Time for a national debt history lesson

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Speaker 2 A trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon it all adds up.
We'll talk debt and data,

Speaker 2 and then we'll go fishing. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 2 I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Tuesday today.
This one is the first day of July. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 2 As we begin the second half of 2025, it feels like an appropriate moment to consider the six months gone by in this economy, or actually better yet, the 90 days since President Trump announced his barrage of tariffs back at the beginning of April and made uncertainty the macroeconomic word of the year.

Speaker 2 So far. We touched on manufacturing yesterday.
We're going to get the June unemployment report on Thursday. Today from the Census Bureau came construction spending data for May.

Speaker 2 Not great. Down 310%, more than expected.
Also, the fifth consecutive monthly decline. Marketplace's Abri Benishwar has the whys and the wherefores.

Speaker 5 Some of this slowdown in construction spending is a delayed hangover from the construction party we had a couple years ago.

Speaker 6 At the end of 2023, there were 1 million apartments under construction.

Speaker 5 Robert Dietz is chief economist at the National Association of Homebuilders. After that surge in apartment building, the market came back down to earth.

Speaker 6 2024 saw a 25% decline in apartment construction starts. There was a big slowdown in the apartment development market due to the high cost of financing.

Speaker 5 Higher interest rates make it more expensive to build. Meanwhile, the demand side of things hasn't exactly been thrilling builders either.

Speaker 5 Vacancy rates are higher than normal in more than half of all major metro areas, according to Liu Chen, senior economist with Moody's Analytics.

Speaker 9 A lot of these metals have current vacancy seating about 8%, 9%.

Speaker 5 Chen says a lot of Sunbelt cities in particular have high vacancies that are holding back construction. And good news for renters, they're holding down rent growth too.

Speaker 5 And there's a more recent addition to the building buzzkill in general, good ol' uncertainty.

Speaker 10 There's a lot of uncertainty among contractors about what's happening, you know, in tariffs, tax rates, and labor availability.

Speaker 5 McRina Wilkins is a senior research analyst at the Associated General Contractors of America. How much will building materials cost in a month? Six months.
Depends on how tariffs shake out.

Speaker 10 And it's making them a lot more hesitant to take on new projects.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, over in the world of single-family homes, which take less time to build than apartments, falling construction spending now is a sign that 2025 got off to a slow start, says the National Association of Home Builders Robert Dietz.

Speaker 6 It's just a reminder that the housing market has slowed due to housing affordability and construction cost constraints.

Speaker 5 The Home Builders Association predicts that unmet demand will actually nudge developers to start building more apartments this year. In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Wall Street here on day two of a four-day week. Mixed where the major indices we will have the details.

Speaker 2 Yeah, when we always have the details.

Speaker 2 Ever since President Trump upended global trade with his tariffs, companies have been looking for ways around them.

Speaker 2 Some of those companies have been using what are called foreign trade zones.

Speaker 2 FTZs in the vernacular are specific designated areas supervised by federal customs officers, usually near ports or airports or border crossings, that for decades have let companies import products tariff-free, store those products in those special areas, and then either pay the import tax later or maybe manufacture something out of those imports so that they end up paying lower tariffs or even no tariffs at all.

Speaker 2 And what's happening now is that a lot of local governments are looking at those FTZs as ways to power their economies. Marketplace Justin Ho has that one.

Speaker 11 I'm standing in the headquarters of Micro-Commercial Components in Simi Valley, California. It's a semiconductor manufacturer that makes chips in Asia and ships them here for distribution.

Speaker 11 MCC's Eric Schneider is walking me to the back of the office.

Speaker 12 We'll come up to a door that's heavily secured by a magnetic lock and by an RFID key reader.

Speaker 2 And that will allow us to go through this door and into a foreign trade zone.

Speaker 11 That foreign trade zone is a 19,000 square foot warehouse filled with boxes upon boxes of semiconductors and and plenty of security.

Speaker 13 So you can see we have across all of our gates we do have secure fencing across all the different entry points.

Speaker 13 You have to be secured employee with a background screening and there's also security cameras at pretty much every entrance and exit.

Speaker 11 Schneider says all of this security is required by customs and border protection because everything in this warehouse from the standpoint of customs law is not yet inside the U.S.

Speaker 12 And so with the FTZ

Speaker 12 what it allows us to do is basically bring this product over into the port of Long Beach.

Speaker 13 We bring it into the foreign trade zone. It's being secured and we identify it as foreign merchandise.

Speaker 11 That matters because it means Micro-Commercial Components hasn't paid any tariffs on these products.

Speaker 11 Schneider says many of his customers, mostly electronics and auto manufacturers, have foreign trade zones of their own. So Schneider can sell to those customers tariff-free.

Speaker 13 Having this directly at our facility in Southern California, we're able to have that as a selling point essentially.

Speaker 11 Schneider says the FTZ helped push the company's revenue up by more than 30% over the last five years.

Speaker 11 And now, with the Trump administration's tariffs, other companies in the area have been getting FTZ curious.

Speaker 15 Potential foreign trade zone users reaching out, asking questions, asking how they can be a part of this and who they would need to speak with.

Speaker 11 That's Stacey Lang with the nearby Port of Winemi, which takes in applications from businesses that want to set up shop in a foreign trade zone.

Speaker 15 We have been actively mentioning to all of the customers that move through the port that it is a feature that we can offer.

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, local governments are using foreign trade zones to lure businesses.

Speaker 9 We are really using it as an attraction tool for advanced manufacturing.

Speaker 11 Christine Mackey is Director of Community and Economic Development for the City of Phoenix.

Speaker 11 She says over the past 10 years, FTZs have attracted manufacturers in the electronics and semiconductor industries, as well as aerospace, automotive, and solar panel manufacturers.

Speaker 9 Which is great for Arizona. We're completely changing the economy of Metro Phoenix into a production-based economy from where we had been, which was a consumption-based economy.

Speaker 11 Mackie says that shift has created jobs, raised salaries, and generated tax revenue as a result.

Speaker 9 We're able to invest more money in our streets, in our parks, in our swimming pools. We're building five new fire stations right now.
We're building a PED bridge that crosses over the Salt River.

Speaker 11 There are limits to these kinds of benefits. Melissa Ehrman with the National Association of Foreign Trade Zones says the Trump administration has been tightening up FTZ regulations.

Speaker 16 So that has sort of inadvertently disincentivized U.S. manufacturing in a foreign trade zone.

Speaker 11 But Ehrman says there are plenty of benefits that still apply. Companies can use foreign trade zones to delay paying tariffs on imports until it's most convenient.

Speaker 11 or if they're exporters too, avoid paying any tariffs at all.

Speaker 16 The U.S. Foreign Trade Zone program has always been one tool in a larger economic development toolkit, especially if you're trying to attract manufacturers for export or distributors for export.

Speaker 11 Ermin says her organization is focused on trying to educate businesses, local governments, and the Trump administration about why all of these benefits can help the economy.

Speaker 11 I'm Justin Hoe from Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Let's talk for a second about the GOP's big tax and spending bill that passed the Senate today.

Speaker 2 The people who do the math at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office say that this bill, all by its lonesome, is going to add more than $3 trillion to the national debt and it's not just the cbo who's saying that virtually every model from nonpartisan groups agree that this bill is going to increase the debt debt that stands today at 36.2 trillion dollars and counting honestly it's an unfathomable amount of money and yes you probably know the broad strokes of it but really

Speaker 2 how did we get here my name is kathleen day

Speaker 18 i am a full-time lecturer at johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

Speaker 19 My name is Carola Friedman. I am at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Speaker 21 I'm Eric Hilt, and I'm an economics professor at Wellesley College.

Speaker 2 That's our semi-regular panel of economic historians. And since this is going to be a history piece, in case you couldn't tell, we are going to go all the way back.

Speaker 18 The Revolutionary War. We had to fund it.
Wars cost money.

Speaker 21 When Alexander Hamilton was Treasury Secretary, he proposed to assume the debts of the states from the Revolutionary War, and in doing so, significantly expanded the debts of the federal government.

Speaker 2 Debt in and of itself isn't bad. That's really important to understand.
Virtually every government has some. Washington sells Treasury bonds and bills, that's another word for borrows, right?

Speaker 2 To finance the difference between what it spends and what it takes in.

Speaker 2 The fact is, the government's responsible for things the private sector isn't, and it does things the private sector can't, most noticeably when there's a crisis.

Speaker 21 Like the Great Depression.

Speaker 22 In seeking immediate relief, with a grant of $5 billion.

Speaker 2 And come 1941 for national security.

Speaker 20 And World War II.

Speaker 22 Second, I ask that you invest every cent you can now in war bonds.

Speaker 2 Which added about 3 trillion of today's dollars to the debt.

Speaker 19 And that's important for the country's survival.

Speaker 2 The program's only half an hour, so we're going to fast forward a lot.

Speaker 18 We have the crisis of 2007.

Speaker 23 The situation with Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions, the Great

Speaker 18 Recession required billions in bailouts or billions in assistance.

Speaker 19 Making sure that banks survive was really important to keep the function of the economy in relatively good shape.

Speaker 2 The Great Recession added about $5 trillion to the debt in the five years after 2008, as the government created programs to help companies and small businesses and help states pay for extended unemployment benefits.

Speaker 2 All those bank bailouts, by the way, which I know you are thinking about right now, just for the record, repaid with interest.

Speaker 2 At its most basic, there are just two parts to the debt equation: revenue and spending.

Speaker 2 The spending part gets a whole lot more airtime, as you know, than the revenue part does, but the reality is that revenue is really important, or actually, the lack of it.

Speaker 2 The tax cuts and jobs act slightly. The 2017 Trump tax cuts weren't the biggest ever, but they were plenty big, just shy of $2 trillion added to the debt.

Speaker 2 By definition, tax cuts reduce revenue, revenue that is needed for mandatory program spending required by law, which is the vast majority of what the government does.

Speaker 2 And in fact, in 2018, after those Trump tax cuts, the government spent about $1 trillion more than it collected in revenue. And then came 2020.

Speaker 18 What happened is we had COVID.

Speaker 21 The COVID crisis. The COVID pandemic.

Speaker 2 We added $8 trillion to the federal debt between September 2019 and September 2022 to pay for stimulus checks and the paycheck protection program and all those other COVID benefits you probably remember.

Speaker 2 And that brings us to today, the GOP's tax and spending bill and what it means for our $36 trillion worth of debt.

Speaker 2 The Congressional Congressional Budget Office says that bill is going to add $3.3 trillion to that pile of red ink. And it's just math that the bigger our debt gets, the more expensive it gets.

Speaker 21 If you expand the debt a lot, it starts to expand itself unsustainably.

Speaker 18 Then you are being charged interest on interest.

Speaker 21 And so it will just continue to expand on its own until you start to actually run budget surpluses and pay it down.

Speaker 2 Last time we ran a budget surplus? Anyone? Fiscal year 2001, Bill Clinton.

Speaker 2 The CBO says over the next decade, the GOP bill is going to add more than $400 billion just in interest payments to the national debt. I have said this before, and I will say it again.

Speaker 2 There is no tax cut in the history of tax cuts that has ever paid for itself.

Speaker 2 The Senate bill goes over to the House today. Speaker Mike Johnson says they are going to vote on it tomorrow.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Kathleen Day at Johns Hopkins, Carola Friedman at Northwestern, and Eric Hilt at Wellesley College.

Speaker 2 Seeing as how you're listening to this program, I am going to take it as a given that you know that the stock market is not the economy.

Speaker 2 It is, however, economy adjacent, and it probably hasn't escaped your notice that equities have been doing quite nicely of late. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 The SP was up almost 4% in June, the Dow and the NASDAQ up more than that.

Speaker 2 You look around, though, at everything, and you kind of do have to ask: what are stock traders seeing that the rest of us are missing? Here's Marketplace of Samantha Fields.

Speaker 26 If you look at charts for the Dow, S ⁇ P and NASDAQ, you can see the day President Trump announced his tariff plans, April 2nd. The markets tanked.

Speaker 26 To some degree, Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan says it's surprising investors were so spooked. Trump made clear tariffs were coming.

Speaker 27 He ran on it. So the market tanked not because he imposed tariffs, but because they were bigger and larger and more incoherent and more destructive than anyone thought.

Speaker 26 So much of what happens in the stock market is about expectations. And Wolfer says the fact that it has since rebounded has a lot to do with the pullback on tariffs.

Speaker 27 Maybe people are optimistic the president is not wedded to such an extreme agenda.

Speaker 26 Investors also seem optimistic about the big tax cuts and budget bill in Washington, much of which he says favors the kinds of big established companies that are represented in the stock market.

Speaker 26 Rohit Chopra, a former director of the Consumer Financial Financial Protection Bureau, says there's often a disconnect between what the market's doing and how small businesses and consumers are doing.

Speaker 7 We have seen this story before where stocks go up, but really there are warning signs flashing when it comes to consumer credit.

Speaker 7 People who are falling behind on their credit cards, falling behind on their auto loans.

Speaker 26 Even though some of those warning signs are flashing now, consumer spending is still solid. So is the labor market.
and inflation is under control.

Speaker 26 Anviti Bahuguna at Northern Trust Asset Management says all of that matters a lot to investors too.

Speaker 14 It's really the macroeconomic volatility that then drives market volatility. And in many ways, the market volatility has come down sharply.

Speaker 26 Mainly, she says, because key macroeconomic data has been so stable. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 Coming up.

Speaker 28 Our economy here depends on our tourists, so we need them to come.

Speaker 2 Taking the temperature of trout tourism, but first let's do the numbers.

Speaker 2 Dow Industrial is up 400 points even today, 9 tenths of 1%, 44,494. The NASDAQ gave up 166 points.
That's about 8-tenths percent, 20,202.

Speaker 2 The S ⁇ P 500 down 6 points, about 10th percentile, 61 and 98. The dollar continued the slide.
It's been on all year. The U.S.

Speaker 2 dollar index gave up a little bit more than a tenth of 1% today, year to day to down nearly 11%. When the dollar is worth less, you need more.
of them to buy an ounce of gold or silver.

Speaker 2 And that is very good news indeed for precious metal miners. Newmont dug up 1%.
1% barrack mining found 1.10% bonds down. Yield on the 10, your T-note rose 4.24%.

Speaker 2 You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 2 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl.
Spending, it seems, has become an inadvertent theme of the program today.

Speaker 2 There was government spending and our debt in light of the GOP's big tax cut bill passing the Senate. Sabri told us earlier about construction spending continuing to slow in May.

Speaker 2 And now Home Depot is going to to do some spending of its own to capture more of those fading construction outlays. The home improvement retailer is going to shell out $4.3 billion to buy GMS.

Speaker 2 That's a building supply distributor for things like drywall and steel supports.

Speaker 2 Home Depot is apparently looking to serve more of the big contractors who work on big construction projects as opposed to the smaller pros and DIYers who shop in-store.

Speaker 2 Marketplace's Megan McCarty-Carino has more on that.

Speaker 24 Last year, Home Depot acquired a different building supply distributor, SRS, which specializes in roofing, landscaping, and pool materials.

Speaker 24 The acquisition of GMS is another sign Home Depot is going after the big guys. Think entire home construction instead of bathroom renovations.

Speaker 24 Michael Baker is a managing director at investment firm D.A. Davidson.

Speaker 8 What's attractive about that business is that Lowe's really doesn't compete there.

Speaker 24 Lowe's has increasingly focused on contractors, but more at the small and medium end. Baker says Home Depot's pivot could expose the company to vulnerabilities in the construction industry.

Speaker 8 But in a way, it sort of diversifies their exposure. Without that business, they're really very levered to home sales.
And actually, that market has been pretty soft.

Speaker 24 Home Depot assumes construction won't stay depressed, says Amole Shah at consulting firm Alex Partners.

Speaker 32 They are making an intrinsic bet that the worst is behind us.

Speaker 24 Home Depot actually tried to break into wholesale back in the 90s and early aughts, according to Seth Basham at Wedbush Securities, but it sold its HD supply subsidiary off in 2007.

Speaker 32 They weren't executing well in the stores. They were losing market share.
They weren't treating their associates right and their customers weren't being treated right.

Speaker 24 Basham says Home Depot's retail business is now in much better shape. Consultant Michael Brown at Kearney says he wouldn't be surprised to see the retailer take wholesale up a notch.

Speaker 33 I think the next move for them is they might be able to move vertical and look to be a manufacturer.

Speaker 24 In other words, big orange could get even bigger. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

Speaker 2 According to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the average brook trout, the only trout native to the western part of that state, is six to eight inches long and weighs a quarter to a half of a pound.

Speaker 2 Also, according to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, in the year 2022, 350,000 people fished for the brook trout and its cousins in the western part of that state, bringing the region nearly $1.4 billion in trout-related tourism revenue.

Speaker 2 The thing about the brook brook trout, though, is that they're sensitive little creatures.

Speaker 2 They favor cold, clear, rocky streams, and Hurricane Helene damaged a whole lot of those streams, squeezing both the fish and the businesses that depend on them.

Speaker 2 Katie Myers of Grist and Blue Ridge Public Radio reports.

Speaker 34 Thomas Champeau is ankle-deep in the Yellowstone Prong Creek near Brevard, North Carolina. He's fishing for the elusive brook trout, which love the cool water here at 5,000 feet above sea level.

Speaker 34 He steps lightly, casting his line into the calm pools.

Speaker 35 Your approach has to be low and quiet. So it's a little bit like hunting because you're kind of stalking as opposed to just fishing blindly.

Speaker 34 All around the mountain laurels are blooming. This landscape, the combination of the solitude and recreation opportunities, draw millions of visitors to the region.

Speaker 34 Champeau helps run a local chapter of Trout Unlimited, and he's trying to help anglers understand the fish's climate sensitivity and how storms like Helene have changed the trout habitat.

Speaker 35 It's amazing how those big rocks have moved. I mean,

Speaker 35 the size rocks bigger than a refrigerator have been pushed around.

Speaker 34 Bankside trees that used to provide shade were wiped out, which means warmer water. Not good for fish.
And that affects not only the little trout, but also the big fishing industry here.

Speaker 34 Kevin Howell runs Davidson River Outfitters, a well-loved gear shop for anglers. He makes his living off his deep love and longtime knowledge of the local waterways.

Speaker 25 Born and raised in Transylvania County, grew up here,

Speaker 21 fished the river my entire life.

Speaker 34 Howell says Helene hit his business hard. Anglers couldn't even access some streams because so many trees fell down.

Speaker 25 We did lose our two busiest months of the fall as far as income.

Speaker 34 Some fishing guides just had to take other jobs. Howell was hopeful as cleanup began and contractors started work, but clearing all that storm debris, the fallen trees, that affected the river too.

Speaker 25 All adding to the sedimentation and adding to the warmer temperatures, which again results in less fishable water and less fish and less habitat.

Speaker 34 Less fishable water means fewer opportunities for tourists. For example, in the summer, trout fishing is catch and release only in some waters since the fish are so sensitive.

Speaker 34 But if the water is already too hot, a trout might go belly up after the release.

Speaker 25 We had had to make the decision today to stop fishing at noon because in the afternoons it's getting to 68 degrees already in June, so which is very early.

Speaker 34 But the county still needs the tourists to come and fish, to pay for lodging, dinner, guides. Tamika Hunter with the Brevard Chamber of Commerce says recreation is still possible.

Speaker 28 We're open with being sensitive to those who are still suffering, right? Because our economy here depends on our tourists. So we need them to come.

Speaker 34 Back out on the Yellowstone Prong Creek, Thomas Champeau waves to a few of those much-needed tourists who are fishing on the opposite bank. Champeau has a few close calls, but nothing bites today.

Speaker 35 But you never know after I call it fishing, they're not catching, right?

Speaker 34 Champeau says he'll be back soon to his favorite spot to try again. In Brevard, North Carolina, I'm Katie Myers from Marketplace.

Speaker 2 This final note on the way out today, which I mentioned definitely not because I'm going to see a movie when I get out of here this afternoon.

Speaker 2 This was a deal that was announced in early June, AMC Theaters and the ad giant National Cinemedia. It takes effect today that will put yet another ad in there before the actual movie starts.

Speaker 2 According to AMC's website, all that pre-show filler, trailers, ads, police silence, your cell phone, all of that stuff, can last as long as 25 to 30 minutes.

Speaker 2 I say enough. Who's with me?

Speaker 2 Come on. Jordan Mangies, Maharj, Janet Wynn, Oga Oxman, Virginia K.
Smith, and Tony Wagner are the digital team. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital.
And I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

Speaker 2 We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 2 This is 8 p.m.

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