MarketPlace - APM

College admissions rates fell with the widespread adoption of the online Common App in the early 2000s. Add more recent changes to admissions — like universities no longer requiring standardized test scores and then changing their tune, a Supreme Court ban on affirmative action — and high schoolers and parents have been left with whiplash and confusion. That’s where independent college counselors come in.

As Nicole LaPorte wrote in Town & Country, the field has grown into a $3 billion industry. LaPorte is also the author of the book “Guilty Admissions,” which chronicles the Varsity Blues scandal.

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with LaPorte about the world of independent college counselors. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: Could you define a term for me here? What is an “independent college counselor”?

Nicole LaPorte: Yes. An independent college counselor is a counselor that works outside of a high school. You can hire them to provide a service for your high school student or maybe even your middle school student to walk them through the college admissions process, everything from looking over their essays and filling out the application. Just helping out with all of this stuff that these kids need to do to apply.

Ryssdal: I’ve had four kids go through the college application process. Could I hang out a shingle tomorrow and say, “Here I am. I’m an independent college counselor”?

LaPorte: You absolutely could, and you’d probably be very good.

Ryssdal: No, no, because the truth is, my wife did all of them, but that’s a whole different thing.

LaPorte: Yeah. I mean, sort of the dirty secret of college counseling is that you do not need a certification. You absolutely can set up shop.

Ryssdal: How much for those parents of kids who are confused and anxious, and, you know, parents probably who are confused and anxious? How much is it going to cost?

LaPorte: There’s quite a range. The numbers that get the big headlines, of course, are the super-, superhigh numbers, and that can go up to $200,000. That’s not for, you know, a month of counseling, or even a year of counseling. That’s counseling that starts in middle school. So that’s say, from eighth to 12th grade. You know, at that point it becomes almost like a concierge service where the counselor is perhaps mapping out visits to colleges and doing a lot more than just, you know, editing an essay.

Ryssdal: Let’s say I don’t have 200 large to spend on my kid before they even get to college. What’s the, you know, sort of average going price?

LaPorte: Yeah, the average is about $6,500 and you know, when you get into New York and LA and San Francisco, these more expensive places to live, it goes up to maybe 15 grand. Again, that’s over a couple of years. That’s not just for a couple of months or even one year. But it’s expensive, there’s no way around that.

Ryssdal: I’m obliged to point out here, as you say in this piece, you know, the schools know this. This is a service that’s available to a teeny, tiny fraction of the tippity, tippity, top of the income spectrum. And it brings with it a whiff of elitism that is inescapable.

LaPorte: Absolutely. I mean the numbers that I was just citing alone tell you what segment of the population we’re talking about. And, yeah, colleges admit this. I talk about Christoph Guttentag, the longtime Duke admissions officer, and he admits that this is absolutely a luxury, and it’s giving advantaged kids another advantage.

Ryssdal: Not only are the parents deeply interested in this, but as you point out in this piece, venture capital firms are interested in this. There’s a company that you talk about in here that raised some, you know, high tens of millions of dollars funding round.

LaPorte: Yes, I mean, I will point out that that’s not the norm.

Ryssdal: Fair enough, but the idea that VC is interested in this should tell you something.

LaPorte: Well, I think it speaks to just how this has come to dominate media headlines and the cultural interest in this, particularly amongst, yes, elite members of the population. And, you know, it’s a $3 billion industry. I just think that number alone, you can’t ignore that. But again, that’s a rare example.

Ryssdal: With the observation here that not everybody, and probably most people don’t and shouldn’t want to have the need to go to this tiny piece of higher education because you can get a good college education lots of places. Do these companies have the secret code?

LaPorte: They would like you to think that. Well, it’s funny, because you look at their websites and there’s all kinds of promises and statistics, much of which is very hard to discern and get behind and prove. But then when you actually speak to them, and I think virtually all of them, in probably the first meeting with a family, will say we cannot guarantee admission to X school. So no, there is no secret sauce, but again, it’s just providing an advantage.

Late last year, Eric Hamm was feeling uneasy about his job security. He was working as a maintenance mechanic at Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas and aware of President Donald Trump’s plans to make big federal budget cuts. So, he applied to an opening for a city forester in Cortez, Colorado. In January, he was offered the job. 

“I actually turned it down,” Hamm said. “Saying we want to stick around [in Big Bend], we want to help the park, and we want to get the benefits that come with being part of the federal system.” 

About a month later, Hamm’s wife Kelon Crawford’s job was one of thousands cut in the first wave of downsizing under the Department of Government Efficiency. She also worked in the park as a physical science technician and was five months pregnant. Hamm said it felt like a betrayal. 

“It was kind of a no-brainer for me. I don’t want to work for an organization that’s going to do that to people,” Hamm said. 

So, he called the city of Cortez back. “I felt like I was coming back to them kind of with my tail between my legs,” he said. 

But the position was still open and the city was happy to extend Hamm another offer. Now, Hamm, Crawford and their two dogs are packing their things, selling their house in Texas, and prepping for a move to Colorado. In other words, the federal government’s downsizing is the city of Cortez’s gain. 

Other states and localities have the same idea. Officials in Maryland, New York, New Mexico and Kansas City are among those launching recruitment campaigns targeting federal workers and adjusting hiring procedures to scoop up some badly needed talent. 

“We feel like tapping into this applicant pool that we, up until now, have had limited success in recruiting from is a real opportunity,” said Brenna Hashimoto, director of the state of Hawaii’s Department of Human Resources Development.

Hashimoto’s department is enthusiastically recruiting workers affected by federal layoffs and budget cuts and fast-tracking their hiring. She said it’s seen a “tremendous response” so far, with more than 1,600 new applications for around 60 high-priority, hard-to-fill positions like research statisticians and IT specialists. 

But Liz Farmer, a researcher with The Pew Charitable Trusts, said matching those workers’ federal salaries and competing with private sector offers will be tough. 

“I would expect that to be a concern, and something that states and localities don’t necessarily have an advantage of,” Farmer said. “However, one of the things that government has always had going for it is this idea of a job with purpose.”

That’s true for one federal worker we’re calling Ann — her middle name since she fears retaliation at work. 

“I’ve spent my entire career either in the military or in federal service,” Ann said. “It’s an important part of who I am, the ability to serve and to give back.” 

But federal budget and staffing cuts have Ann looking for an exit strategy. 

“Every day or every couple of days, something happens. We lose contractors that do critical work. We find out we lost funding for X, Y or Z,” she said. “It’s mentally and emotionally really taking a toll on everyone.” 

Ann has an interview lined up for a state government job in Pennsylvania, where she lives. The work is comparable. The base salary? Not even close. 

“I’d be looking at a $60,000 pay cut. So that’s really ouch,” she said. 

Pennsylvania’s governor has ordered state agencies to weigh federal work the same as state experience in hiring as part of its push to scoop up federal workers. If Ann gets the job, she’s counting on that to help narrow the salary gap so she can afford to keep working for the public. 

Eric Hamm, the former National Park Service worker, says he’s not taking a pay cut at his new municipal job in Colorado. 

“But it’s hard to beat federal benefits,” he said. 

With their baby due in three months, Hamm and his wife won’t get the paid parental leave they were counting on; their health insurance won’t be as good; Hamm’s military service won’t count for retirement purposes the way it would if he stayed with the federal government. On top of that, his family is struggling to find housing in their new and much more expensive city. 

“So in a lot of ways, we’re hurting,” Hamm said. 

He’s grateful he gets to keep working outdoors and serving a community, but the move from federal to local government work comes with big sacrifices for Hamm’s family. 

We got some fresh data Monday about how companies are doing and how they’re feeling. The S&P Global Purchasing Managers Index is based on surveys of folks at firms across the U.S. According to a preview, the index rose in March but paints a picture of a divided economy based on how it’s doing now and how it thinks it will be doing in the future.

If you ask businesses in the service economy — the diners and hair salons — how they are doing in March, they generally say better than January and February, which were terrible. Terrible because of terrible weather — polar vortexes, snowstorms in the South.

“You know, your tourism sectors and restaurants and so forth. Just people not wanting to go out,” said Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence. S&P Global puts out the PMI. So in March, the weather got better and service businesses did better.

“Manufacturing is a complete opposite,” said Williamson.

Companies in the manufacturing side of the economy had a great start to the year. “They were ramping up production to get shipments out ahead of any possible tariffs,” he said.

That bump’s over. In March, manufacturing sank back into the swamp of malaise and periodic contraction it’s been in for more than two years. The cost of inputs for manufacturers is at a 31-month high — see tariffs. But despite all that, manufacturers in March were the most optimistic about the future that they’ve been in years.

“That reflects this more protectionist environment that manufacturers are saying, hey in the long run this is gonna help us,” said Williamson.

Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, is not so sure that it will.

“Tariffs, they’re going to cut into economic activity and the dollar is likely going to appreciate, which doesn’t really bode well for U.S. manufacturers,” said Sweet.

Tariff anxiety did help sour the mood in the service economy, though. That and the cooling labor market and slowing wage growth. “When that occurs, it’s not a great barometer for what’s ahead for services,” he said.

And confidence there around how this year will go fell to its lowest level since 2022. The service economy employs more than 80% of workers in the U.S.

We humans are suckers for free stuff. And it can cloud our ability to judge the true value of a deal. 

That’s why credit card rewards can be so alluring — free concerts, flights and airport lounge access? Yes, please. Spending more earns you more, and housing is most Americans’ biggest monthly expense, so it’s understandable that the country’s 42 million rental households might be tempted to plunk their credit card on the first of the month.

Just 4.5% of rent payments were made on credit cards in 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, but the market sees opportunity here. About one in four apartments have integrated credit card-style rewards into their payment systems, and there are new specialty credit cards designed for rent and mortgage payments.

All this might make it tempting to charge rent, but the risks are less obvious. Before you pay rent with plastic, consider the following.

Convenience fees add up fast

Do you want to pay 3% more for your rent? If you pay with a credit card, many landlords are likely to tack on fees. 

With the national median rent at $1,689 per month in February, according to real estate brokerage Redfin, the costs for the typical renter paying via swipe would be not insignificant: about $50 extra each month, or $600 for the year. 

Most businesses that accept credit cards have already embedded the “swipe fees” into the prices they charge to customers, but landlords largely haven’t done the same yet.

“It is rarely worth it to pay a convenience fee,” said Emily Thompson, an editor at the credit card rewards travel site The Points Guy. Transaction and processing fees almost always cost consumers more than the value of rewards they receive in return, she said. 

The Bilt Mastercard allows renters to earn rewards without paying fees. For now, Bilt covers the cost of sending rent to the landlord, in the hopes that cardholders will swipe for other expenses as well. That’s what got Ken Tse, a budget analyst and lifelong renter in San Francisco, to sign up for a Bilt credit card.

“Instead of paying rent to my landlord, I just pay it to my credit card company, and I set up an automatic payment,” Tse said.  

Rewards are tricky to value 

Credit cards rewards programs can be hard to understand You might have accrued thousands of points, but the cash value of a single point is typically just a penny or two. Points’ values can fluctuate depending on how you redeem them, and the terms set by your credit card issuer and its partnered airlines or hotel chains. 

Then there are annual fees that many credit cards charge in exchange for high value rewards. The American Express Platinum Card charges a $695 annual fee, for example, and offers up to $1,500 of potential benefits. Earning them all might push the cardholder to spend in ways that may not align with their lifestyle or budget.

Thompson told us she’s met people who opt for high-fee cards because of their airport lounge access, with unlimited free food and drinks. They don’t always realize you have to travel frequently and fly to airports with the proper lounges for that benefit to pay off.

“Are you spending $700 in airport alcohol out of pocket? Because if not, this is not a good value,” Thompson said. “Just buy your own airport drinks. You’re gonna save $600 a year.” 

Put another way: “if you weren’t going to spend money on the benefit [with cash], you’re not saving any money by getting it on your credit card,” Thompson added.

Tse said he earns about $7.34 in rewards every month by charging his rent to a Bilt credit card. While Bilt doesn’t currently charge an annual fee, it surveyed customers earlier this year, hinting that it may add new tiers charging $95 or $550 per year. Tse said he’d stop using the card before paying an annual fee that high, because the approximate $88 in rewards he could earn in a year wouldn’t offset the fee. He’d essentially be paying Bilt to use their product, he said.

Rewards can change, usually for the worse

Just as inflation eats away at our spending power, credit card rewards tend to become less robust over time. 

“Very few things in life get cheaper and more valuable as time goes on, and credit cards and points and miles are no exception,” Thompson said.  

At the beginning of the year, Thompson said she saw some credit cards raise fees without adding rewards or benefits. Other cards kept fees static, but cut their costs by dropping benefits like airport lounge access or statement credits for certain subscriptions.  

When the Bilt credit card first launched, for example, users received two points for every dollar spent on rent; now it’s just one. 

Carrying a balance negates any rewards

Banks issuing credit cards expect consumers to rack up balances that they don’t pay off at the end of the month, so they can charge them interest, and they use credit card rewards to encourage spending on their cards over their competitors. Researchers found that interest on balances generated more revenue for banks than swipe fees. 

When Wells Fargo partnered with Bilt to co-launch the Bilt credit card, the bank expected that card holders would carry balances for 50% to 75% of what they spent, The Wall Street Journal reported.  

“The biggest mistake that I see is people using a credit card for the rewards and then carrying a balance and paying interest on their purchases,” Thompson said.

That math will never make good economic sense, she said. 

The average credit card interest rate was 22.80%, according to Federal Reserve data from November 2024. Meanwhile, typical rewards are worth between 1% to 5% of the spending required to earn them. 

“Everything that we have, as far as earning rewards and maximizing your rewards, only exists as a value proposition if you’re paying off your bills in full every month,” Thompson said.

Nearly half of all American credit cardholders carry debt month to month, according to Bankrate, but two thirds of them are still trying to maximize credit card rewards. 

“If you can’t make [rent] this month, like, what’s the chance you’re not going to make it next month? And then you’re going to pay interest on that?” said Lulu Wang, an assistant professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management. 

 “People are always overly optimistic about their ability to pay off debt.” 

Two instances when paying with a credit card might make sense

When budgets are tight, Wang said paying a credit card fee might be preferable to sending a landlord a late payment. 

“You can imagine not being able to pay your rent is a bad signal,” said Wang. 

“So maybe you just float it on your credit card until a week later, when you get your paycheck, and then you pay it off. You pay a 3% [fee] of whatever your rent is. It sucks, but it at least means that it won’t show up on your rent history record as having a late rent payment.”

Thompson said that paying rent with a credit card can also help consumers reap new card bonuses worth hundreds of dollars, sometimes more than $1,000. Welcome offer windows are the only time, she said, that the value of rewards will typically outweigh the cost of transaction fees for using a credit card to pay rent. 

If credit card users all paid their bills in full every month, there would be fewer downsides to maximizing rewards. But there would also be little incentive for credit card issuers to continue paying out generous benefits. Wells Fargo was losing a reported $10 million per month on the Bilt credit card partnership in part because cardholders were more fiscally prudent than the bank had estimated; their balances, The Wall Street Journal reported, amounted to 15% to 25% of what they charged.

That’s a good thing from a personal finance perspective but bad for a credit card issuer who relies on interest revenue to generate profits.

Rates of homeownership stalled out for Generation Z and millennials in 2024. A Redfin report released Monday showed that ownership hovered around 26% for older Gen Zers and 55% for millennials, instead of increasing like they did for Generation X members and baby boomers last year. 

While the younger half of the population made gains in homeownership during the pandemic, that momentum has flatlined. 

Tyler Klene, a 33-year-old from Denver, started his search a year ago, first with standalone houses. 

“Even something that was like a single-bedroom, little bitty thing, I couldn’t afford that anywhere that I wanted to live,” said Klene. 

So he expanded his search to townhomes and condos that seemed to fit his $300,000 budget. But with homeowners association and other fees, “that just made them out of reach,” said Klene. 

After a year, he’s mostly given up. 

“These high interest rates, the low amount of inventory, it’s creating this barrier where it’s harder for young people to advance in terms of homeownership,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist of Redfin. 

Fairweather said those elevated interest rates are making it even harder for first-time buyers. “They are borrowing most of the money to purchase the home,” she said.  

Uncertainty around interest rates is discouraging buyers, said John Paasonen, CEO at mortgage services firm Maxwell. 

“What we saw across all segments, but particularly millennials, just the pumping on the brakes to say, ‘What’s going to happen?’” said Paasonen. 

Younger people are waiting and seeing as they continue to trail their parents’ generation in terms of homeownership, which can be an important financial milestone. 

“Homeowners have about 40 times, you know, the wealth of renters,” said Daniel McCue, senior research associate at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. 

But Mauricio Soto, a real estate agent in Oregon, is optimistic that young people will figure it out — they have well-paying jobs and time on their side.

“If millennials, Gen Z, they understand and they know how important it is to save money for the future, definitely they will be in a really, really good position.” 

He said young people should start saving and earning interest as early as they can to prepare for homeownership. 

This week marks one year since the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after it was hit by the Dali, a container ship. When the bridge fell, six construction workers died, the channel to the Port of Baltimore was blocked for over 10 weeks, and the region lost a major commercial thoroughfare.

In February, the state of Maryland released the design for a new bridge that will go where the Key Bridge stood. The design is still in its early stages, but the new bridge has an expected life span of 100 years. That means this bridge will have to accommodate not just the ships and trucks of today, but those a century from now. 

One change to the new bridge? It’s going to look different from the old one.

“The old Key Bridge was truss, a kind of design that looks like, kind of a cage, and that is holding up the roadway,” said Rick Geddes, who studies infrastructure policy as a professor at Cornell University.

Geddes said truss bridges were very common back in the 1970s, when the old Key Bridge was built. The new bridge will be a kind Geddes said is more commonly built now — what’s called a “cable-stayed bridge.” 

“You have very tall towers, and those towers hold cables, and the roadway is suspended under the towers via those cables,” said Geddes. “And so the cable-stayed design allows the center span to be longer.”

The center, or main span, of the bridge goes over the shipping channel. The old Key Bridge’s main span was about 1,200 feet. The new one is expected to be at least 1,600.

The new cable-stayed bridge is still in the early stages of the design process. (Maryland Transportation Authority)

“So the likelihood that a big ship is going to veer out of the channel and hit a part of the bridge is reduced by the fact that you have towers much — about a third, which is a lot — wider apart than under the old bridge,” said Geddes.

The deck of the new bridge, where the road is, will also be about 45 feet higher than the old one. That could allow bigger ships to pass underneath.

“Today, right now, there are certain cruise ships that cannot serve the Port of Baltimore, because they’ve gotten very large,” said Paul Wiedefeld, secretary of Maryland’s Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the project.

Will the new bridge accommodate the biggest ships?

“Mmmm, probably not the biggest in the future,” he said. “I mean, you have to think of it in this scale, the Port of Baltimore versus other ports.”

Wiedefeld said the Port of Baltimore does have plenty of room to grow, but there are some geographical limits. 

“You know, it’s tight. It’s within a very dense urban environment,” he said.

But, as with other kinds of infrastructure, there have been big advances in bridge-building technology in the last half century.

“You’re building a bridge for 100 years, so you start to use materials that can last much longer,” said Wiedefeld. 

For example, there are better coatings for metal that protect against corrosion, said civil engineer Maria Lehman, who recently worked on a different bridge designed to last at least 100 years — the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge over the Hudson River in New York, which opened in 2018.

Also, she pointed out, you can now embed sensors in a bridge that will give a heads up when something is off.

“You get an alarm, ‘Hey, you should check this out.’ Things that normally you may not notice with a visual inspection, because it’s going on at the steel level,” said Lehman.

Lehman said from an engineering standpoint, you can address a lot of different outcomes — but you’re on a budget.

“You really have to think about risk, which is the probability of failure times the consequences of the failure,” said Lehman. “And where is that sweet spot, where you’re investing enough that you’re meeting the risk, but not too much, because there isn’t an unlimited pot of money to be able to do this.”

In the case of the new bridge in Baltimore, there’s also not unlimited time. Maryland’s goal for opening the new bridge is Oct. 15, 2028. 

And forecasting what shipping and trucking will look like in 2128 is hard, said Ben Schafer, who studies civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

“If there’s another new idea that you and I can’t really even conceptualize right now, and that becomes the most important way to move goods around, there’s not an easy way to get into that sort of prediction,” said Schafer.

The best engineers and planners can do is rely on current standards. One of the groups that works to develop these standards is the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, or AASHTO.

“We take the data and the information that’s available to us, the research that’s available to us, and we do the best that we can to project forward as to what may be occurring into the future,” said Kevin Marshia, the director of engineering for AASHTO.

Basically, trying to take into account how commerce may change in the years to come.

The Trump administration has made some changes to two pillars of the American housing market: the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. Or, as they’re better known, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Last week the administration fired 14 members of the boards of directors at the two corporations. Fannie and Freddie have been under government-run conservatorship since the late 2000s housing crash, but the White House is reportedly considering a plan to re-privatize them.

Fannie and Freddie do not lend people money to buy homes.

Instead, they buy mortgages from the lenders that originate them, so those loans — and the risks associated with them — are no longer on those lenders’ books. 

Then they bundle up the mortgages into neat little snackable securities, and then sell those snacks to pension funds and insurance companies and other big investors around the globe.

“They’re important because they’re the grease basically that makes the whole mortgage finance system work, and they’ve been incredibly successful at it,” said David Dworkin, CEO of the National Housing Conference, which pushes for more affordable housing.

Fannie and Freddie’s big value-add is the federal government acting as a backstop. If a homeowner defaults on a Fannie or Freddie-backed mortgage, the investor who owns it still gets paid.

Dworkin said that lowers mortgage risks and mortgage rates.

“The mortgage that you get is going to have a lower interest rate than it would have otherwise, probably about half a percent,” said Dworkin.

Last year Fannie and Freddie backed about 40% of all securitized U.S. mortgages. It’s not exactly clear how the administration might go about ending their government-run conservatorship.

Mike Fratantoni at the Mortgage Bankers Association said re-privatization could have an upside.

“We think when they’re out of conservatorship, it’ll help them to be more innovative, more responsive to the markets, but it needs to be done cautiously,” said Fratantoni.

The government selling its stake in Fannie and Freddie could also yield hundreds of billions of dollars for Uncle Sam.

But Andrew Fieldhouse at Texas A&M’s May Business School said we’ve seen this movie before — like, before the government had to bail out Fannie and Freddie when the financial system choked on those mortgage-backed security snacks.

“The pre-2008 status quo in which Fannie and Freddie’s upside gains were privatized, going to shareholders and management and any big downside losses were backstopped by taxpayers, was problematic,” said Fieldhouse.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, declined a request for comment.

Mexico is under pressure these days to keep illegal drugs and migrants from crossing into the United States. But the country is facing pressure to crackdown on another front: the trade in smuggled and counterfeit products. 

Professor Enrique Dussel Peters in his office at the Center for China-Mexico Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. (Ted Siefer)

Late last fall, these pressures came to a head when police in Mexico City descended on a 16-story building and confiscated what they said were 19 tons of contraband mostly from China, including Hello Kitty knock-offs. 

Mexican authorities said the raid was just the start of ongoing operations aimed at protecting domestic manufacturing and enforcing trade agreements. 

But for professor Enrique Dussel Peters, who heads the Center for China-Mexico Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the timing of the raid is telling.

“This is a symbolic stance saying, ‘Mr. Trump, we are following your orders. Don’t worry, we will not become your backdoor for illegal imports,’” he said.

Inside Izagaga 89, the building raided by police in Mexico City last fall. (Ted Siefer)

Dussel pointed out that many places are selling imported goods from China in the city’s historic center, where the raid took place. “You have hundreds of blocks, and they just see this one building,” he said.

Reporting by Mexican journalists has revealed that there are dozens of shops, warehouses and plazas selling products from China. Many operate clandestinely and skirt local laws.

Much of this trade takes place in a neighborhood called Tepito. Here, one can find block after block of vendors selling things like scooters, stereo speakers, make up and new shoes, including ones purporting to be Nike Air Jordans for about $20.

A vendor named Francisco, who was one of the few willing to be recorded, said the glut of Chinese products makes it hard to compete. (We’re not using his last name because he fears legal trouble.)

“It’s not good because [the products from China] displace Mexican products,” he said. “There’s no way to compete with them.”

The bigger reality here is that imports from China — both legal and smuggled — have become thoroughly enmeshed in the Mexican economy. Exports from China have doubled over the past five years, to more than $100 billion annually.

“Imagine a video of a day in Mexico without China,” Dussel said. “So we would be walking barefoot without underwear, cellular phones would not work because the antennas are from Huawei, a Chinese firm. Ports, airports and whatever would not work.”

From this perspective, a raid or two might be a light lift for Mexico — considering some of the other tough choices the country faces to stay in the good graces of the United States.

You’ll soon be able to pay for your next delivered DoorDash meal in installments. The payment company Klarna is partnering with the delivery service to offer “buy now, pay later” loans for DoorDash purchases over $35. 

Those kinds of short-term loans are becoming more common across the economy, but they come with risks.

One of the most popular “buy now, pay later” methods is known as “pay in four.” Basically, when you buy a new pair of pants — or soon the dinner for your next lazy night in— you pay one installment up front, and three more every two weeks, explained the Boston Fed’s Joanna Stavins.

“So it’s a sort of six-week short-term credit, interest-free,” she noted. If you’re late on payments, however, fees can eventually rack up.

Stavins said that buy now, pay later users tend to have less money in the bank. “And they already carry credit card debt, so they are what I call ‘financially fragile.'”

There’s additional risk because unlike getting approved for a credit card,” there’s no requirement for a buy now, pay later to assess whether you have an ability to repay the loan,” said Nadine Chabrier at the Center for Responsible Lending. “That may lead to consumers taking out unaffordable amounts of debt.”

And a delivered DoorDash meal often comes with fees already, noted Lisa Gill at Consumer Reports. So someone who uses “buy now, pay later” for their order is financing “service fees, delivery fees, gratuity fees and any other service charges over a month’s time, and they’re just trying to get a $10, you know, bowl for lunch or burrito for lunch.”

You could always order directly from the restaurant and cut out the middlemen, she added.

The Trump administration’s budget-cutting efforts are having a big impact at research universities, even as those efforts remain in various stages of implementation due to legal challenges. Universities have to plan years ahead, especially when it comes to medical research. And dozens of institutions have announced cuts.

Research that started 30 years ago at Donald McDonnell’s laboratory at Duke University led to a new drug in 2023 to treat metastatic breast cancer. Now, he has a second drug in clinical trials.

“Both of those drugs — let me just say — were drugs that industry passed on years and years ago for other indications, and they were rediscovered by really inquisitive, bright graduate students,” he said.

McDonnell’s lab depends on a handful of those students, funded in part through the school and in part through grants. Right now, with all of the uncertainty around federal funding, McDonnell is facing an unprecedented challenge.

“This is the time of year when students elect, you know, to work with various professors, and I personally am scrambling right now to take four incredible students who want to work with me to develop a new drug we have for prostate cancer, and I can’t find funding,” he said.

He needs $70,000 per student per year.

Similar scenes are playing out across the country. Academics say that at minimum, the Trump administration is slow-walking approvals of medical research grants.

Also, the threat of drastically reducing reimbursement for researchers’ so-called indirect costs — things like electricity and supplies — has left many unsure about what money their labs will actually have to spend.

“We’re doing a lot of tabletop exercises, a lot of strategic planning exercises with different scenarios,” said Colin Duckett, executive vice dean for basic and preclinical science at Duke. Those scenarios could mean broader, school-wide budget cuts to come.

Dozens of other universities have already publicly announced such cuts, because of the disruptions coming from the federal government.

“I came here 35 years ago from England, because this is the best place in the world to do science. And it is really sad for me to wonder whether the U.S. is the best place to do science. It’s almost inconceivable,” said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a political science professor at Northwestern University. “There is a lot of worry, there’s a lot of frustration, there is a lot of anxiety.”

Harbridge-Yong’s own research grants are unaffected, but she’s been having a lot of conversations across academia. She noted that graduate students, in particular, are concerned about their futures.

That’s because of the challenges professors like McDonnell are having in finding grants. Existing private funds can’t make up the difference for the federal government’s vast financial powers.

“If this grant money dramatically decreases or goes away in some fields, we can’t sustain to bring in the graduate students,” Harbridge-Yong said. “That means these early career researchers don’t get to be trained to become world-class researchers and scientists, and we’re going to lose that whole pipeline of expertise and knowledge.”

It’s the kind of loss, academics say, that could take a decade or more to reverse.

I really love the Apple TV+ show “Severance,” and I’m having an internal struggle about it that is not unlike the current struggle in Congress over how to measure tax cuts. 

In “Severance,” an evil company has found a way to sever employee’s minds. When they’re at work, they don’t remember the life they have outside of work. The show is so horrifying and dystopian, I find it oddly soothing.

What I do not find soothing is the $10 a month I pay to watch “Severance” on Apple TV+. But I signed up temporarily to watch it. Now the season finale has aired and it’s decision time. 

“So you have a month-to-month subscription, and you get to the point where you’re deciding, ‘Oh, do I, do I keep the subscription service or do I cancel it?’” said Chye-Ching Huang, executive director of the Tax Law Center at New York University. 

Here’s my dilemma — and Congress’. I could look at the situation like: “My show’s ending. It’s time to cancel Apple TV+ and save some money.” That’s the “current law baseline” Congress uses now.

Then there’s the “current policy baseline” part of my brain. It says: “You’ve been paying for Apple TV+ for months. This isn’t some new expense you have to figure out. Just keep it.“

My streaming subscription struggle is basically what is happening in Congress, except instead of $10 for Apple TV+, it’s trillions of dollars for tax cuts.

“The way to think of current policy is: What’s the policy today?” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Bradley thinks the way taxes are calculated in the budget should be changed to use the current policy baseline. “Current policy baseline reflects the reality of what’s happening in the real world,” he said.

 In the real world, Bradley said most people and businesses saw their taxes go down in 2017, and they’ve stayed down — that’s the policy we’re living under now. 

“Absent a current policy baseline, you’re going to have to sunset all of these tax provisions,” said Bradley. “ And so you end up with this huge tax cliff that no one believes actually that we should send the economy over.”

If the tax cuts expire, most households would see their taxes go up by at least $500. For the top 1%, it would be more like $60,000

Bradley said keeping the tax cuts in place isn’t a new cost, it’s a continuation of current policy.  

But Congress doesn’t calculate it that way. It uses the so-called current law baseline.

“So current law baseline is exactly how it sounds. It’s how the law is written,” said Jonathan Tucker, a partner at tax firm KBKG. He’s firmly in the current law baseline camp. “These tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire. That is the law.” 

That means if Republicans want to extend the 2017 tax cuts this year, it will show up in the budget as a new government expense — an expensive one: roughly $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

“That would increase the deficit, right?” said Tucker. “Current law is the reality, right? The actual economic impact.” Tucker said the economic impact of these tax cuts is a major blow to the already worrisome deficit. And the current policy camp wants to ignore that.

“Current policy is kind of the funny math, if you will, to make it look like it’s not going to cost anything. But I’m a tax accountant, so I tend to like to deal with real numbers,” he said.

But this fight isn’t really about the numbers, it’s about the framing of those numbers. The GOP’s majority in Congress means the tax cuts will most likely be renewed, no matter who wins this war of the words.

So why the fight? NYU’s Chye-Ching Huang said the framing matters. 

“It changes the rhetoric,” she said. Current law baseline would mean Democrats can point to the tax cut extension and say: “The GOP is preaching about cutting government waste, but they are adding trillions to the deficit with these tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the super wealthy.”

If current policy baseline wins, Republicans can say, “We’re not adding to the deficit! The Democrats are just trying to raise everybody’s taxes.”

There are also some political process implications: Current policy baseline could make passing the tax cuts easier, and they wouldn’t have to come up for a vote again in the future.  

“But the reality for how the federal budget and how people will experience it is really the key thing to keep focused on,” said Huang. 

And the reality is this: The tax cuts will add trillions to an already crippling U.S. debt load. But, if they expire, most businesses and individuals will see their taxes go up at a moment when a lot of people are struggling financially.

The ultimate decision will be made by the Senate parliamentarian — a nonpartisan appointee, whose “mysterious and important” job, as they might say in “Severance,” is to wade through wonky word policy debates like this one.

Meanwhile, I have to make the call about whether to sever my ties with Apple TV+. Though I did hear “Severance” was renewed for a third season.

Caregiver John Boakye added paprika, garlic and onion to a bag of raw chicken that he was prepping for dinner for a Dallas family to grill up later. 

Cooking is one of the many tasks Boakye takes on to help Jean Fuller, 89, and her husband, Dale, 91, manage their home and their health. “I take him through exercises and stuff,” he said. “And I [help] with the wife too.” 

Boakye, who emigrated from Ghana around eight years ago, earns $15 an hour. It helps pay the rent on a house where he lives with his wife and another family from his home country. 

He and two other caregivers help the Fuller family manage life. Jean has a brain condition. 

“What it takes away is short-term memory loss. If you were to meet my wife today, she would have no recollection of having met you the next day,” Dale said. 

Dale said that for the first year or so after his wife’s diagnosis in 2019, they managed on their own. But eventually they needed help with activities like taking medication, bathing and laundry. 

He gets to spend more time with his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren because of the assistance he gets for his wife. 

“The caregiver becomes sort of a second brain for her, since hers doesn’t work so well,” he said.

The at-home help from Cambridge Caregivers costs around $16,000 a month. Dale said they’re lucky it’s covered by long-term care insurance, which most people don’t have. All three of the Fullers’ helpers are immigrants from Africa. 

“Eighty percent of our staff are foreign born. Most of them, 90%, are African,” said Cambridge Caregivers CEO Adam Lampert, who employs roughly 300 people. “Americans don’t want to do this job.” 

About a third of home health and personal care aides in the U.S. are foreign born, according to the American Immigration Council analysis of American Community Survey data. Around 100,000 are from African countries. 

“Our labor force is generally more skilled than is required by that type of job,” said economist Pia Orrenius of the Dallas Federal Reserve. “Our kids are growing up with more education than ever before. They’re not aspiring to those types of jobs.” 

But someone still has to do this work, and it won’t be artificial intelligence. These are physically and emotionally demanding jobs. 

As the U.S. population ages, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber said it’s a looming labor problem. Recent census data shows that there are just five states where more than 1 in 5 people is 65 or older. In 2050, Gruber estimates, 43 states will be in the same boat.

“America is going to be Florida,” he said. “We have no plan for credibly meeting that massive change in the long-term care needs of our population.”  

It may be unrealistic in this political environment, but he said one obvious solution is increasing legal immigration. 

“There’s a natural trade to be made, which is to let people who would like to come live in America and be happy to work for the low wages we pay our care providers to come and provide the care we need,” Gruber said.   

And without immigration reform, it’ll be baby boomers, their kids and taxpayers who will pay for the labor shortage. Adam Lampert said the pandemic is an example of what can happen when there’s a shock to the labor market. 

“Prices went up almost 30% — when I say ‘prices,’ I mean the wages that we had to pay went up — and we turned around and charged that to our client,” Lampert said. 

The pandemic labor shortage boosted immigrants’ wages because there weren’t enough other workers to compete for those caregiver roles. 

Lampert worries about a similar effect under a policy of mass deportation. He said his employees are working legally, but that’s not true everywhere.

“There are these undocumented workers in the invisible part of the market. They’re working privately for people,” Lampert said. 

A large part of the caregiving labor force works informally and even the threat of mass deportation, he said, could cause workers to stay home, removing a chunk of that workforce. 

“That is the definition of the labor shortage,” he said. 

And a run on caregivers would make these services more costly at a time when the ranks of people who need care are growing.   

Where is this economy going? Honestly, we don’t know. Economists don’t know. The stock market — we say it all the time here— is not the economy, and it doesn’t know, either.

Hard economic data about how different sectors have actually been performing, like home building, retail sales and job creation, have been holding up pretty well. The ‘soft’ data —how businesses and consumers are feeling — have been more downbeat. 

The Conference Board’s latest Leading Economic Index, which pulls a bunch of data points together to try to predict where the economy is going, was down by 0.3% in February — the third straight monthly decline. What does it mean?

The LEI crunches together 10 key data points, including manufacturing orders, jobless claims, consumer confidence and stocks. 

A falling LEI from December to February signals the economy is slowing and faces headwinds, said Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, senior manager of business cycle indicators at The Conference Board.

But she said what matters most is the six-month trend, and that’s been gradually improving.

“It has not been as negative as 2023 or the beginning of 2024, not triggering recession signals,” she said.

Now, one big caveat here, February’s LEI doesn’t include what happened in March; rising fears of a global trade war, and a big selloff in stocks. 

“So the market has pulled back from its all-time high,” said Paul Christopher, head of global investment strategy at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

He said in the overall economy, we’re not seeing “a cascade of weakness, where one thing leads to another leads to another.”

Instead, things just seem to gradually be getting a little worse, said Thomas Martin, a senior portfolio manager at Globalt Investments.

“Employment has been weakening, sort of, but not too much. Consumer spending — it’s still OK. The odds of a recession have increased, but they’re not alarming,” he said.

Lower-income consumers are increasingly pulling back in the face of high prices, said Eric Freedman, chief investment officer at U.S. Bank.

Still, with incomes rising faster than inflation, and business balance sheets strong: “We do retain a glass-half-full perspective. We do concurrently recognize that that glass could spill, quite quickly,” he said.

With the next wave of unsettling news on tariffs, inflation, government spending cuts, and all the rest.

This is just one of the stories from our “I’ve Always Wondered” series, where we tackle all of your questions about the world of business, no matter how big or small. Ever wondered if recycling is worth it? Or how store brands stack up against name brands? Check out more from the series here.

Listener Brian Hempstead from Seattle asks: 

In Seattle, pre-Microsoft and Amazon, when layoffs happened, there was a phrase “the Rule of 7.” For each high white-collar job laid off, it affected seven support jobs in the community
When you talk about these huge government layoffs, is there a formula of its down river effect on the economy?

The federal government has announced more than 62,000 layoffs this year as part of a new initiative to curb “wasteful” spending, even though federal worker salaries represent less than 5% of total government expenditures.  

These sweeping layoffs, led by the Department of Government Efficiency, have hit departments and agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Education.

The Department of Education announced earlier this month that it will reduce half of its workforce, with those employees being placed on administrative leave starting on Friday. Then on Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the agency. 

It’s been a major period of upheaval – and confusion – for federal workers, some of whom have been rehired in recent weeks after their initial firings. On Thursday, the National Park Service was allowed to reinstate 1,000 terminated employees.  

The federal government employs about 3 million workers, a figure that excludes active-duty military personnel. The vast majority of federal workers live outside of Washington, D.C., residing in states like California, Washington, Texas and Pennsylvania, where they help stimulate the economy.

Jonathan Schwabish, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who’s worked for the federal government, said government workers take pride in serving the country. 

“Federal workers are just like any other person working in the United States. They’re just trying to do good work, pay their mortgage, pay their bills, raise their family, and put food on the table,” Schwabish said. 

Each federal layoff could result in the loss of 1.3 additional workers  in the private sector, according to Patrick Clapp, senior economic consultant at Chmura Economics & Analytics, a labor market consulting and data firm. 

That’s because the federal government works directly with other businesses who sell them items like office supplies, while laid-off federal workers are no longer spending money in industries like food, health care and retail, Clapp explained. 

Some local economies, like Washington, D.C., could be hit even harder. “On average, for every job in the federal government, you explain two to three jobs in the regional economy,” public policy professor Terry Clower told the Washingtonian. Government jobs lead to jobs for contractors like Lockheed Martin, the Washingtonian explained. 

Some federal workers, like national park employees, live in communities that are especially tight-knit.

If they’re unemployed, that creates ripple effects throughout the regions where they live, said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association. 

“These are dedicated park servants who have moved their families in many cases, and are integral parts of their communities,” Garder said. “Their children go to the same schools. They have friends and family in the community.”

And they’re investing their paychecks in the area, whether that’s buying groceries or taking their families out to local restaurants, Garder added. 

While the NPS is now able to reinstate workers, the parks still face the possibility of future cuts. 

“After they have been treated so poorly, it remains to be seen how many of them will actually want to return,” Garder said. 

The federal government is also cutting back on grants and contracts and laying off the people who run them, Schwabish said. 

Take the Department of Agriculture. If the government fires everyone who handles contracts, they’re no longer able to provide contracts or grants to research or farm-lending organizations, Schwabish said. 

“So that money is not going out the door,” he said. 

Without that money, these organizations may then lay off their own employees. Johns Hopkins University announced last week that it’s going to eliminate more than 2,000 jobs after the Trump administration clawed back $800 million in grants for the university. 

Americans will soon become even more aware of how vital federal services are, said Emily Gee, senior vice president for Inclusive Growth at the Center for American Progress.

People might face longer lines at their Social Security offices and receive less reliable weather forecasting information, Gee said. 

“It’s not pain that’s going to be contained to the federal workforce,” Gee said.

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Delaware has long been the go-to state for businesses to incorporate, but competition is heating up. Lawmakers in the First State are voting on a controversial bill that would give companies more leeway — and maintain the state’s competitive edge as a business-friendly haven. Let’s do the numbers. 

2.2 million

That’s the number of registered companies in Delaware, with nearly 300,000 new entities incorporated in 2023. There are nearly 43 million incorporated entities nationwide, but Delaware is home to many of the richest, including about two-thirds of the Fortune 500.

$2.2 billion

Delaware’s corporate franchise tax generates $2.2 billion in annual revenue, more than a third of the state budget. Corporate tax revenue offsets the state’s lack of a sales tax and low property taxes.

1792

Delaware established the Court of Chancery in 1792 to rule on corporate law disputes. The court has no jury; judges with corporate expertise hear cases. The special court is just one of the reasons Delaware has been a popular place to set up shop since the early 20th century.

2004

That’s when Meta, then Facebook, first incorporated in Delaware. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been talking with officials in Texas and other states about picking up sticks, at least on paper.

SB 21

That’s the bill a bipartisan group of Delaware lawmakers are considering  to make their state more business-friendly. The bill would limit investors’ ability to file lawsuits and information requests when they suspect controlling stockholders or executives of insider deals or conflicts of interest.

Supporters, including Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer, a Democrat, say the change would preserve Delaware’s tax base. Opponents argue the law “helps billionaires and corporate insiders avoid accountability” and could lead to abuses of power.

$55 billion

Tesla CEO Elon Musk left Delaware last year, reincorporating in Texas after a Chancery Court judge rejected his multibillion-dollar pay package. In December, a Delaware judge rejected Musk’s compensation plan again, on the grounds of conflict of interest between Musk and his company’s board.

Tesla is appealing the latest ruling, and Musk has encouraged more companies to leave Delaware. The kind of shareholder lawsuit that prompted Tesla’s flight would become more difficult if SB 21 becomes law.

This story was first published in Marketplace’s weekly newsletter. For more numbers you need to know, sign up to receive updates from Marketplace.

Among the federal agencies that DOGE has its eyes on is the Social Security Administration. Less than three months into the current Trump administration, Social Security has been in the headlines a lot: Offices are expected to close. At least 7,000 workers are expected to be cut. Identification requirements have been changed, too. And a lot of those changes may mean limited access and additional delays to already protracted services.

Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer recently spoke with two experts — Jack Smalligan who worked at the Office of Management and Budget for almost 30 years, focusing on Social Security, and Rich Couture, an attorney at the Social Security Administration and a union official — for their thoughts on how changes at Social Security could play out and impact the everyday Americans who rely on the agency. 

The following is a selection of extended interviews with Smalligan and Couture. Interviews took place separately and have been edited for clarity and length. 

On what things are currently like at the Social Security Administration

Rich Couture: Social Security is at a 50-year staffing low. We currently have 57,000 workers serving about 73 million Americans, compared to fiscal year 2010, where we had 67,000 workers serving 60 million Americans. And we know by estimates that about 10,000 Americans turn age 65 every day — that’s when they become Medicare-eligible — and we handle Medicare applications. And so we that’s a pretty good indicator for how much our prospective workload grows on a daily basis. We haven’t been funded the way that we needed to be funded in order to keep up with this explosion in beneficiary growth, and it’s had real impact on service delivery and on productivity.

On what would happen if the agency experienced layoffs

Couture: There’s significant risk of disruption that can be caused by the agency’s diminished ability to maintain its IT systems as a result of the loss of significant numbers of IT specialists. There are other components that provide budgetary, programmatic and other forms of support to the front lines. HR offices are likely to be impacted, which is going to affect what little hiring we’ve been able to do. It’s going to adversely impact the processing of a lot of these separations and retirements that we believe are going to be coming, as well as being able to provide mission support to frontline offices.

If we are losing thousands of workers from the frontlines, that is going to have an absolute impact — an absolute negative impact — upon wait times, upon processing times, upon the ability to schedule appointments for in-person services, in terms of wait times to get a disability hearing in front of a judge. All of our workloads on the frontlines will be impacted, and that will lead to further delays for Americans seeking benefits. And any delay in benefits is really a de facto benefit cut, because, again, all of the services that we provide have been paid for by the American people through their FICA contributions — not just the benefits, but the ability to access those benefits through prompt and timely service.

On layoffs and the ancient tech the SSA uses

Couture: As you’re probably aware, the Social Security Administration operates a very ancient (by computing standards) and fragile information technology infrastructure, with the mainframe itself operating off of COBOL, which is an antiquated programming language. It’s not widely taught in schools any longer, and the number of individuals in the national economy who have programming expertise dwindles by the day. And so Social Security hires a lot of these programmers in order to maintain this foundation, this mainframe system upon which the rest of SSA’s information technology infrastructure rests. And if we lose significant numbers of programmers who speak COBOL and are familiar with the mainframe and all of the other IT systems that rest upon the mainframe, Social Security is going to face major exposure to system disruption, if not system collapse. 

On impacts to services

Jack Smalligan: For individuals who experience an issue with third-party data that comes into Social Security, SSA staff now spend a lot of time resolving those issues. And those are misunderstandings; this is not fraud. With fewer SSA staff, it’s going to take much longer for people to resolve very innocent discrepancies in what’s been reported about them, whether it’s earnings or other types of income.

On what would happen if SSA facilities — such as field offices or permanent remote sites — were closed

Couture: [DOGE] has claimed publicly that most of the offices where the leases are being terminated are these permanent remote sites, some of which haven’t been used in more than a year, because we have pivoted to having more than 90% of our hearings be conducted virtually, rather than in person — by public choice, I should stress. So there hasn’t been as much of a need for in-person hearings, including at the satellite hearing locations. But the American people have a right to an in-person hearing, if they so choose. Closing these permanent remote sites is going to place a real burden, particularly on indigent claimants who want an in-person hearing, who will not be able to travel potentially hundreds of miles to the main hearing office to have their hearing in front of an administrative law judge. So there is an impact with the closure of these permanent remote sites.

Smalligan: There’s been really some rigorous research done by the academic community that’s looked at the effects of past field office closures, and what that analysis has shown, kind of comparing the geographic areas around a closure versus other comparable areas, is that you have basically people giving up on the program, essentially — meaning you have lower participation particularly in SSI, because it’s simply harder to access the benefit. And so on top of people potentially losing their benefits because of these kind of misunderstandings around income and earnings, you’re going to just have a discouraged population that’s just never going to apply.

Signing up for Social Security could soon feel like a trip to the DMV Listen READ MORE READ MORE 150-year-olds are not receiving Social Security payments  READ MORE READ MORE On who would be most impacted

Smalligan: People with an issue with their eligibility status. And let me give an example: I worked with an individual receiving SSI who received a COVID stimulus check, and by law, that check is exempt from the SSI asset limit. But it’s hard for SSA to know that that source of income is from the stimulus check. So SSA sent her a letter basically ending her SSI benefit. And having lost your SSI benefit, she also lost your Medicaid benefit. And that misunderstanding is the kind of issue that a regional office could be working through or a field office could be working through. And before the Trump actions, those kinds of misunderstandings took months to resolve … With the downsizing and the office closures, it’s going to take much longer.

Someone claiming Social Security benefits, especially disability benefits, they are going to be the most acutely affected because they’re already waiting eight months for an initial decision, seven months for an initial appeal — and that’s with the current staffing levels. So if there’s substantial attrition because of all these actions, those wait times are going to increase into, kind of, years for people getting that initial review. And the Social Security actuaries modeled some scenarios that had backlogs for initial claims going from 1 million to 2 million if staffing is just allowed to stagnate. And here we’re actually looking at staffing declining by substantial amounts.

On what outside of Social Security benefits might be impacted

Smalligan: For low-income individuals, there’s a lot of rules around how the Medicare premium is done, and SSA has to calculate many of those things. And if there is an error made in that process, I mean you could have wrong payments going out and it could take a long time to resolve that. 

The COLA is clearly a pretty simple calculation, I mean, but the Medicare premium means there’s a higher premium for the highest-earning individuals. There’s also protections against having your Social Security benefit go down if the COLA is very modest, but the Medicare premium is very substantial … there’s provisions to basically hold those beneficiaries harmless so they don’t have a net reduction in their overall benefit after the Medicare premium. So depending your situation, you could have a higher or lower Medicare premium. And there’s been years when I was at OMB where Congress was still negotiating the budget, and if Congress changes the Medicare program in such a way to change Medicare spending, then the premium adjusts and everything ripples through. And so a change in overall Medicare policy ripples into the Medicare premium and how that impacts higher-wage and lower-earning individuals is complicated.

The price of copper has surged in the past few weeks to its highest level in nearly 10 months. Traders typically think of copper as a leading economic indicator; rising prices often predict economic growth ahead. But copper’s rising price may be sending a murkier signal right now.

Copper is generally a good indicator because it’s used all over the economy — in factories, houses, electronics and streetlights, per Chris Berry, founder and president of House Mountain Partners.

“The next time you’re on an airplane at night, and you’re coming in for a landing, and you see any lights or anything like that, every single one of those lights is working because of the electrical conductivity of copper,” he said.

So, if the economy is growing, and we’re building more, we’ll need more copper. 

Thing is, something else is going on right now. “In this specific case, I don’t believe that copper is acting as a leading indicator,” said Ian Lange, who teaches mineral economics at the Colorado School of Mines.

What’s mostly driving copper prices now is the threat of tariffs, he said. Companies are stocking up on copper as they attempt to navigate changing import tax policy.

“It’s just more because we don’t really know what’s going to happen,” Lange said. “‘Let me maybe try to buy some and hold it, just in case.'”

In the longer term, copper prices could keep rising — regardless of whether the Trump administration raises tariffs on the metal, said Chris Berry. That’s because more of the economy is electrifying.

“You need a lot of copper to effect the energy transition, right?” he said. “You need a lot of copper for data centers.”

Demand from those industries, he said, could keep copper prices higher for years to come.

We call ourselves Marketplace, so part of our job is exploring how marketplaces work, in all their forms. David Brancaccio and the “Marketplace Morning Report” team are setting out to visit in-person places of commerce, in a world where so much buying and selling has gone remote and digital. None are financial markets in a formal sense, but all markets are financial markets in a way, right? The goal is to learn the right and the wrong moves with experts.

This week: “A Business Reporter Goes to the Rodeo.” Today: why “rodeo clown” is a serious occupation.

Barrelmen are the people with the job of protecting bull riders when they fall and things go haywire. The protective barrier used to keep rodeo rider and fierce bull apart is an aluminum barrel, like a good-sized beer keg. John Harrison is among the best in the business.

Harrison gets ready for the next bull-riding contestant. (Courtesy Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo)

The job is above all about the personal safety and the economic security of the people who ride the bulls.

“Professional other sports, they get hurt, they go sit on the sidelines and get a check,” Harrison said. “In rodeo, they get hurt, they go home and no money. So if you can keep them safe, so they can go ride tomorrow, that’s our job.”

If you’ve never been to a rodeo, you may be picturing some kind of stern referee dressed with authority. But barrelmen dress funny, act funny and are also known as rodeo clowns. Harrison has been doing this work for decades, but just this year reached the very top of his league as he received a torch passed to him from a barrelman who became a Houston legend: Leon Coffee.

Coffee was just inducted into the rodeo’s hall of fame. (Courtesy Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo)

Coffee will continue to entertain rodeo crowds, but with his 70th birthday in the rearview mirror, he’s no longer going to fold himself into that barrel with bulls barreling down at him. It’s been a career where he showed early promise.

“In high school, I had an American history teacher that told me, he said, ‘Son, you can’t make a living being a clown,’ ” Coffee said. “The first time I won rodeo clown of the year, I called him up, went, ‘Nana nana na na.'”

Coffee has been goofing around yet been serious about safety here for 31 years.

“Like I’ve always said, anybody can get a job — not everybody can keep one. They changed presidents and directors of this rodeo many times, and I’m still here.”

David Brancaccio speaks with Coffee and Harrison in their dressing room at the rodeo. (Alex Schroeder/Marketplace)

What was Coffee looking for when he found Harrison, the clown he picked to take over in the barrel?

“You’ve got to be a very caring person and caring about putting a smile on that face,” he said. “And we are in the entertainment business. If you don’t have the best show in town, you’re not going to get the entertainment dollar.”

And if clowning is your destiny, what do you tell your parents?

“Oh, my goodness, I was that person that went to college for six years and never finished,” Harrison explained. “So … I always joked, the best way to become a rodeo clown is spend six years at a junior college, and your parents won’t care what you want to do.”

Leon Coffee and John Harrison. (HLRS Association)

The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association does evaluations and issues permits for barrelmen/clowns for the events it sanctions, but pros like John Harrison also do a lot of outside homework.

“They changed presidents and directors of this rodeo many times, and I’m still here,”said Leon Coffee. (Courtesy Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo)

“You study great comedians on TV, and you don’t have to copy them, but you might pick one thing up by watching something,” Harrison said. “And you just try to adapt to be your own person, and you start trying to work your way up the ladder.”

And you don’t start with the big leagues; you earn your barreling in the minors.

“I’ve worked rodeos in Iowa where they’ve tilled up a cornfield an hour and a half before it started, and hauled bleachers in, lawn chairs on the side of a hill,” Harrison said.

As for other tricks of the trade from these pros, they hand us a useful piece of information from the world of bull:

“Everybody thinks they’re attracted to red. That’s completely fake. They’re color blind. They don’t see color. They’re attracted to movement,” Harrison said.

We call ourselves Marketplace, so part of our job is exploring how marketplaces work, in all their forms. David Brancaccio and the “Marketplace Morning Report” team are setting out to visit in-person places of commerce, in a world where so much buying and selling has gone remote and digital. None are financial markets in a formal sense, but all markets are financial markets in a way, right? The goal is to learn the right and the wrong moves with experts.

This week: “A Business Reporter Goes to the Rodeo.” Today: the market mechanics of auctions, especially those for a good cause.

It’s a Friday morning junior market auction at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, where the students put their gorgeous goats, charming chickens, stately steers and luxurious lambs up for sale to the highest bidder. On stage, the No. 2 rated lamb: 173 pounds, medium wool and its name is Trump. Turns out, that’s sort of a popular choice these days — the No. 2 goat up for auction is also named Trump.

Most people in the crowd at this auction are holding a list of all 288 lots being sold off. Some also have a yardstick to wave to make a bid.

As for the “Marketplace Morning Report” crew, we come equipped with a peer-reviewed journal, volume 56 of “Management Science,” featuring the article “Charitable Motives and Bidding in Charity Auctions” to help us get better a understanding of what we’re looking at.

In a normal auction, people want to pay lowest prices for highest quality. Here, they are happy to pay way above the going rate for goats and lambs to generate a pile of philanthropic money, for a scholarship fund here in Texas.

“I believe the commitment for this year from the rodeo to the youth of Texas is $28 million,” said Tracy Troup, chairman of the Lamb and Goat Auction Committee.

Troup, left, speaks with Brancaccio. (Alex Schroeder/Marketplace)

Troup said the committee raised $4.2 million in last year’s sale. It’s a process that turns lambs and goats into what is actually two pots of cash — the big one for the education fund, and a smaller lump sum that goes to the animal’s student owner. It’s $40,000 to the owner of the grand champion lamb and $30,000 for the grand champion goat.

“They can use it for college education. They can use it to go purchase another animal to show next year. So they can use it for any purpose that they decide to use it for,” Troup said. “But the additional money that’s raised goes to scholarships.”

The No. 1 overall lamb at this year’s auction was raised by high school senior Madden Wise from Brownwood, Texas. The bidding started at $50,000. A normal wool lamb of this size would go at a commercial Texas auction for around $200 these days, but with charity as the incentive, the bidding quickly climbed north of $350,000.

Competing experiments have found that the higher the percentage to charity the higher the bidding in these kinds of auctions. That’s in part because charity-minded bidders collude in a benevolent way to get the number higher. The authors of the aforementioned study call people doing their charitable best to juice up the price “unpaid shills.” Out of respect for the public-spirited people here, let’s call them “philanthropic bidder-uppers.”

“First of all, it creates a little competition,” Troup said. “But it’s amazing. Most of the people in that room are very good friends. You have the added touch of the kids being here, and who doesn’t love to donate to a child.”

People bidding in charity auctions are doing it all or in part for a higher purpose, which confounds some economists who tend to think humans just do things selfishly. Some theorize that people bid so they, in return, receive what researchers call the “warm glow” of doing good. Or to get the benefits of signaling their good work to the wider community. The study has evidence that refutes that second part, showing little difference between anonymous bidding and bidding with your name attached. Maybe helping others is a reward in itself.

In the end, the top lamb goes for $450,000. Think about that: Wise’s neatly shaved, pink-hued lamb named 2Dotto goes for more than the median price of a home in America.

Federal Reserve officials on Wednesday raised their prediction of what inflation will look like at the end of the year from 2.5% to 2.7%. That’s likely taking into account the tariffs that are already in place — for example, the 20% on Chinese goods.

But in about 10 days, the next round of tariffs promised by the Donald Trump administration may — or may not, who really knows? — come into effect. Some of the 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada would start then too. Tariffs haven’t shown up yet on a lot of price tags on store shelves and in car lots, but they are in the pipeline.

MFA Inc., a farmers cooperative based in Columbia, Missouri, is owned by 40,000 ranchers and farmers. It sells a lot of fertilizer.

“You know, the two biggest wild cards in our business are weather and the government,” said Chris DeMoss, senior director of plant foods.

He said the less predictable one is the government. Potash fertilizer from Canada was going to be tariffed at the beginning of this month, but that was pushed back to April 2.

“They’re gonna have an impact, there’s no doubt, ’cause 80% of what we use domestically comes from Canada,” said DeMoss.

But whatever that impact is, it will be delayed.

“There’s a lot of tons that were already in place for this spring, so we’ll probably have a better understanding of what all this means as we get into the summer period and into the fall,” he said.

For other products, the delay is gonna be much shorter. Twenty percent tariffs on goods from China are gonna start showing up on stickers in April, predicted Omair Sharif, head of Inflation Insights.

“A lot of sort of furniture and household goods. Things like household appliances. Furniture in particular is a big one. Cookware, cutlery, glassware, rugs,” he said.

Seventy-one percent of our cookware and cutlery is imported from China, Sharif said. So is 45% of all footwear. And the cost increases for these goods tend to get handed on to consumers. 

That’s what happened with washing machines in 2018. “Tariffs went up 20%, prices went up 18%,” Sharif said.

Anderson Economic Group forecast the impact of multiple layers of tariffs on cars over the next few months.

“We found that the typical model produced by these manufacturers in North America would see a tariff cost increase of between $4,000 and $10,000,” said CEO Patrick Anderson.

His advice? Buy that car now. 

Tomatoes from Canada and avocados from Mexico will likely see jumps in April. Other industries wouldn’t be hit with major effects — tariffs on oil, for example.

“Canada would end up eating that because we have so much supply here,” Anderson said.

In the construction sector, builders are nervous about the cost of materials.

“Steel and aluminum is one, and also some goods imported from Canada such as lumber are very important for housing. So that could have an outsize impact on inflation for the U.S.,” said Elijah Oliveros-Rosen, chief economist for emerging markets at S&P Global Ratings.

But for now, it’s still mostly a waiting game.