Govt 3: You are what you pay for (Budgets)

Summary

Planet Money Summer School, Govt 3: You Are What You Pay For (Budgets)

Date: July 23, 2025
Host: Robert Smith, NPR
Guest Professor: Aviva Aron-Dine, The Hamilton Project at Brookings

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the federal government budget: where the money the government collects (mainly through taxes) actually gets spent, why certain areas receive so much more funding than others, and the complex realities that shape budgeting decisions. Along the way, listeners learn economics concepts like "market failure," "redistribution," and the power dynamics between special interests, politicians, and the public. The show combines a practical tour of the U.S. budget—by breaking down the big-ticket items—with case studies on how lobbying and political self-interest shape government spending.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Does the Government Run Deficits?

[02:09–05:17]

• Host Robert Smith frames the perennial debate: Why doesn’t the government ever balance its budget, especially given the $36 trillion national debt?
• Aviva Aron-Dine explains that, unlike individuals, governments have a tax base, and there are legitimate reasons to run deficits:
  • Wars and recessions justify increased borrowing.
  • Even in normal times, borrowing can fund investments that pay off in the long term.
• Key concern: If debt grows faster than the economy, it becomes unsustainable, requiring drastic measures like major tax increases or spending cuts.

Quote:
“The more the debt grows as a share of the economy, and the more rapidly it’s growing, the harder it is to make that stabilization.”
—Aviva Aron-Dine [05:10]

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2. What Does the Federal Government Actually Spend Money On?

[06:38–18:33]

"The Ten-Minute Budget Breakdown"

A fast-paced walkthrough of the federal budget, assigning each major spending category a proportionate slice of 10 minutes. Most data remains broadly accurate, despite being based on a 2017 segment.

Major Spending Buckets:

• Medicare & Medicaid (29%)

  • Coverage for 120 million Americans (seniors, low-income families, disabled).
  • Federal/state partnership; Medicaid expanded with Obamacare.
  • Political fights center on how many people get covered and how much federal money is sent to states.

  Quote:
  “If we live long enough, we all get Medicare. But even if you don’t consider yourself poor, you might also find yourself on Medicaid.”
  —Robert Smith [08:45]

• Social Security (24%)

  • "Almost everybody gets it," including the rich, to ensure broad-based political support.
  • Funded via payroll tax; not a personal savings account—today’s workers fund current retirees.

  Quote:
  “God damn it, I’m going to be sure to have a program that no damn Congress is going to mess with because people are going to feel entitled.”
  —Ted Marmor, paraphrasing FDR [12:16]

  Quote:
  “The probability that you will receive Social Security benefits for retirement is so high that you should be declared irrational for believing [otherwise].”
  —Ted Marmor [12:54]

• National Defense (15%)

  • $1.5 billion per day, steady proportion over decades.
  • Changes are perpetually proposed, but powerful interest groups (including defense contractors and lobbyists) maintain the status quo.

• Income Security (13%)

  • Programs for low-income Americans: food stamps (SNAP), earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, etc.
  • SNAP recipients are mostly children, the elderly, or people with disabilities.

• Interest on National Debt (6% then; now 13%)

  • No direct benefits—just the price of borrowing.
  • Interest as a share of spending is growing due to higher debt and rising interest rates.

  Quote:
  “The interest on the national debt is now double what it was—13% of the budget. Twice as much time, ouch indeed.”
  —Robert Smith [18:25]

• Veterans Affairs (5%)

• Transportation (2%)

  • Infrastructure and transport projects, highlighted by a poetic haiku from Ray LaHood.

• International Affairs (1%)

• Everything else (3%)

  • Includes law enforcement, environment, science, agriculture, etc.

Memorable Takeaway:

Quote:
“The federal government is basically a big insurance company—backed by a large standing army.”
—Jacob Goldstein [18:33]

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3. Economic Theory: Why Government Does What It Does

[19:25–22:35]

Aviva Aron-Dine explains government spending decisions fall into two broad categories:

• Market Failure: When private markets can’t efficiently provide certain goods/services.
  • Examples: National defense, scientific research, roads, parks.
• Redistribution: Adjusting economic outcomes for equity rather than efficiency, e.g., SNAP/food stamps.
  • Not about markets failing to function but not producing a distribution society finds acceptable.

Quote:
“There are lots of things that the market is definitely not going to provide... National defense, it’s what economists call a pure public good.”
—Aviva Aron-Dine [20:16]

Quote:
“A pretty pure case of...the market failing to achieve the distributional outcome that we want.”
—Aviva Aron-Dine on SNAP [22:15]

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4. The Messy Reality: Special Interests, Lobbying, and Budget Decisions

[23:41–34:31]

Political Realities:

• Politicians balance the national interest with district-level demands and re-election pressures:

  • Fundraising is relentless; members spend hours daily soliciting donations, often leaning on lobbyists and special interests (Senator Dick Durbin describes “power hours" at call centers).
  • Fundraisers are central to D.C. political life (as described by several lawmakers and lobbyists).

• Lobbyists’ Role and Return on Investment:

  • Politicians frequently seek donations from lobbyists, not just the reverse.
  • Special Interests may get an outsized return for their lobbying. Study of the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act found corporations got a 22,000% return on investment in lobbying.

Quote:
“The member is stalking the lobbyist, saying, ‘Hey, can I have some of that money?’”
—Alex Blumberg [29:07]

Quote:
“If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money’s rear end any time…”
—Barney Frank [31:02]

• Why does lobbying work so well?
  • On technical or niche issues, only special interests are paying close attention. Lawmakers are often swayed by those providing information—and donations.

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5. Economic Principle: Concentrated Benefits vs Diffuse Costs

[35:02–38:17]

Aron-Dine introduces a core political economy concept:

• Concentrated Benefits:
  • If a policy benefits a small, focused group substantially (e.g., hospitals), those affected will lobby fiercely to maintain it.
• Diffuse Costs/Benefits:
  • If a reform would slightly benefit millions, those people have little incentive to lobby for it.
• Result: Hard to reform wasteful or inefficient spending.

Quote:
“The hospital cares a ton about this payment reform. At best, the average citizen is going to save a little bit of money, and so they're just never going to care as much as the local hospital does.”
—Aviva Aron-Dine [36:16]

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6. Quick Vocabulary Review

[37:06–38:17]

Terms defined:

• Market failure: When the private market won’t efficiently provide a good/service (e.g., defense).
• Redistribution: Adjusting the distribution of resources for equity, not efficiency.
• Concentrated vs Diffuse: Who’s paying attention and fighting for/against budget changes, affecting political feasibility.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Robert Smith: “It’s easy to rant about big government, but what if everything inside the budget is actually there for a good reason? Then how do you make the hard choices?” [05:17]
• Jacob Goldstein: “Almost everybody gets Social Security, including billionaires. If Warren Buffett wants Social Security, he can get it.” [11:12]
• Ted Marmor: “The probability that you will receive Social Security benefits for retirement is so high that you should be declared irrational for believing [otherwise].” [12:54]
• Nick Fountain: (on international affairs): “If the current plans hold, the budget for international aid and embassies will be cut to far less than 1%.” [18:25]
• Barney Frank: “Look, if [money] had no effect, we would be the only human beings in the history of the world who, on a regular basis, took significant amounts of money from perfect strangers and made sure...that it had no effect on our behavior.” [30:36]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:56–02:12 – Episode intro, this week’s theme: government spending
• 02:12–05:17 – Why governments run deficits/national debt concerns
• 06:38–18:33 – Ten-minute budget breakdown: where the money actually goes
• 19:25–22:35 – Why does government spend where it does? (Theory: market failure and redistribution)
• 23:41–34:31 – Political reality: lobbying, fundraising, and special interests
• 35:02–38:17 – Concentrated vs. diffuse interests in budget decisions (and why reform is so hard)
• 37:06–38:17 – Vocabulary and concepts recap

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Conclusion

This episode serves as a crash course on federal budgeting. It moves beyond abstract numbers to examine why the government spends what it does, the economic theories behind those decisions, and the all-too-human realities—re-election pressures, lobbying, and special interests—that dictate how and where our tax dollars ultimately get spent. The class is left to reflect on whether spending aligns with market failures, societal values, or vested interests—and to keep a sharp eye on the forces shaping those choices.

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Transcript

[A]

Hey, I'm Daoud Tyler Amin. And I'm Ann Powers.

[B]

We are an editor and a critic.

[A]

At NPR Music, and we're also friends who love digging into music histories and thinking about how songs can change over time.

[C]

And we're doing that on a new show. We're totally nerding out about the songs.

[A]

That just stick with us and why. Find our first episode in the All Songs considered feed on October 23rd. Hey, everyone, just a quick message before class gets started. Planet Money Summer School is having a live group graduation ceremony and party in New York City on August 18th. It's gonna be great, so get your tickets now before the show sells out. Planet Money plus supporters get a 10% discount and get early access to summer school episodes all summer long. Check out the show notes for a link to buy tickets and to subscribe to Planet Money Plus.

[C]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[A]

Welcome back, class, to Planet Money Summer School. The only economics degree you can get just by. Listen. No tuition, no textbooks, no frustrating group projects. Am I right? I'm Robert Smith, and this season we are tackling power and money, the profound ways that the government influences business and the economy. This is class number three. You are what you pay for. Last week we talked taxes, how the government raises money. This week, we get to decide what to spend it on.

[D]

Woo.

[A]

Government shopping spree. But reality check. Although it seems like the government can spend an endless amount of money, it cannot do all the things it wants to do. So the big question in this week's lesson is, how do we decide? Why does the government spend so much money on some things and not other things? And honestly, is there any limit the United States is at. Let me check here. More than $36 trillion in debt. Is that too much? Kind of feels like too much. Every week we have a couple of case studies and a guest professor to teach us the big lessons. Welcome today to Aviva Arundine, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. What exactly does the Hamilton Project do? It's not based on the musical, right?

[C]

It's not based on the musical. Though it's funny, it gets its name from sort of the same rehabilitation of Hamilton, the that is embodied in the musical.

[A]

I guess it is hard to make a rhyme based on the Hamilton Project, but of course I'm gonna try. It makes multimodal proposals on quality fiscal policies. Yeah. Not ready for Broadway. Moving on. For our purposes here at Summer School, we should say that Aviva has in the past been inside the very government we are going to talk about at the Treasury Department and at the Office of Management and Budget. So, Aviva, you have been there for the taxing. You have been there for the spending and. And the cloud hanging over all those discussions must be the national debt. Now, of course, like, as an individual, I have to pay my debts eventually. Why doesn't the government ever balance its budget?

[C]

So government is different fundamentally because it has a tax base. And there are, in fact, some very good reasons that a government might not balance its budget every year.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, we might be at war. That often sends up the deficits. The country could be in recession, where it makes sense to spend a ton of money to perk up the economy and help people, but there's not always an emergency reason, right?

[C]

Yeah. Even outside a recession, it can make sense for the government to borrow to invest. The concern, and I would say we do have this concern now, particularly as we look out 10, 20 years. The concern is when your debt is growing too rapidly or relative to your economy. And that's what projections would say is going to happen in this country going forward if we don't do something that changes our fiscal trajectory.

[A]

So to put it in terms of my own life, if the money I owe to the bank is growing faster than the money I make my salary, then I'm getting deeper and deeper into this hole. And for governments, they're already in a hole and they might want to stop digging at some point.

[C]

And the reason for that is that the size of your debt and the growth rate of your debt relative to your economy is sort of telling you what would you need to do if you abruptly needed to reduce your debt? Is that a manageable proposition where you have lots of policies you could plausibly pursue to do that, or is it an unmanageable proposition?

[A]

Okay, so you seem to be saying if there's some huge thing the government has to spend money on, like a crisis, or, or perhaps the financial system starts to worry about lending the government money. We can always theoretically increase taxes as a country to stabilize the debt, but it makes a difference. If you have to theoretically increase taxes by 3%, which may be manageable, or if you have to increase taxes by 10%, which is definitely going to get you in trouble, like a 3% tax hike is easier to sell.

[C]

And, you know, we're a big country, we're a wealthy country.

[A]

We.

[C]

We absolutely have policy tools with which we could do that. But the more the debt grows as a share of the economy, and the more rapidly it's growing, the harder it is to make that stabilization.

[A]

So on today's show, we are going to peer inside the budget and see what we can do to slow this roll a bit. It's easy to rant about big government, but what if everything inside the budget is actually there for a good reason? Then how do you make the hard choices? Get your calculator out for after the break. This message comes from LinkedIn ads. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing is reaching the right audience. That's why you need LinkedIn ads. You can target your buyers by job title, company role, seniority and skills, all the professionals you need to reach in one place. Get a $250 credit on your next campaign. So you can try it yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com nprpod that's LinkedIn.com nprpod Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads.

[E]

Families around the world aren't having as many kids as they used to. Researchers say the average woman is having half as many children now than they did in the 1970s.

[A]

I love having only one child.

[E]

On the Sunday story from up first, why are so many families making this choice and what exactly does it mean for our future? Listen now to the Sunday story on the up first podcast from npr.

[A]

Planet Money Summer school back in session and doing math on the radio, which is always fun. Pay attention, everyone. We are going to go over everything our government spends money on in exactly 10 minutes. This is from an episode we did back in 2017. Professor Aviva Erendine, what should the students listen for in this episode?

[C]

I think the question is, what are all these programs doing? What do these policies and programs accomplish?

[A]

This episode is hosted by Jacob Goldstein and Stacey Vanek Smith. And even though it was made eight years ago, the percentages of the government budget are roughly the same. One thing to mention, though, when we talk in this episode about President Trump and the Republicans trying to make budget cuts in things like Medicaid, we are referring to his first term and not the current moves in his second term to make those cuts. The more things change.

[D]

Okay, here's how it's gonna work. We're gonna put 10 minutes on the clock and we're gonna cover the entire federal budget.

[B]

Every second of that 10 minutes will be worth $6.4 billion.

[D]

So the small programs, they're gonna go super fast.

[B]

Big programs, nothing but time.

[D]

And we're gonna bring in a bunch of people from Planet Money to help us out. So the first piece in our show today, Robert Smith, is gonna talk about Medicare and Medicaid. That is 29% of the federal budget. So they will get 29% of our. 10 minutes.

[B]

Start the clock now.

[A]

You know how there's always this debate about whether the federal government should have a responsibility to pay for health care? Well, I got news for you. It already does. The federal government pays for the health care of 120 million Americans. People over the age of 65, families with low income, people with long term disabilities. They're all covered by Medicare and Medicaid. Medicaid and Medicare. Although I always mix them up, everyone does.

[D]

I had some embarrassing errors when I was a new health policy reporter where I would mistake these in stories and lots of people would send me angry emails.

[A]

This is Sarah Kliff, a writer for Vox.com, she co hosts the Weeds podcast.

[D]

I heard a terrible way to remember it.

[A]

Oh, I wanna hear it.

[D]

Ages ago someone told me you care for the old and aid the sick or no, aid the poor. That's what it is.

[A]

See, it's a, it's a terrible one. Okay, I have a better one. Silver hair. Medicare, underpaid, Medicaid. If we live long enough, we all get Medicare. But even if you don't consider yourself poor, you might also find yourself on Medicaid.

[D]

It actually finances a lot of long term nursing home stays. So a lot of middle upper class Americans eventually do end up on Medicaid when they need that kind of coverage and they've kind of whittled away their savings.

[A]

And there you have it. Hey, Stacey. How much time do I have left?

[D]

You've got about a minute and a half.

[A]

Minute and a half?

[D]

Yeah, you got. This is the big, this is the biggest part of the budget. You got some time?

[A]

Okay, let's go get some coffee. We got time.

[D]

We have some time.

[A]

And I can explain one more thing about Medicaid. Okay, so we've all heard about Obamacare. We've all heard about how in Congress right now the Republicans are undoing Obamacare. But what the fight is really about is the future of these programs. We're talking about the future of Medicaid.

[D]

Underpaid.

[A]

Underpaid. Do you want, Should I get your cup?

[D]

Black coffee, please.

[A]

One of the big ways that Barack Obama got people insured was to expand Medicaid. Medicaid costs are shared between the federal government and the states. States run the programs. And Obama essentially said, we are going to give you more federal money, a larger share of our budget if you just cover more people. And so this, this part of the budget pie. I'm Talking my way through this got larger. So when the Republicans are thinking, God, how do we undo Obamacare? What they thought is, let's put some caps on the growth of Medicaid. And what that means in sort of real world terms is that if the Republican plan passes, 15 million fewer people covered by Medicaid. So if we were going to do this show again in 10 years, that there might be slightly less time for government health care, perhaps no coffee break. Maybe time for a short coffee break.

[D]

You gonna drink that, by the way?

[A]

No.

[B]

Transportation, 2% of the budget. Kenny Malone.

[A]

We asked former secretary Ray LaHood to write us a haiku. He declined.

[F]

So I made one for him using.

[A]

Words from his old speeches. A highway crumbles neath our wheels. One big pothole it spreads across the roads.

[G]

Thank you all very much.

[A]

Thank you very much.

[D]

Next up, Social Security. It accounts for 24% of federal spending. Jacob, take it away.

[B]

Social Security is really big because almost everybody gets it. In particular, almost every American over the age of 66, including billionaires. You know, if Warren Buffet wants Social Security, he can get it. I called up Ted Marmor to ask about this. He's an emeritus professor at Yale, expert on Social Security. Why does Warren Buffett get Social Security checks?

[H]

That's a classic dumbbell ouch formulation.

[B]

Okay. Marmor says billionaires getting Social Security is not a bug, it's a feature. When Social Security was created back in the 30s, some Democrats did want to create a version of the program where the money just went to poor people. But President Roosevelt was like, no, a program like that just won't survive politically. What we need is something that almost all working people are eligible for. And he said we should fund it with a special tax that almost all working people pay. That way people will say, I paid into Social Security. I deserve Social Security when I retire, and I will vote out of office any politician who tries to take it away from me.

[H]

His terms, in which he expressed it was, God damn it, I'm going to be sure to have a program that no damn Congress is going to mess with because people are going to feel entitled.

[B]

But I do think this leads to a lot of confusion. You know, people seem to think, oh, I contributed to Social Security. They're holding onto my money in a special box.

[A]

This is not how it works.

[B]

My money is paying for retired people right now. And I'm crossing my fingers that in 30 years when I'm retired, there will be 40 year olds who are paying me.

[H]

Jacob.

[A]

Yes.

[H]

I'll bet you Any money. And I want you to pay me off by putting it in my grave.

[F]

Okay.

[H]

The probability that you will receive Social Security benefits for retirement is so high that you should be declared irrational for.

[B]

Believing so really, why are you so confident?

[H]

Why am I so confident? I understand the political economy of the United States.

[B]

Because Roosevelt was right.

[H]

Correct.

[B]

Because almost everybody pays in and gets paid out, including billionaires. Marmor says Social Security is politically bulletproof.

[D]

Social services and education, 3%. And for this segment, we wanted to get someone who is currently a beneficiary of public education, AKA Jacob's Kidd.

[C]

Most funding in this area comes from state and local governments.

[B]

The federal government's big.

[C]

The federal government biggest education line item is grants for low income college students.

[B]

National defense is 15% of federal spending.

[A]

Stacey.

[D]

We spend one and a half billion dollars every day on defense. And this is famously one of the most controversial parts of the budget. I mean, Democrats often come in and they want to cut defense spending. The Republicans come in and they want to raise defense spending. But somehow, in spite of all of this, if you look back over the last 20 years, the share of the budget devoted to defense has not really changed that. And actually that is pretty much true for most of the federal budget. It stays pretty steady. And I was totally shocked by this. So I talked to this guy, Bill Valdez, about it. He worked for the Energy Department for more than 20 years. He wrote a lot of budgets and he told me his theory of what's going on here.

[A]

You know, the real thing that keeps the budget stable is that there are all these special interest groups, hundreds of.

[D]

Lobbyists battling for government funds, hammering out deals with different states and different politicians. Bill says the budget status quo is really this hard earned equilibrium. And he thinks this is a good thing. Ultimately, it creates stability. So we actually have lobbyists to thank for our stable budget.

[A]

Yeah, in many respects, yeah, it's like.

[D]

A little shout out to the lobbyists. Well, I mean, they get so little love. I feel like that's okay.

[A]

Right?

[D]

Don't you think that maybe the budget should be their valentine? President Trump has proposed increasing defense spending by cutting other parts of the budget. Bill says he will have to get through lobbyists first.

[B]

Next up, income security. 13% of the budget. Here is Noel King.

[I]

Yes, income security. So think of this as programs for poor people. It includes a bunch of different things like the earned income tax credit, housing assistance, unemployment. Foster care is a small part of it. I'm going to talk about food stamps, which are officially known as SNAP for Two reasons. Number one, food stamps are a really big program. Usage spiked during the recession. If you look at graphs, it's basically like a straight line going up, and it has stayed pretty high. More than 40 million people are getting food stamps right now. And I think there is a lot of confusion over who gets them. So let's clear that up. Two out of every three people on food stamps are kids, the elderly, or they are disabled. Of the rest, it's roughly split between people who are working but making very low wages, low enough to qualify for food stamps, and people who are not working but should be working soon, because SNAP comes with work requirements for the most part. If you are able bodied and you don't have a job, you get cut off from food stamps after a couple of months. There you go.

[D]

Interest on the national debt. Six percent of the budget.

[B]

And you can look at this in two ways. One, interest rates are really low right now, so the government was able to borrow money, spend it on goods and services for Americans.

[A]

Great.

[D]

But you could also say this whole chunk of the budget is just the interest on all the money we owe and, and what we get in return for all this money is nothing.

[B]

Four more seconds.

[D]

This is feeling awkward.

[B]

Veterans Affairs, 5%. Sally Helm.

[A]

Go.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

They provide things like health care and.

[C]

Disability benefits for vets.

[D]

President Trump wants to boost funding for the va, but is proposing some cuts, including one for disabled vets once they're old enough to get Social Security.

[C]

President Eisenhower tried to do something kind.

[D]

Of like this in the 50s.

[C]

He was a five star general, so maybe he thought he could get away.

[D]

With it, but he got totally shut down by Congress. We'll see how Trump does. International Affairs, 1%. Nick Fountain.

[F]

Go.

[A]

Yeah. This goes to operating U.S. embassies and.

[B]

Consulates throughout the world, providing military assistance.

[A]

To allies, aiding developing nations.

[B]

Everything else makes up about 3% of the budget.

[A]

Let's bring it home.

[D]

Justice. That's FBI. DEA, prisons. Homeland Security, Natural resources and the environment. Science, space and technology.

[E]

General government.

[B]

That's like mowing the White House lawn and paying congressional salaries.

[D]

Community and regional development. Agriculture, Energy.

[B]

Done.

[E]

Woo.

[D]

We did it. So we made it through the whole budget in 10 minutes. And I have to say the thing that strikes me about the budget is that half of it, more than half of it, is just made up by three programs. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

[B]

And then in the rest, overwhelmingly, the biggest chunk is defense. And so there is this old line that I still love, which is the federal government is big, basically a big insurance Company backed by a large standing army.

[A]

Jacob Goldstein and Stacey vanek Smith from 2017. And the percentages you heard there are still roughly the same, with a couple of notable exceptions. If we were doing this show again today, Nick Fountain would barely have time to speak. If the current plans hold, the budget for international aid and embassies will be cut to far less than 1%. And the interest on the national debt, the debt is now bigger. The interest rates are now higher. The interest on the national debt is now double what it was 13% of the budget. Twice as much time. Ouch. Indeed. Let's bring back in our Professor Aviva Erendine from the Brookings Institution. As we listen to those 10 minutes of the budget, I kept thinking, why? Why does the government do these things and not other things? What's the big way to think about this?

[C]

So I think you can put most of the things government does into one of two buckets. One is addressing a market failure, a case where there's something that prevents the private market from functioning well, and the other is redistributing income. So addressing a case where the private market is not giving us the distribution of resources that we as a society want.

[A]

Why don't we start with market failure? What do you mean by market failure?

[C]

Yeah, so this is a case where there are lots of cases where markets work pretty well. If you want to buy a pair of shoes, market economy is going to do a pretty good job of offering you a range of shoes to buy of different kinds, lots of different characteristics. They're going to be priced pretty close to what it costs to make them. It's going to work great.

[A]

This is why we don't have government shoes.

[C]

Right. And anyone who suggests we should have government shoes.

[A]

Right.

[C]

You'd have some questions. There are other things that the market is definitely not going to provide. So, classic example, national defense. It's what economists call a true, a sort of pretty pure public good. We usually define this in technical terms as non rival risks. Which means that the fact that you and I both get protection from the U.S. national defense apparatus doesn't really increase the cost of providing national defense and non exclusive, which means you can't really say to anyone living here, we're going to carve you out of our national defense protection because you didn't pay for it. Right. So the market is just never going to provide something like that. And then there are lots of things that aren't pure public goods, but they have some characteristics and qualities of public goods. So this is a lot of things that the federal government does, like education, scientific research, infrastructure, national parks, in theory, could you imagine those being privately provided? Sure. But I think most people have a pretty strong instinct that there are reasons that those are treated as public goods, that we want to provide those on a common basis.

[A]

So that is one reason why government would spend money for a market failure. The other one you said was redistribution. Which parts of the budget are redistribution and why are we doing it? Sure.

[C]

So a good example of a part of the budget that is principally redistribution is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or snap, or what used to be called food stamps, that provides food assistance to people who have low incomes, whether elderly people who have low incomes, kids who have low incomes, people of working age who just lost their jobs and have low income. And that's a pretty pure case of in a market economy, if you just left the market outcome alone, many of those people would really struggle to put food on the table. And in fact, we have evidence that when you cut snap, people have more trouble affording food. When you increase snap, people, fewer people struggle to get food. And we've decided that that's a valuable thing to do. It's not addressing a market failure per se, but it's addressing a failure of the market to achieve the distributional outcome. In this case, lower poverty, lower rates of people who can't feed themselves than we want.

[A]

So that is the theory of how government budgets should be decided. Coming up after the break, we look at the messy reality. I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say that maybe, maybe the politicians who decide how to spend our money have some personal interests of their own. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of FRESH AIR. Hey, take a break from the 24 hour news cycle with us and listen to long form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times.

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Of the Day podcast, feedback on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, class, in our next case study, we peer behind the curtain of the US Congress and find out that there are forces at work that might keep them from doing the most fiscally responsible thing. One reality is that senators and representatives want to keep their jobs and get re elected, and that takes donations. Listen now to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin.

[H]

I think most Americans would be shocked, not surprised, but shocked, if they knew how much time a United States Senator spends raising money and how much time we spend talking about raising money and thinking about raising money and planning to raise money.

[A]

In 2012, Planet Money and this American Life collaborated on a series of stories about how money and lobbyists influence politics. Alex Bloomberg and Andrea Seabrook began by tracking down a list of dozens of fundraisers that happen in Washington, D.C. every single week.

[E]

The money changes hands in very specific places all over D.C. there are townhouses whose sole function is to be rented out as venues for this. Dozens of restaurants do a booming business catering small parties in private rooms.

[F]

And there's one thing driving all this activity, a gnawing, relentless, voracious need for cash. To understand that need, consider Walt Minick.

[E]

Minick is a conservative Democrat who represented a Republican leaning district in Idaho. He was first elected in 2008, and after he won, he took just five days off from fundraising. Then, two months before he was sworn in as a congressman, he was back raising money for the next election, two years away.

[A]

I needed to raise 10 to $15,000 a day, and you only do it by elbow grease.

[F]

Let's stop and dwell on that statement for a second, shall we? Andrea? 10 to $15,000 a day. The typical cost of a congressional race is about a million dollars, although if you're challenging an incumbent, you need more. Minick's goal was even more than that, 2.5 million because he was in such a competitive district.

[A]

I would spend two or three hours a day as a congressman trying to raise money.

[E]

That's typical for a member of Congress. And most of those hours are spent across the street from the Capitol in special offices set up by the specifically for this purpose.

[F]

Special offices, because federal law prohibits lawmakers from making fundraising calls from their own congressional offices, neither party is eager to let reporters into these call centers. But we got a couple Democrats to describe what it's like in there. This is Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio. If you walked in there, you would.

[A]

Say, boy, this is about the worst looking, most abusive call center situation I've seen in my life. These people don't have any workspace. The other person is, you know, virtually touching them. Just like counters on the wall with.

[F]

Telephones and people 8 inches away from.

[A]

You talking on the telephone.

[H]

We sit at these desks with stacks of names in front of us and short bios and histories of giving.

[F]

This is Senator Dick Durbin, who says that on the Senate side, they'll have these things called power hours several times a week where a bunch of senators will go into the call center and.

[H]

Make these calls to people who are our faithful friends and ask them to give money or have a fundraiser. And then if we're fortunate enough, we end up attending those fundraisers that we beg people to do for us. I mean, that is part of the conversation. And this goes on and on and on.

[F]

Where do the names come from? How do you decide who to call?

[H]

The names come from a history of giving. And many of them, it's hard for most listeners to believe, really aren't looking for much. They want their team to win. In this case, the Democratic team. They don't ask for special favors, but there are exceptions. There are some who won't waste any time to tell you what they think is the most important issue in Washington as they talk about their donation. I mean, it is part of the reality of the life that I live now.

[F]

There is an easier way to relieve some of that pressure and raise money faster, A way that doesn't involve tapping out your friends. Just go to the people who already have big stacks of money set aside to give to politicians, lobbyists.

[E]

A lobbyist can throw you a fundraiser, a lunch at Johnny's Half Shell, or a cocktail reception at Bullfeathers. And so every week, lawmakers and their staffs work the phones trying to find lobbyists to organize these events. Jimmy Williams used to get those calls. He was a lobbyist for the real estate industry for many years.

[G]

A lot of them would call and say, hey, you know, can you host an event for me? And you never want to say no. Actually, no. You always want to say no. In fact, you always want to say no. But you can look on your phone with these caller IDs, and you would be like, really? I'm not taking that call.

[F]

Oh, so you would dodge calls for phone calls?

[G]

Oh, yeah. Every lobbyist does it. Are you kidding? You spend most of your time dodging phone calls. Oh, yeah.

[F]

This was one of the most surprising things I learned about this whole process. The way Most of us generally think about it is absolutely backwards. We imagine the lobbyists stalking the halls of Congress trying to influence members with cash. But more often than not, it's the reverse. The member is stalking the lobbyist, saying, hey, can I have some of that money?

[E]

And it's hard to say no, Jimmy says, especially to a Congressman whose work and votes he cared about. So he'd say yes, and then he'd have to round up a bunch of guests.

[G]

So I call up my buddies down on K Street from my buddy over at the credit unions or my buddy over at the insurance company, or my buddy over wherever at the home builder, and I say, hey, dude, I'm going to do this event for this guy. And he sits on the House Financial Services Committee, and do you guys have any money for this person? Is he in your budget? And the answer was usually, yeah, yeah, I got money for that guy. So, all right, so cool. So we'll come up with a date, and then we have this fundraiser, and it's a breakfast or it's a lunch or it's a dinner or a cocktail reception, and everyone comes and they bring their checks or they mail their checks in, and then you have it.

[E]

We're talking thousands of dollars that the Congressman will make in just an hour.

[F]

And this brings us to the big what does the money buy? What are corporations and special interests getting in return for the billions of dollars they spend lobbying each year?

[E]

There tend to be two views on this. If you're cynical, you think money buys votes. Pure and simple, Washington is owned, Money drives everything.

[F]

But lobbyists and politicians will sometimes tell you the opposite. Money has no effect. After all, they say there's always two sides, and both are giving exporters versus importers, bankers versus Realtors, businesses versus unions. The money cancels itself out.

[E]

When we asked Congressman Barney Frank about this, he said both of those positions are caricatures.

[C]

People say, oh, it doesn't have any effect on me.

[A]

Look, if that were the case, we would be the only human beings in.

[C]

The history of the world who, on.

[A]

A regular basis, took significant amounts of money from perfect strangers and made sure.

[C]

That it had no effect on our behavior.

[A]

That is not human nature.

[E]

On the other hand, he says, there are things that influence a politician besides money.

[C]

If the voters have a position, the.

[A]

Votes will kick money's rear end anytime.

[E]

But the fact is, most legislation your district doesn't care about, the stuff that makes the news is a tiny fraction of what Congress actually does. They're deep in the weeds of tax law and Business code and replacing the and in subsection B of title I with an or things most voters have no opinions on. The only people who do care or who even understand what that small print means are the lobbyists and the industries and interests they represent.

[F]

Consider the American Jobs Creation act of 2004. This was a piece of legislation that lots of multinational corporations spent a lot of time lobbying for because it got them a huge one time tax break. Some of the profits, the profits they made overseas would be taxed at just 5% instead of the normal rate of 35%. A massive windfall.

[E]

This law caught the attention of a tax professor at the University of Kansas, Raquel Alexander. She thought it might help her understand a pretty difficult question she and her colleagues had been considering.

[C]

We know that people lobby for a reason, but we haven't really been able to quantify what's the return on their lobbying investment.

[E]

With the American Jobs Creation Act, Alexander and her colleagues finally got something that could help them add up the lobbying costs of and benefits.

[F]

They simply compared the amount that companies spent lobbying with the amount they saved on their taxes. Came up with a figure, a figure they called the return on investment for lobbying. Now, for some perspective money in a regular old savings account, you'd be lucky to get a 1% return on your investment. On the other end of the spectrum, Bernie Madoff advertised annual returns of just over 10%. If you want to come up with a big impressive sounding lie, a 10% return on investment is what you say, the return on investment to lobbying. In the case of Alexander's study, 22,000%.

[E]

So for every dollar on average that.

[C]

These firms spent on tax lobbying, they receive $220 in tax benefits from this repatriation provision.

[F]

Were you expecting it to be that big?

[C]

I was not. I was not expecting it to be that big at all. I thought I needed to go back and check my math again.

[F]

So after the fifth or sixth time checking, you were like, oh, this is.

[C]

The number after the 20th time of checking.

[E]

In 2010, there was a total of $3.5 billion spent on lobbying. 3.5 billion. It's hard to imagine that every one of those dollars got a 22,000% return. There's certainly companies out there that spend a lot of money and don't get what they want. They've just lost money.

[F]

And it's not to say that the things they're lobbying for are bad public policy. There are lots of people, President Obama included, who think a lower corporate tax rate would benefit the country.

[E]

Barney Frank and lots of others told us straight up. A lot of times the lobbyist knows much more about your subject than you do as a congressman. You depend on their expertise and so you listen to their arguments.

[F]

The problem is those arguments are accompanied by a large check the other side of the issue. You don't always hear from them.

[A]

Alex Bloomberg and Andrea Seabrook from Planet Money and this American life in 2012, just last year, the amount of money spent on lobbying hit a new record $4.4 billion. Big thanks to this American Life for letting us rerun that piece. If somehow you are just hearing about this American Life for the first time, check it out. It's available wherever you listen to podcasts. After the break, we'll invite our professor back to talk about an economic principle that explains why special interests often get exactly what they want.

[H]

Foreign.

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[A]

We are back with our professor, Aviva Arundine.

[C]

You're back.

[A]

So in a democracy, we are essentially hiring these politicians to run our country in a responsible way. But there are all these pressures on them, right, to bring back more money to their districts and the national interest, of course. And as we hear in the story, to listen to what lobbyists want. And so politicians really have to weigh competing interests over taxation and spending.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, I think another economics concept that comes into play here is the problem of concentrated versus diffuse benefits. And so let's take an example. If I were looking for a place to save money in the federal budget to save a significant amount of money, one of the things I would look at is reforming the way we pay hospitals versus doctors in Medicare. We sometimes pay more for the exact same health service if you get it at a hospital than if you get it at a doctor's office. Costs us a lot of money, causes all kinds of problems, probably makes care worse.

[A]

But who would want that?

[C]

Right. The challenge is whenever anybody suggests changing it, and many people have, you get a lot of pushback from hospitals and they push back quite publicly. And they say, congressman, so and so is proposing to cause your local hospital to close. And a lot of people find that credible. Some voters may find that more credible than what their congressperson is telling them. And even more than that, the balance of interests is just very different. The hospital cares a ton about this payment reform. At best, the average citizen is going to save a little bit of money on their health bill and they're going to see the national debt go down by a very little bit. And so they're just never going to care as much as the local hospital does. And I do think there are a bunch of problems in federal budgeting that have this quality that you have concentrated interests on one side and diffuse benefits on the other.

[A]

Yikes. The school bell is about to ring. Professor, perhaps we could go over some vocabulary words and concepts so that students can think about it when they hear about Congress debating the budget. Does a government program solve a market failure? What's a market failure?

[C]

A case where the private market doesn't function effectively, for example, a case where the private market just won't provide a certain kind of service or good and.

[A]

The government could step in. That's right, redistribution.

[C]

When we as a society say that we're not happy with the distribution of resources that result in from just letting the market operate. And so we step in to achieve a different distribution of resources.

[A]

When we talked about the problems of trying to balance the budget, we talked about concentrated versus diffuse costs and benefits.

[C]

Yeah, there are a lot of problems in public policy where there's some stakeholders that benefit a lot from a particular policy and there's a much larger number of stakeholders who would benefit a little bit from changing it. And those are circumstances where it's often hard to make changes.

[A]

Aviva Erendine from the Hamilton Project, which is part of the Brookings Institution, thank you so much for coming to class today.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

Man, the time flies when we are in class. But if you're eager to hear more episodes now before everyone else get a head start on studying, well, you can if you are signed up for Planet Money plus, we're giving our PLUS supporters early access to every episode of Summer School this season. You can brag, you can show it off. You'll also get sponsor free versions of regular Planet Money episodes and the indicator joining Planet Money plus is one of the best things you can do right now. To show your support for our journalism and the work of NPR, go to plus.NPR.org planet money to join Summer School is produced by Eric Mennel and edited by Alex Goldmark. It was fact checked by Emily Crawford and Ciara Wardez. Devin Miller is our project manager and the show was engineered by Robert Rodriguez. I'm Robert Smith. This is npr. Thank you for listening. You care about what's happening in the world stay informed with NPR's State of the World Podcast. In just a few minutes, we take you to stories around the globe. You might hear the latest developments in world conflicts or about what global events mean for the price of your coffee. Listen to the State of the World podcast from npr. Making time for the news is important, but when you need a break, we've got you covered on All Songs Considered. NPR's music podcast. Think of it like a musical music discovery show, a well deserved escape with friends and yeah, some serious music insight. I'm gonna keep it real. I have no idea what the story is about. Hear new episodes of All Songs Considered.

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