What happens when states manage public land?

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Speaker 5 Despite the short holiday week, there's plenty of news to talk about. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 5 In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Chi Rizdahl. It's Friday, July 4th.
Good to have you here for this Independence Day holiday.

Speaker 5 Like I said at the top, this week had lots of headlines, the tax and spending legislation, a trade deal with Vietnam, and a bunch of economic data.

Speaker 5 So to sort through it all, we have Jordan Holman from the New York Times and Rachel Siegel from the Washington Post. Hello, you two.

Speaker 5 Hi, happy fourth.

Speaker 5 Happy fourth.

Speaker 5 So I want to start with one of today's headlines, which is the president announced today that our trading partners will start getting letters about tariff rates as we inch closer to next Wednesday, which is when that 90-day tariff pause ends.

Speaker 5 As somebody who follows the ins and outs of this every day, I kind of get lost in the tariff place that we're in right now.

Speaker 5 Rachel, I'm wondering if you can bring us up to date on where we are and whether we're coming to the end.

Speaker 6 Well, you would have good company and feeling kind of dizzy by where we are, where we are five minutes from now, five minutes ago. And the answer is: there is still a really long way to go.

Speaker 6 Trump has suggested that that July 9th deadline isn't going to move, that they're going to start sending out, you know, these notices saying, hey, here's what's coming for you next week.

Speaker 6 And that covers a lot of countries that these negotiations haven't been finalized with, and also a lot of countries that have made headlines.

Speaker 6 You mentioned Vietnam this week, where there's still a lot of details yet to be hammered hammered out. So this is, you know, a major prong of the administration's agenda.

Speaker 6 And with just a couple days to go, it's not like there is a whole stack of papers with the really specific details of these negotiations in hand. There's a long way to go for dozens of countries.

Speaker 6 And it seems like that deadline is really going to stick.

Speaker 5 Well, I want to talk a little bit about the effects because related, you know, the jobs report yesterday was better than expected. And in the last several months, when I've talked to business owners,

Speaker 5 policy experts, economists, they've told me month after month that, you know, the tariffs will show up in prices. They'll show up in hiring.
But it doesn't seem like top line we're really seeing that.

Speaker 5 Rachel, does that mean we're safe? Or are we still waiting for something to happen?

Speaker 6 I think we're in this sort of never-ending waiting game. And it's interesting to me, you know, I know we all look at a big dashboard of indicators to try and answer questions like that.

Speaker 6 You see it show up in some places.

Speaker 6 You see, you know, consumer sentiment numbers or business sentiment really dour because of the tariffs that have already been announced or the sense that they're really going to start to break through to prices.

Speaker 6 I was at REI last weekend changing out a helmet and they said that they've had a whole list of items that have just spiked in price.

Speaker 6 But we aren't really seeing the same things in the aggregate inflation numbers. We're still seeing solid jobs numbers.
So it's almost like it shows up in some places, but not in others.

Speaker 6 And you even got the Federal Reserve saying that they can't really make decisions about what to do about interest rates until they get more of a clear picture there, too.

Speaker 5 Hmm. Did it show up in your helmet purchase?

Speaker 6 Well, actually, they were exchanging it for me, and they had to pull a manager in because they were exchanging it for one that had gone up in price just since the one that I bought mine a few months ago.

Speaker 5 Okay. There you go.
Well, Jordan, your job Your new job literally at the times is to talk to CEOs every day. You write the corner office column now.

Speaker 5 What are they saying about tariffs and how that will trickle down to consumers?

Speaker 7 So many CEOs I'm chatting with and mostly in this retail sector specifically, the last thing they say they want to do is raise prices.

Speaker 7 So they're trying to figure out everything else to do besides that, which kind of speaks to what Rachel was saying, that maybe they won't do a wholesale changing prices, but like, hey, if this specific item or piece is coming from China, we have to raise the price, but maybe we won't touch, you know, know, some other merchandise.

Speaker 7 But I think the overall

Speaker 7 vibe is that retailers and companies, especially the big ones, have already been operating as if tariffs are as bad as we thought they were going to be in April, meaning they have been moving their supply chains out of China to other countries like Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and the like.

Speaker 7 But when it comes to next week, we're really, they will start to see exactly what that means.

Speaker 7 Do they need to keep moving or they'll at least have numbers to work with when it comes to what the tariff price will be for some of those countries that they're now operating in?

Speaker 5 Well, we heard from Rachel about her helmet exchange, but Jordan, you also recently wrote a story about your experience as a consumer.

Speaker 5 How have tariffs shown up in your life?

Speaker 7 So I am planning a wedding, and I

Speaker 7 quickly just realized, thank you, I've quickly realized the cost of things for weddings, but specifically with looking at the wedding dress industry, and the majority of our dresses in the U.S.

Speaker 7 come from China.

Speaker 7 And obviously, that is, that means tariffs.

Speaker 7 So, what I wanted to better understand was how bridal shops, from the biggest one, David's Bridal, to the mom and pop shop in Brooklyn, were handling tariffs.

Speaker 7 And part of it is a David's Bridal, like I was saying earlier, has moved its supply chain out of China.

Speaker 7 They, at the end of last year, realized how devastating tariffs from China would be and said, okay, we have to get out of there. But for a bridal shop, mom and pop

Speaker 7 in Brooklyn, one woman was just explaining to me how much time it takes to try to keep up with all of this.

Speaker 7 I'm sure, you know, she's spending this weekend trying to figure out, you know, what July 9th will mean

Speaker 7 because every piece that she gets imported.

Speaker 7 uh lace um you know silk all of this kind of stuff she's trying to do the numbers to make sure she's getting charged the right thing and it's just a lot of murkiness right now so i mean i still need to figure out what it means for my dress in particular but that slice of the industry um is going through it you've got the insider knowledge

Speaker 5 um i want to pivot for a second and talk about the other bullet point of the day which is trump's tax and spending bill he's signing uh there are It's big, it's broad, there are lots of things we could talk about, but I'm curious, Rachel, what you want to talk about.

Speaker 5 What's something you're going to be keeping a close eye on?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I'm really curious to follow the impacts of these new work requirements, specifically for Medicaid recipients.

Speaker 6 You know, this came from a pretty large push from the administration and the Republican caucus, not only to narrow the pool of eligible folks, but also, you know, it was following on this argument that you had to work in order to receive this benefit.

Speaker 6 And my curiosity sort of goes in two directions.

Speaker 6 One being what that does to people's access to health care, what that does for people's own health, the ability to access other types of benefits, and what it does for the job market.

Speaker 6 We know that a lot of people on Medicaid already do work, but I've been talking to a lot of economists who say that when you have to constantly back that up with documentation, or maybe you're floating in and out of the workforce, you have reasons that aren't covered that would exempt you, that that can mean that you lose your access to benefits really quickly.

Speaker 6 And that might start to show up, especially in industries that

Speaker 6 rely really heavily on this work work population. And I think we might start to see that pretty quickly.

Speaker 5 Rachel Siegel is at the Washington Post. Jordan Holman is at the New York Times.
Thanks, you two, and have a happy fourth weekend. Thanks.
Have a great weekend.

Speaker 5 U.S. markets were closed today for the holiday, but international markets were open.
We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 5 We talked a bit about the better than expected jobs report at the top of the show, but we're going to dig deeper for a moment here because as we reported yesterday, the increase in hiring was mostly in local government.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, manufacturing lost jobs in June for the second month after hiring was flat in April.

Speaker 5 And a report from the Institute of Supply Chain Management earlier this week showed the sector contracted for the fourth straight month. Marketplace's Megan McCarty-Carino has more.

Speaker 8 The slowdown in manufacturing seems to match up with President Donald Trump's announcement of global tariffs back in April, says Darrell West at the Brookings Institution.

Speaker 8 It might seem counterintuitive given that revitalizing the sector is a stated goal, but right now, the tariffs are causing a lot of disruption.

Speaker 10 It's very difficult for factory managers to plan their supply chains. The policies are changing sometimes every month or every week.

Speaker 8 That's led to a pullback in global trade, says Christopher Tang, a business professor at UCLA.

Speaker 11 You can see the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach has been quiet. So I think everything is in a holding pattern.

Speaker 8 He says both imports and exports have slowed. Manufacturers in the U.S.
often use components from abroad, and retaliatory policies in other countries have softened demand for U.S.-made goods.

Speaker 8 But the effects of tariffs are hard to predict, says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor.

Speaker 11 There isn't necessarily a clean answer because it's going to depend company by company.

Speaker 8 He says some domestic producers have seen business surge as buyers seek to avoid tariffs.

Speaker 8 And it's hard to disentangle the recent slowdown from sluggishness over the past couple years or the long-term losses over decades.

Speaker 11 We've seen manufacturing slow down as the American economy shifts more towards services.

Speaker 8 Which isn't to say the sector has been unproductive, says Andrew Flowers, chief economist at AppCast.

Speaker 12 It's almost like we're a victim of our own success. Manufacturing productivity and the actual output of manufacturing has never been better.

Speaker 8 Partly because of advances in technology, says Daryl West at Brookings.

Speaker 10 Robots, AI, and automation in general. Factories are producing more goods with fewer workers.

Speaker 8 He says manufacturing could be supercharged without necessarily supercharging jobs. I'm Megan McCarty-Carino for Marketplace.

Speaker 5 For the last several months, I've been working on a series called Lived Economies.

Speaker 5 I'm keeping up with a bunch of different people, from steel workers to pharmacists, from adults just entering the workforce to people in retirement, to get a better sense of what Americans' financial lives are like and how they change over time.

Speaker 5 One of the first people we introduced you to is Ashley Ayala. She's 36, an insurance appraiser outside of Austin, Texas.
And one of the big things that's been on her mind is homeownership.

Speaker 5 Ashley joins me now. Ashley, it's been a while.

Speaker 13 It has been a while.

Speaker 5 Let me remind people about where you were the last time we talked.

Speaker 5 In the story where we introduced you to our listeners, I guess the end of the story, we were literally sitting right at your apartment. You, me, and your boyfriend boyfriend James.

Speaker 5 We had just gotten back from house shopping. James owns land right like four hours away from you

Speaker 5 in rural Texas. You had been also looking at buying a place of your own.
What's happened since then?

Speaker 5 What's the house update?

Speaker 2 I still have no house.

Speaker 13 I want a house so badly. But for work, I travel three weeks out of the month and I am only home for one week.

Speaker 13 It is very hard for me to justify like the largest purchase of my life when I am only home one week a month.

Speaker 5 How's James?

Speaker 13 James is great. James is very happy living out in the wilderness.
I am less so.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 13 it's a huge sticking point. There is no power

Speaker 13 and he thought that he'd be able to just like call up the electric company and have them like come and install it for a couple hundred bucks. No, it would be $50,000 to run power to the property.

Speaker 13 And it's like $15,000 to $18,000 to dig a well and

Speaker 13 it's a tremendous amount of expenses. And I think everything is an adventure, right?

Speaker 13 Like I can figure out anything and I can entertain myself anywhere, but it is literally, there is nothing out there.

Speaker 5 I want to talk a little bit about work,

Speaker 5 especially since you mentioned that as part of the piece of you kind of holding back from buying a house.

Speaker 5 You are an insurance appraiser, right? You travel a lot. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and how that kind of impacts your daily life.

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 13 so I inspect damages to vehicles, boats, RVs, things like that. after weather events, right? Like catastrophe claims.
And that requires three three weeks of travel every month.

Speaker 13 So I leave on Sunday, I return that third Friday,

Speaker 13 and that is, it's very difficult. It's a very isolating job.

Speaker 13 Income-wise, it's great when it's great, but there are also downtimes where we're not necessarily needed to travel, in which case the extra money that I get for traveling isn't there.

Speaker 13 And that is something that also makes me very nervous. Like I try very hard to live within my actual guaranteed salary.

Speaker 13 But when you are making $40,000 a year in travel pay, it is hard to not kind of count on that money always being there.

Speaker 5 I imagine your job is hard on your relationship and kind of your goal setting. How do you look at all that?

Speaker 2 That's a really tough one.

Speaker 13 I get one week at home, and in that week, I have to fit in,

Speaker 13 you know, doctor's appointments. I have a dentist's appointment.
I've got to clean my house. I have to take my dog to the vet.

Speaker 13 I have to see my mom, and I've got to see my family, and my friends, and my boyfriend.

Speaker 13 But he now has a job where he works six days a week, and his only day off is Sunday. And I only have one Sunday at home.

Speaker 13 It's not that I don't love him, but it's just the logistics of of it are incredibly difficult.

Speaker 13 And I still want a house with a huge kitchen island where I can host Thanksgiving. And that hasn't changed.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 13 James wants me to move out there, but I don't see how I would ever be able to get to a position where I'm comfortable enough

Speaker 13 making that jump. when I can only experience it in one day at a time chunks.

Speaker 13 And so now it's like, well, should I have just bought that super cute condo that had the little Harry Potter room under the stairs?

Speaker 13 Like it wouldn't have been my dream house, but it would have been, you know, something that I bought and something that made me happy.

Speaker 13 I really don't know.

Speaker 5 Ashley Ayala is 36. She's an insurance appraiser near Austin, Texas.
And she's one of the people we've been following in our series, Lived Economies. Ashley, thanks so much for catching up today.

Speaker 5 No problem. Have a great day.

Speaker 5 Coming up.

Speaker 15 Using books as a portal to different stories.

Speaker 5 How a community librarian is giving literature a lift. But first, first, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 5 U.S. markets were closed today for the holiday, so let's look at travel.
AAA says a record number of

Speaker 5 travelers will venture 50 miles or more from their homes this weekend, 72,200,000 to be exact, up 2.4% over the last year. This includes people traveling by plane.
Almost 5.8 million people will fly.

Speaker 5 Gas prices are down 36 cents per gallon from a year ago. AAA says the average price of a regular gallon nationwide is is $3.15.

Speaker 14 In Europe,

Speaker 5 Britain's FTSE was flat, France's CAC 40 was down three-quarters of a percent, and Germany's DAX gave back two-thirds of a percent. You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 13 Three friends, one tea time,

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Speaker 5 This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab.
Yesterday on the show, Savannah Peters reported on state-owned lands and the push to use them for housing development.

Speaker 5 Today, we're going going to look at another slice of this: states taking over federal-owned lands. In parts of the West, there's a growing frustration with how federal acres are being used.

Speaker 5 A push and pull between people who want preservation, people who want recreation, and people who want to make money. So, what if individual states took over these lands? Whose priorities would win?

Speaker 5 The Mountain West News Bureau's Hannah Mersbach reports from Wyoming.

Speaker 14 Near the end of a long dirt road outside the small city of Casper, Carolyn Griffith's tan A-frame house sits in front of a towering mountainous ridge.

Speaker 18 This is the foothills of Casper Mountain.

Speaker 14 As chickadees sing, the 65-year-old says the wide open area is pretty tranquil. But that was all turned upside down on one February afternoon last year.

Speaker 18 I noticed a backhoe going onto the state land.

Speaker 14 Land that right now is open for recreation, but is in a state trust. Griffith and her neighbors learned there was a gravel pit approved there a couple years ago.

Speaker 18 So we were all pretty shocked at that.

Speaker 14 She's worried about mining operations impacting the fragile aquifer. Others are worried about losing their place to birdwatch or walk their dogs.
Things that don't exactly make the state money.

Speaker 19 State trust land is not public land. It's trust land.

Speaker 14 Jason Crowder says trust land has to be used to fund K through 12 education. He used to run the office that manages the land.

Speaker 19 Office of State Lands and Investments is not the BLM, it's not the Forest Service. We have different missions.

Speaker 14 Federal lands are managed for multiple uses, but on many state lands in Wyoming and beyond, recreation comes second. Some states allow day use like picnicking or fishing, but camping, not so much.

Speaker 19 We're here to optimize revenue.

Speaker 14 Some conservatives want the state to take over all 30 million acres of federal public land in Wyoming. State lawmaker Bill Landon thinks some parcels would be better managed locally.

Speaker 4 It just feels like to me there's an opportunity at the national level right now.

Speaker 14 But if federal lands are turned over to states, there's no guarantee that land would stay public. Wyoming has sold about 20% of its state land in the past two centuries.

Speaker 14 Plus, the state might not have the capacity to take on more land. The state trust agency has five field staff for 3.4 million acres, and the state parks department's budget has shrunk.

Speaker 14 It has fewer resources than it did 15 years ago. That's why environmentalists like Josh Metten with a hunting and angling group say land management should be left as it is.

Speaker 20 Our federal agencies have more capacity to do public outreach.

Speaker 14 State lawmakers actually commissioned a study on this in 2015. They wanted to inherit federal lands, but learned Wyoming couldn't afford to manage the land.

Speaker 20 There is no no clear way to take federal public land and just transition it into a state public land.

Speaker 14 In the foothills of Casper Mountain, Carolyn Griffith gestures to her floor-to-ceiling window at the open landscape.

Speaker 18 We knew there were state lands. We also knew there was a fragile water supply and certainly didn't think that, you know, digging a pit through that would be a good choice for the land.

Speaker 14 After a year of pushback, the gravel mine project ended up largely failing. But Griffith knows with state management, there could be another threat down that long dirt road.

Speaker 13 In Casper, Wyoming, I'm Hannah Mersbach from Marketplace.

Speaker 5 A holiday weekend is a good weekend to pick up a new book, but some kids across the country have a harder time finding something to read.

Speaker 5 According to USA Reads, more than 60% of low-income children grow up in homes without books, and the learning gap especially widens in the summer when kids can't access books from schools.

Speaker 5 Now, some educators are stepping in to get more books into the hands of families who need them. Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy.

Speaker 15 I am Khadija Jenkins. I am located in Houston, Texas.

Speaker 15 I am an academic, and I am currently building community libraries to help close the learning poverty gap to give students all over the world the education access that they deserve.

Speaker 15 My nine-to-five is a college and career counselor. And throughout this process, I realized that most of the students that I work with never had access to a library.

Speaker 15 And so, by the time that we were working on their college applications, I noticed a lot of the writing gaps or the reading gaps.

Speaker 15 And so, I decided to just make a post on threads and talk about this experience very loosely. And overnight, it went completely viral.

Speaker 15 And so, in 72 hours, I was able to have 700 books at my door to help with my students and build libraries within their areas and expanding this to partnering with universities and local governments.

Speaker 15 The trend that I see in every day I get asked about this is graphic novels. Graphic novels, graphic novels, graphic novels, but also graphic novels that represent their stories.

Speaker 15 The student population in which I work with, they are predominantly Hispanic and Latino.

Speaker 15 So having stories also from Honduras, Colombia, Mexico, Texas, like I want you to see yourself reflected in media.

Speaker 15 I want you to see yourself reflected in your academic experience so it feels tangible, but also pulling in different literature for parts of the world that they've may never been exposed to.

Speaker 15 So, even if you may not have the passport, using books as a portal to different stories and different perspectives and thinking about leveraging literature.

Speaker 15 I really think about this library through a love letter, a love letter to my students to know that I care about you. I will advocate for you.

Speaker 15 I will go find the resources and bring it in simply because you are deserving. Because I'm also

Speaker 15 understanding if I don't do it, nobody will.

Speaker 15 Because if somebody would have done it, they would have came already.

Speaker 5 Khadija Jenkins, she's in Houston, Texas. Remember, we can't do this series without you.
So tell us what's going on in your economy at marketplace.org/slash myeconomy.

Speaker 5 This final note on the way out today saw this in Axios. The price of your 4th of July cookout may have gotten a lot more expensive this year, or less expensive, depending on who you ask.

Speaker 5 The American Farm Bureau's survey of grocery stores says barbecue staples are down 1% from last year. Their grocery bag includes chicken breast, beans, and potato salad.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, the Rabbo Bank Barbecue Index, yes, that's a thing, it says cookout costs are up more than 4.2%.

Speaker 5 That's mostly thanks to the rising prices of beef and beer. Of course, the cost you see depends on what you buy.

Speaker 5 According to a survey by Empower, this year 32% of Americans are swapping barbecue for pizza.

Speaker 5 Our theme music was composed by BJ Lederman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargalli.
Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer.

Speaker 5 Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager. And I'm Kristen Schwab.
Have a great holiday. Have a great weekend.
We'll be back here on Monday.

Speaker 5 This is 8 p.m.

Speaker 9 You've finally broken loose from work.

Speaker 13 Three friends, one tea time,

Speaker 9 and then the text: Honey, there's water in the basement.

Speaker 9 Not exactly how you pictured your Saturday. That's when you call us, Cincinnati Insurance.
We always answer the call because real protection means showing up, even when things are in the rough.

Speaker 9 Cincinnati Insurance, let us make your bad day better.

Speaker 9 Find an agent at cinfin.com.