What's in the long-awaited farmer relief package

0:00Meta's AI infrastructure is bringing jobs to local communities like Los Lunas, New Mexico. Phil, who grew up in Los Lunas, has seen the positive impact that Meta's ongoing$600 billion investment in American jobs and infrastructure will bring. I had to travel for work. Missing moments I can't get back. Then Meta opened a data center and brought new jobs. Now I don't worry about missing out anymore. Learn more about Meta's investment at meta.com slash building America. This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth.

0:38Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Turns out it's not what you know, but when you know it, economy-wise, from American public media, this is Marketplace.

1:19In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Monday. Today, this one is the 8th of December. Good as it always is. To have you along, everybody. We're going to talk in a little bit about the Federal Reserve and what data it's going to be looking at tomorrow and Wednesday as it decides what's to do with interest rates and why, in fact, it is meeting without the latest data. But we're going to start with the last best information the central bank is going to have to put into its models, the October count of job openings and layoffs. That'll be along for us tomorrow. Marketplace of Novosafo gets us going today.

1:53Here's what we know. Inflation has been stubbornly hanging around 2.8 percent for months. That's above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target. Meanwhile, key areas of the labor market are showing signs of weakness, says Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute. So if you look at, let's say, the black unemployment rate, that's been rising pretty steadily over the last few months. Young workers, their unemployment rate has been rising over the last year, almost two years. She says that can indicate things to come for the broader labor market. For the October report on job openings due out tomorrow, Gould will look closely at the rate of new hires, which has been falling.

2:32The hires rate is about where we were in the aftermath of the Great Recession. So think 2013, 2014, not a very strong economy. But as we know, the labor market isn't the Federal Reserve's only concern. It also works to keep prices stable. And on that front, Aditya Bhabe of BOVA Global Research says the Fed may soon have something new to worry about. And there's a wonky economic term for it. Reflation. In reflation, you have more money. And the risk is that everybody else has more money as well. And so that might drive prices up. Where's all that money coming from? New tax breaks. Going to get$100 billion in consumer stimulus from the Big Beautiful Bill.

3:16He's talking about tax cuts for workers who get overtime and on tips. Roughly$65 billion is going to hit in the form of larger than expected tax refunds. For now, the Federal Reserve appears more worried about the labor market, says Kyle Roda at Capital.com. He says a quarter point cut this week is all but certain. I think the really critical issue at this Fed meeting is perhaps not so much if the Fed cuts or not, but it's the kind of color around the cut. As in what Chair Jerome Powell says in the aftermath. This time, Rhoda expects to hear that a December cut doesn't mean a January cut. I'm Nevis Afo for Marketplace.

3:56Your homework assignment today, should you choose to accept it, is to look up a Supreme Court case from 1935 called Humphrey's Executor. The citation is 295 U.S. 602, if you're curious. It's about the president's ability to fire the people running independent agencies. And then check out the coverage of today's hearing in a case called Trump v. Slaughter, same topic. And as you read, just know that what's at issue here is almost literally how this economy works. Wall Street on this Monday, which is again and forever not the economy. Traders were a little bit cranky. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

5:00As Nova was just telling us, members of the Federal Open Market Committee start their two-day meeting tomorrow, despite having a little recent data on this economy. So why not? And this is a totally serious question. Why not just wait and reschedule until data does come out? Catherine Ann Edwards is an economist. She's also the host of the Optimist Economy podcast. Catherine, thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me back. Take through for me, would you, the information that Jay Powell and the gang have as they head into this meeting? Not much. We are not going to have data on the month of October, and they will not have ever.

5:40No one will ever have that. And we won't have November data. It'll come out a couple of weeks after the meeting. So the last piece of information they will have is September. This seems like a very common sense question, but things, you know, at the level of the economy are rarely common sense. Why doesn't Powell just come out and say, you know what? We have been saying forever, I have been saying forever, we need data. Austin Goolsbee, the president of the Chicago Fed, comes on this program all the time and says, I'm a data dog. I need some data. without that weird Southern accent, but you know what I mean.

6:14Why don't they just say, look, we're going to push this meeting 10 days. Maybe the markets would freak out a little bit, but I mean, come on. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a situation where it's a little bit damned if you do, damned if you don't. They would benefit from having more data, and I don't doubt that all of them want it. But at the same time, nothing about the fundamentals of our economy or our current economic situation have changed. And I think that one of the most important issues for the Fed right now is being able to maintain its independence. And I think they must have had some type of calculated decision to say, it's more important that we make our schedule our schedule than to look like we're serving the whims of whatever is happening for the rest of government.

7:02That's a guess. I'm not in the room. Well, look, I mean, we're all guessing, right? We're all guessing. Last thing, and then I'll let you go. This is one of those meetings where we're going to get the dot plot, the summary of economic projections, in which members of the Board of Governors and members of the Federal Upper Market Committee and regional Fed presidents make their projections about where things are going to go. Some may recognize it as the dot plot. those calculations are made based on models that they run with data in it. And so now we're going to have people saying, listen, this is where I think inflation is going to be a year end.

7:42This is where I think unemployment is going to be in six months. And yet the data is not there, right? Well, not all of them are making projections on data. We know from the last dot plot that the most recent appointee to the Fed who was still serving in the White House at the time, I mean, And his dot plot was not even in the same neighborhood as everybody else's. Some of them are very data and model driven. And some of them are just opinion. And probably all of them are a little bit of intuition. Again, I mean, yes, we live and die by data that comes out regularly. And it is on some level so horrible that we won't know the unemployment rate in October, the only month they've missed on record.

8:23Like ever. Ever. But at the same time, it's still that the threats to the economy are the same. And maybe there's a tenth of a point that they're missing, but they're not missing tariffs. They're not missing that unemployment and prices are both going up, even if they're going up at different small rates. All right. Catherine Ann Edwards, she's an economist. She's also a podcaster. It's called the Optimist Economy Podcast. You should listen to it. Catherine, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thanks again for having me.

9:16President Trump spent some time in front of the cameras today, as he is wont to do. And he said, among other things, that he's going to take 12 billion dollars in tariff revenue and use it for farm relief. Tariffs, I am required to remind you here, are taxes paid by American businesses and consumers. Farmers, of course, have been among the groups most directly hit by the president's trade policies. The China soybean market, for example, has essentially evaporated even as input costs for American farmers keep going up. And as Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval reports, they are making plans now for the 2026 planting season.

9:53Fifth generation farmer Jed Bauer grows corn and soybeans in southwest Ohio. I farm there with my wife and two kids. We're just under 1 ,100 acres. Bauer and farmers he represents as head of the National Corn Growers Association have had a tough year. Since China got out of the market buying soybeans, a lot of growers maybe switched more acres over to corn. So much corn was grown that it drove down what farmers can sell it for, while the cost to farming stayed high. It's our fertilized costs, our chemical costs, our seed costs, and equipment costs. Bauer says the Trump administration's aid package provides a short-term solution.

10:33That's a Band-Aid. That won't help us long-term. But because we can't get these input prices to come back in line, that will help us get through planting season with some cash flow issues. Longer term relief could come through more stable trade relationships. LSU economist Michael Deliberto says soybean markets rallied in the fall when China agreed to buy U.S. soybeans again. I think what every soybean producer is hoping for now is that China actually starts to follow through. And we are a little bit. Soybean sales have been made to China. And I think it's a step in the right direction to kind of put some of this trade uncertainty at ease.

11:13But there is another country to consider that could affect the fortunes of U.S. farmers. Brazil. It continues to increase corn and soybean production, says Michael Langmeier with Purdue. That's going to impact the market for years to come because they just keep adding more supply to the market. And that's not a problem as long as world demand continues to increase. But if economies like China struggle, he says, that can weigh on global demand for these commodities. And that hurts U.S. farmers. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.

12:11Unless there's some kind of breakthrough in Congress and a change of heart by the president, in some parts of this country, a lot of people who buy their own health insurance are going to feel more pain when Affordable Care Act subsidies go away in January. Those people, as it turns out, live in Republican-led states that didn't expand Medicaid to cover people who are working, but who are just above the poverty line. The subsidies were kind of a backdoor to get people covered who might qualify for Medicaid if they just moved across the state line. Now, though, millions of those people who would qualify for Medicaid elsewhere are staring at staggering premiums.

12:46From WPLN in Nashville, Blake Farmer reports. Hundreds of cars are lined up in a high school parking lot in Hickman County, Tennessee. Crystal Tipton is driving one of them, waiting for a box of groceries from a local food pantry and reaching for a tissue. I know you probably need to talk to somebody else. I'm afraid I'm going to get you sick. She's hoping it's not the flu. But if Tipton needs to see a doctor, at least she has insurance coverage for now. She just received the dreaded letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. It told her that her plan on the Affordable Care Act marketplace is going from$50 a month to$350.

13:24There's no way. But what can she do? I don't know yet. Pray. That's about all you can do is pray. because she's still going to need care. She manages diabetes and an autoimmune disease. So I'm on certain medications that I have to have. She's had to use the county health department before and expects that's where she'll be again. Tipton is one of 4 million Americans projected to lose coverage in the new year. It's not just because health insurance is getting more expensive, which it is. It's because generous subsidies implemented in 2021 are expiring. But that pain isn't evenly distributed. For states that didn't expand Medicaid, far more people took advantage of those subsidies.

14:08Nicole Rappvogel is a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. You have someone who has the same income in Tennessee as, you know, someone just across the border in Kentucky, North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, who just because they live on the other side of the border and they have a very low income, they're able to access Medicaid. The expiring subsidies, Rapp Vogel says, leveled the playing field between states. Someone who could qualify for Medicaid elsewhere could even get a plan with no monthly premium. That quietly led to a surge in ACA marketplace signups that ballooned more than 200 percent in Texas, Georgia and Tennessee.

14:49Mandy Spears of the Sycamore Institute, a policy research nonprofit, says the biggest jump, not surprisingly, was among those who would qualify for Medicaid in many states. So these are folks that don't necessarily have a ton of money, and so they're going to be a lot more price sensitive. Meaning many will just dump their coverage. In Tennessee, the uninsured rate is projected to jump by 40 percent. South Carolina and Mississippi could spike 50 percent or more. Healthcare economist Kara Smith of Belmont University says unless you're using your insurance all the time, it may not seem worth it.

15:24That means people that on the margin are more healthy are going to drop out, leaving that community at a higher per person cost to provide coverage for them. And so it's just kind of a spiral. It's really concerning for us. Smith calls it a double whammy because the people left behind will be more expensive to insure. They're folks like Kimberly Daft in Old Hickory, Tennessee, who can't afford to go without coverage. I am at the doctor so, so much. I mean, I just got out of a six day hospital stay. Being able to get insurance through the ACA marketplace allowed Daft to leave corporate America to start her own business selling specialty houseplants.

16:02Her subsidy is also going away, making her monthly premiums rise sevenfold. But she sees no option but to pay whatever it costs. I'm never not going to be a sick person. I have to have access to good health care to stay alive. For Daft, skimping on coverage is the last place she'd cut. So it's the rest of her budget that'll get a trim. In Nashville, I'm Blake Farmer for Marketplace.

16:50Coming up. You don't really buy things nowadays without the intention to put it on your Instagram or your TikTok. If you didn't post about it, did it even happen? Come on. First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials down 215 points today, about a half percent, 47 ,739. The Nasdaq down 32 points, about one-tenth of one percent, 23 ,545. The S &P 500 dipped 23 points, about a third of 1%, 6 ,846 there. Paramount Skydance, as you perhaps heard, has come in with a hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery worth$108 billion. That includes debt. It comes just days after Warner Brothers agreed to an$83 billion offer from Netflix.

17:35Perhaps you've heard about that in the press. It's been out there a little bit, that story, maybe, perhaps. On Wall Street today, Paramount Skydance jumped 9%. Netflix slumped 3 and 4 tenths percent. Warner Brothers' discovery grew about four and four-tenths of one percent today. Bond prices fell. Yield on the 10-year. Tino went up. That's what happens. 4.16 % on the 10-year. You're listening to Marketplace. Meta's AI infrastructure is bringing jobs to local communities like Las Lunas, New Mexico. Phil, who grew up in Las Lunas, has seen the positive impact that Meta's ongoing$600 billion investment in American jobs and infrastructure will bring.

18:14I had to travel for work, missing moments I can't get back. Then Meta opened a data center and brought new jobs. Now I don't worry about missing out anymore. Learn more about Meta's investment at meta.com slash building America. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance, it takes a plan. They're ready to build your wealth blueprint for retirement, investing, taxes, and everything else your financial life brings. It reveals gaps and highlights opportunities you may have missed at no cost to you. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com slash blueprint.

18:57This Marketplace podcast is supported by Gusto. As a business owner, you know your business inside and out. Gusto knows payroll, compliance, and benefits just as well. gusto is built for small businesses it's all-in-one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use pay hire onboard and support your team from anywhere whether it's automatic payroll tax filing simple direct deposits health benefits commuter benefits workers comp 401k gusto makes it simple with no hidden fees and options for nearly every budget save time with automated tools like offer letters, onboarding, direct deposits, direct access to certified HR experts, and more.

19:43Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash marketplace and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash marketplace. Streaming is changing the way we watch live sports and your internet connection can be the difference between catching the game-winning touchdown as it happens or hearing about it from your neighbor's cheers. That's why Comcast is building the network of the future. Using cutting-edge AI and edge computing technology, we're bringing fans closer to the action in stunning high definition with ultra-low latency. It's not just fast, it's game-changing.

20:20Learn more at comcastcorporation.com slash sports. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. We are at the tail end of third quarter earnings season homebuilders among the industry's yet to report. Toll Brothers comes out tomorrow, Lenar and KB Home next week. The latest Census Bureau data we have on housing construction is, well, first of all, it's old. It's from August. And also, it's not great. Building permits were down 11 percent from August a year ago. Actual housing starts down 6 percent. Why so bumpy and are different times perhaps in the offing? Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman has more. Builders started this year with a good deal of optimism, says Ali Wolf, chief economist with the housing data firm Zonda.

21:06Even with elevated interest rates, there seemed to be a lot of people who wanted to buy homes. Going into 2025, builders were like, okay, the year's at least going to be good. Let's ramp up on new construction. But come the spring selling season, those buyers just didn't turn up. Builders found that they had a lot of standing inventory without consumers to buy those homes. so they have no incentive to build more homes if they couldn't sell the homes that they already had available. Wolf says sales were slowed in part by relatively high mortgage rates. Those could tick down in the coming year, but the cost of building supplies may not, says Aniban Basu, CEO of Sage Policy Group, because the Trump administration has imposed tariffs on many of them.

21:49Softwood lumber or copper, steel, aluminum. Those import taxes have raised prices for the structure itself and the appliances that go in it. Basu says Trump's immigration crackdown is playing a role too. You look at the majority of our roofers in many communities, drywall hangers, painters, so on and so forth, they're immigrants. And so the number of potential workers in the home building industry right now? It's much smaller than the amount that we would need in order to be running at maximum efficiency. Macrina Wilkins is senior research analyst with the Associated General Contractors of America.

22:24She says home building is also highly sensitive to borrowing costs. The Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates this week, but persistent inflation means those cuts may not continue. When you add it all up for home builders... 2026 has the potential to be better than 2025, but it does depend on whether or not financing costs ease. Wilkins says demand for new housing will still be there. The question is whether builders will be able to meet it at a price buyers can afford. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

23:22If you're even moderately engaged with pop culture, you're probably aware of Stanley Cups, those reusable water bottles everybody went nuts for a couple of years ago. Or LaBooBoo's, right? Those little dolls people are still a little crazy for. They have become status symbols, but the economics behind them says a whole lot about the state of the consumer economy today. Kendall Cunningham had the story in Vox. Thanks for coming on the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I mentioned LaBooBoo's and those Stanley tumblers up in the introduction to our little chat here. What else are the big status symbols of the day?

23:55I would say in addition to a lot of like the Pop Mart toys and the little trinkets that we're seeing like LaBooBoo's, you also have Sunny Angels. You have all these water bottles like Stanley Cups and O 'Walla's. the Trader Joe's micro tote bag is another like very cheap item that is becoming this like marker status amongst Gen Z. A micro tote bag? Yeah, it's like a$2 like mini tote bag that's sort of like the size of a key chain that you attach to presumably another tote bag. I am so not hip that I don't know what a micro tote bag is. Here's the thing about all these things and why we wanted to talk to you.

24:36used to be that status symbols were, to be bald about it, expensive. And if you can get like a$2 keychain fob, and if you can get a Lububu, which costs, I don't know, like 30 bucks maybe. I mean, how does that become a status symbol? These products are usually limited products. A lot of companies like to use artificial scarcity to sell these products to make them seem a bit more special than they maybe are. And you also have these brands that are like very culty and sort of niche, and that adds this sort of coolness factor to these products. La Boo Boo's are a big example of that. The Trader Joe tote bag, which is, again, only$2.

25:17But it's very convenient for our times now because we're living in an affordability crisis. A lot of Gen Z is not spending money on luxury goods. They're sort of reaching for things that are cheap but are also really flashy and attention-grabbing. Right. You mentioned Gen Z, and of course, that's in the title of this piece. They don't, most of them, have a whole lot of money. So of necessity, it's the cheaper end stuff that becomes a status symbol. And they, of course, are more into social media, and that feeds into the whole thing. So there's a circularity here. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of questions of whether the popularity of these items are recession indicators.

25:56The experts that I spoke to weren't totally convinced of that because I think people are sort of always willing to buy little trinkets. But the fact that they're being used as a way to attain like social media clout is a very – is sort of like the key part of this because they are pretty to look at and they're very wearable. My niece, for example, is very into all like the new water bottles and things like that. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, you know, you can just like have your water bottle sitting on your desk all day and people can like know you as the person who owns a Stanley Cup.

26:27Yeah, no, I totally get that. I totally get that. Back up for a minute. Social media clout. Part of the status of this thing is not just the having of it, but the displaying of it in a very public manner on social. You know, I would say most things that Gen Z is reaching for, there's a bit of a show and tell element to it. You don't really buy things nowadays without the intention to put it on your Instagram or your TikTok. People want to see the latest iteration of something or like the different colored labubus, how you dress them up and things like that. The monetary value doesn't matter as much as how cool it looks.

27:05Right. And also I imagine the journey, if you will, of actually getting one. Yeah, that's another part of it. I feel like most people that I talk to about these items, there's always some sort of story to go along with it. Like, oh, I had to stand in line for this amount of time or I had to go on this many websites to find it. If you go on YouTube, you'll see a lot of vloggers have this own like sub-genre of videos of, you know, I went to two targets today to search for a Stanley Cup or it's usually more than that. So it's also this experience that is tied to this cheap item. Yeah. All right. Put up or shut up.