will not lead to a full career. So for college students like myself who want to go back, it's really daunting to figure out how I'm going to do that. And Reagan, you know, identifies as a Republican. She's involved in young Republican groups. Another thing, though, that's interesting about her, she's from this town called Hayesville. It's a town of around 400 people, very small. And we asked her if she wanted to go back and she said yes right away. It's something she's already thinking about and she's still in school.

And they all did. They all nodded when we asked them if they would go back and live their lives in their hometowns if they could. A lot of what the Biden administration is trying to do is bring things back to those local communities, whether it's through bringing back manufacturing sectors, for example, or talking about climate change, rebuilding hospitals, rebuilding infrastructure. But that message isn't quite getting there. And whether or not we see those dollars immediately go to where they need to be, that bridge is not quite being crossed. Yeah, I mean, President Biden travels a lot, talks about this a lot. Is it sinking in with these voters who clearly care about these issues, Elena? I think that the thing that clicked for me on this of how it is not sinking in is the issues that they do tie the precedent to. One of the students we spoke to, her name is Trinity Locklear. She's 20 and she's from Shannon, North Carolina. And she does not consider herself a political person.

She actually leans kind of conservative, grew up in like a religious conservative family community. And when we asked her just about things that are on her mind, she brought up student loans. Politics don't really care. I need to get through school. And then Biden introduced loan forgiveness. And I was like, ooh, you caught my attention. All these students are from, like Ximena said,

these small towns that, you know, may not have the best cell service and could use broadband, you know, like universal broadband, which is something that the president is like touting a big thing he wants to do. They could use these investments in their communities, but they do link Biden to some things. And one of them is this loan forgiveness program, which we know is complicated. Very complicated in that the Supreme Court said that the way the White House was trying to do it is not going to work and is not allowed. And so they're going to try a new thing, but it's going to take a long time and it's probably not going to be done before the election. In the time we have left, obviously, you must have also talked about social issues

because they are animating forces in our elections this cycle. So what did you hear about that? We did talk to them with a couple of those in North Carolina. Specifically, abortion has been top of mind just because they recently passed a 12-week abortion ban. So that is something a lot of voters of both political parties are talking about. And, of course, that was a big issue in the 2022 midterms. When talking to them about abortion, they were pretty traditionally split down party lines in terms of Democrats wanted less restrictions, the Republicans wanted more restrictions. But one interesting area of common ground that just naturally came up in discussion was how either way there needs to be

more resources funneled to support mothers and babies after birth. I think having that kind of more nuanced take was something we saw a lot with these voters. They didn't agree on everything, but they would hear each other out and they would challenge each other's views. On one topic where it was particularly obvious was on guns and combating gun violence. They all had thoughts on it. And even on the Democratic side, I feel like the traditional thing we hear from Democratic leaders across the country is we need to curb gun violence. And part of that comes from regulating guns and who gets a gun. And a lot of these students, Democrat or Republican or undecided,

grew up with guns in their house. So like their takes on this are going to be a little more complicated. And one of the voters who spoke with us about this was A.J. Jacobs, and he's an 18-year-old from Pembroke. I've been raised around guns. Both of my parents are concealed carry. I've shot guns. I mean, I don't think there's any problem with it. But I think there are absolutely laws that be put in place to make it harder for people to get a gun. And I don't think that's a bad thing if you're a law abiding citizen.

And AJ is a Democrat. He has a lot of friends that don't. But this is something that he thinks people need to talk about more fully. And there were other people in the group like Trinity, who I mentioned earlier, who lean more conservative and have direct family that have been impacted by gun violence. Her cousin actually died pretty recently after he was shot by somebody in their county. So it's like they can see this issue as more than a talking point. Even if they don't consider themselves political, it's like affecting them. And it's not an easy answer. So how are they thinking about this upcoming election? And let me just add a bonus question, which is they are young people. Are they going to vote? Because that's always the dig on young people is that they may not vote. ultimate question for some of them. We did eventually get to talking about specifically the 2024 election. And we asked him about the prospect of another Biden versus Trump rematch

specifically. Here's AJ again. I mean, it's disappointing. You know, they're both old. I mean, they're both old as dirt. And I mean, I understand, you know, Biden's an incumbent president, but he's 80. I mean, exactly. Who said he's as old as dirt? That was Kayla Tran. One thing that you didn't hear was the absolute cascade of laughter when all I said, we think there might be another Biden versus Trump. I didn't even ask a question. I just said the sentence and everyone erupted in immediate nervous laughter. It was first it was silence. And we were like, what do you think? And then it was just laughs all around. But yeah, Kayla Tran, she's 19. She's from Bath, North Carolina. And she goes to school at UNC Chapel Hill. And she said this line, they're old as dirt. And it gets to this bigger thing that she was talking about where she doesn't really care about either party. And she's just like not enthused by the fact that the front runners are old as dirt.

And is she an independent voter then? She she's yeah, she considers herself an independent voter. But, you know, when we talked to her about what issues she cared about, she said abortion access. She said LGBTQ rights. Those are issues you would associate with the Democratic Party. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back and it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop talking about politics or otherwise. Ximena, what can't you let go? I discovered this week that there's a Jeep ducking trend in which people are placing rubber duckies on Jeeps. And apparently this has been happening since the early days of the pandemic.

It actually seems to have started in Canada. But I recently learned about it like this week. And a part of that was on one of our work channels. Someone was asking about it. And so many people commented that they'd also been ducked. What's a duck, man? What is that? Like a rubber ducky.

But why would you put a rubber ducky on a Jeep? I have not. Why wouldn't you put a rubber ducky on a Jeep? Yeah, why wouldn't you? Because that's weird. They're cute, though. It's just like a little delivery of sunshine that says, you're a Jeep person, I'm a Jeep person, we love our Jeeps. Is it because Jeeps have their windows open?

They have like a good solid flat surface where you could put a bunch of ducks. I know a lot about cars, so that's just something I've gotten my repertoire. I don't really know the origin, but it doesn't seem threatening. I think it kind of, it makes me think of how many dumb things we did during the pandemic because we were bored. Like the amount, like I made a fort out of like all of my chairs and like put blankets over things. Like I understand, like I could have totally gotten to a place where I was like, you know what I'm going to do today? I'm going to duck a car.

That makes sense to me. I totally could have gotten there too. Yeah. So Elena, what can you not let go of? The thing I cannot let go of is all of the energy, tears, and brain cells that I've spent trying to get tickets to some of my favorite bands this year. And I'm literally zero for like 100. I tried to get tickets for Taylor Swift. It did not work out.

It went exactly as you thought it would. And I've had to watch everybody I know and their mother get tickets and watch it on TikTok and Instagram. And it's been sad for me. And then today it happened again. I went on the ticketing site, which shall remain nameless, his website. Like Voldemort? Like, yeah. We'll just call it, let his website. Like Voldemort? Like, yeah. Because.

We'll just call it. Let's just call it Voldemort. That's what we'll say. I went on Voldemort's website and I tried to get tickets to this incredible concert that's going to happen at Madison Square Garden. I'm from New York City. I was so excited. Ooh. Boy Genius and Moona are going to play at Madison Square Garden.

They're these two indie rock pop girl bands. And I'm so excited to sing and cry. And it's sold out within 20 minutes. And I just want a world where I can go to these bands in peace. Well, not in peace, but in happiness and not have to worry about getting sold out. But the happy part of this story is that there is still hope for some. My sister went to Beyonce the other day. and that was awesome. I'm sure there were people out there who also have similar plights that I do. But going to see Beyonce was a success, and you can still have fun at these shows. You just have to get a ticket.

Well, or you just have to like less popular bands. Yeah, that's true. I should just find bad bands. Yeah, I mean, that's what I do. Or just go back to being alt. Speaking of, Tam, what are you not letting go of? Well, what I cannot let go of is this sea otter that the New York Times headline is, she steals surfboards by the seashore. Oh, that's a good one.

She's a sea otter. Oh, this story. Say that 10 times. No, I will not. But apparently the sea otter is like totally not afraid of humans or surfboards and has just like been jumping on and taking the boards more and more aggressively. Her name is Otter 841. And unfortunately, the gig is up for Otter 841 because the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement that due to the increasing public safety risk, a team from the department and the Monterey Bay Aquarium trained in the capture and handling of sea otters has been deployed to attempt to capture and re-home her.

Okay, but at least she's only being re-homed. She's not. I mean, I don't think they're sending her off to the farm. I think she's going to get re-homed in a place where she does not have as much contact with humans. Do all of the otters have names like that? Because it sounds like Stranger Things. Like, I thought it was going to be like, Shannon's been jumping on everybody's surfboard. Silly Shannon. Silly Shannon. Well, the thing is that they are,

you know, a threatened species and the Monterey Bay Aquarium tracks them and, you know, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, they track them. And so they have numbers. If I was ever in a place where I was surfing and an animal that wasn't going to kill me jumped on my surfboard, I would take it home. And I would be really happy about it.

Otters could be mean. Otters can't live in your house. They need water that has salt. They're not like actual puppies. They're just puppies at the sea. Yeah, they're sea mermaids. Oh, okay. They're dog mermaids. Oh, okay. They're dog mermaids. But I will say I always get a little sad when I read these stories just because like animals near people is like never a good thing.

And, you know, like I went like hiking recently and there was a bear that was really, really close to the parking lot. And I was like, that's not good for the bear. Also not good for me. As someone that famously got bit by a fox, not good for the fox. Not good for me. It's just animals around people. It's never good. I'm sorry for bringing up this memory.

Yeah, it's traumatizing, Tam. I should have known. I shouldn't talk about animal-human interactions with you. Well, I hope that Shannon is living a nice life in the aquarium now. Yeah, no doubt in the aquarium. All right, that is a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Mathani Mathuri. Our editor is Eric McDaniel.

Our producers are Elena Moore and Casey Morrell. Research and fact-checking by our intern, Lee Walden. Thanks to Krishnadev Kalamer and Lexi Shapiro. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Elena Moore. I cover politics. And I'm Ximena Bustillo and I also cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.