Which Coke's For You?

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1:36Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon. I'm here with Elizabeth Byers of the New York Times.

1:47Felix Salmon: Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. And we are going to be talking about medical costs and whether and when and how and why they might show up on your credit report. We are going to be talking about cane sugar and whether it should be replaced by or whether it should replace high fructose corn syrup in Coca-Cola. We are going to talk about holidays and whether countries should have fewer of them. We have rather deranged Slate Plus segment about cheese. Yeah, it's all coming up on Slate Money.

2:37So let's start with three different things that don't often coincide, which is number one, healthcare. Number two, what the courts are ruling on various big important cases. And number three, credit scores. And all of these have come together in a way that has got a few people panicking. Elizabeth, tell me what the people are panicking about. A federal court has reversed a Biden era rule that says that credit agencies are going to stop including any medical debt in your credit report. So let's just be clear about, I mean, I want to be clear about this for one thing. There was a rule that was passed but never went into effect, and the federal court has made sure that it never will go into effect.

3:20Is that it? Or did it exist and then it's been unexisted? Correct, because it hasn't gone into effect. People are very excited about it, especially if you are a low-income person who has medical debt, this is meaningful for you. Some of what the rule proposed is going to stay in effect. And one thing is that if you have medical debts under$500, they won't be included in your credit report. But the rest of it still affects 15 million Americans, so it's significant. it so my feeling is that americans in general care way too much about their credit scores and they tend to know their credit scores and they tend to want to improve their credit scores and they tend to actually surprisingly to me spend money trying to improve their credit scores there are products that you can buy on the internet that are basically just designed to improve your credit score.

4:15And my sort of personal finance advice historically has always been stop caring so much about your credit score. It's not healthy. It's a bit like caring about your weight. It's like you can want to get healthy, but like, don't just try and get your weight down. What are you talking about? What are you doing? People don't have a choice with credit scores. You need a good credit score to get everything, Like a credit card, a car, a house. Even if you're a renter, you need a good credit score.

4:44Felix Salmon: First to just zoom back, medical debt showing up on your credit score and being sent to collections is a big problem. Yes, mainly for low-income people, but for other people even, not low-income, who touch the health insurance system, the convoluted health insurance system in the United States. When the CFPB was first looking into all of this, the reason the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau promulgated this rule in the first place is because they field complaints from Americans, or they used to before the Trump administration started dismantling the agency. They have a mechanism where people complain about their various interactions with financial companies, including health insurers.

5:25Felix Salmon: And one of the biggest complaints, the most common complaints they were getting, is people would say, there was this medical bill that showed up on my credit report, which I guess to Felix's point, people are looking at, and I paid that bill, but it's still showing up. Or my health insurer was supposed to pay that bill, but it's still showing up. Or I've never even seen this FACACTA bill and it's showing up. And then they go to their health insurer and they say, what the heck is this? Get this off my credit report. And there's like a back and forth and it drags on and on and on because of course we are not the customers of the health insurance companies, but employers are, or the federal government is, but not actual humans.

6:02Felix Salmon: So it's hard to deal with them customer service wise. So this was like a big problem. I was dragging down people's credit scores. And to Elizabeth's point, that means a lot of people can't get a job because for some reason your credit score matters when you're applying for a job. They can't rent apartments. Literally, they can't get a home, put a roof over their head. Really important, not for everybody, a smaller segment of the population, sure. And then for the people who aren't super low income, who are still getting these bills showing up on their credit reports, like maybe you get a point or two or three added on to your mortgage rate or your car loan, or maybe you don't get the mortgage.

6:42Felix Salmon: That's all so bad. There's something unique about medical debt, which is that, first of all, it just simply is not representative of your ability to pay other bills, which is the whole point of having a credit score. But where's people get stuck in this kind of Kafkaesque limbo when they get something that shouldn't be on their credit report? And taking time to dispute it sometimes may take months or even years. And at that point, your credit's already fucked. There's been so many times. I've hinted before that I've had a recent episode with the healthcare system. And this time, and when I've had the babies or whatever, you just get this steady drip of bills.

7:23Felix Salmon: It's like, you don't just go to the hospital and they send you one bill. That's not how it works in the United States. You go to the hospital, they send you one, two, three, four bills. I'm still getting these bills,$20,$30,$40. Do I look deeply and say, is this right or wrong? No, a lot of times you don't. Sometimes you're even like, I don't even think this is right. But you know what? I pay it. I still pay it because I know I don't want to call the health insurance company. I know how that goes. That's like an hour of my life gone that's worth$30 to me so okay let's not get derailed here with like the problem with paying medical bills well it's just it's a bad system that's why they promulgated the rule just take it off 100 we can all agree that the consumer pays incomprehensible series of medical bills that no one understands how they came to that conclusion no one likes that no one thinks this is a good system, I will never in a million years defend that.

8:21Felix Salmon: Stipulated. I do want to unpack a few different things that we're all saying here, because it's so easy in this world to sort of conflate a whole bunch of different things. Number one is bills that shouldn't be there showing up on credit reports. And this is something that happens with all manner of different creditors. like people have a credit report and it has some debt that you don't recognize or shouldn't be there and then you go into all manner of kafka-esque terrible fights with experian and whoever and the creditor and trying to prove that the thing shouldn't be there and trying to prove that the debt shouldn't be there on your credit report is always a nightmare whether it's a medical bill or not and it's a terrible thing and it is one of the things that the cfpb was set up to try to make easier.

9:10And we want that process to be easier. And yes, whenever you have a debt that shouldn't be there, it should be much easier to take it off the report. At the same time, however, it is reasonable to presume that most of the medical debt on people's credit reports is genuine medical debt rather than some kind of bureaucratic mistake. So while I totally understand that the mistake debt is a thing, the genuine debt is also a thing. And as someone who has spent quite a lot of time over the years talking to FICO about correlations and just thinking about the intuition here, if you have a bunch of debt, medical or otherwise, it stands to reason that having all of that debt and having those obligations and having the possibility that your accounts will be frozen or whatever because you have that debt is going to make it less likely that you can pay off other debts.

10:14But that's not true. CFPB's own analysis says that that's not true. And when you think about why, let's say you're a middle class person, you have a reasonably good credit score, but middling income and you get cancer all of a sudden. So if the health insurance company refuses to pay for, let's say, you know, a specialty treatment and suddenly you have a quarter million dollars of debt on your credit report. Yeah. That doesn't mean you're not going to pay your electrical bill because you are absolutely not paying off that debt before you're paying for what you need to live. So some of it is, you know, the sheer amount of debt can make a huge difference and you can acquire that through no fault of your own just by getting sick.

10:56And so that sort of cuts against the intent. You said a really, really interesting word there, which is fault. And this is, again, related to the German word for bond is schuld, which means like guilt, that there's something bad about debt. But Americans believe that. American companies believe that. And they treat people with low credit scores as if they are being fiscally irresponsible. Absolutely. But the fact is that, again, medical debt, you're not being punished because it's your fault that you have this bill. You're being punished because you have a large amount of debt. And to be clear, I agree that there is deleterious consequences to having a credit score.

11:44Although I don't think, Emily, to your point, that anyone sees their mortgage rate go up by three points as a result.

11:49Felix Salmon: No, when you're trying to get a mortgage, like if you already have a mortgage, it's 30 years, you're good. I just want to be clear about this. Mortgage rates do, the amount that you pay for your mortgage when you're trying to get a mortgage, it does go up if you have a lower credit score, right? Because as we saw in the subprime, that was what subprime was all about. Yes. Subprime borrowers paid more than prime borrowers, but not by three points is the only thing I was saying. And the other thing that I will just parenthetically drop in here is that there is, frankly, there's no subprime borrowing going on at all anymore.

12:24Like mostly they just won't let you get a mortgage rather than trying to just charge you. Well, isn't that worse then? Subprime credit cards and car loans, though, are exploding. And that's so it's not just mortgages. No, no, it's not just mortgages. Totally true. But in any case, there's this idea, coming back to it, that all medical debt, whether it's correct or not, should be ignored by FICO and the people calculating the credit scores is also kind of weird to me. Like FICO has a bunch of people spending a bunch of effort trying to work out how existing debts correlate to future ability to repay.

13:07And they're a private company and they can come up with a score. And I understand that this score is deeply embedded in societal ways. But if you refuse to allow them to include medical debt in that score, then there is going to be some quantum of decrease in predictive accuracy there.

13:30Felix Salmon: But the research from the CFPB has found that the presence of medical debt isn't predictive of how you pay your debts. So it's not actually useful. It's an exceptional category. That's their argument. Okay, but let's just remember the genesis of the CFPB, right, which was Elizabeth Warren. She was like the driving force behind setting it up, and everyone thought that she would be the first director of the CFPB. and Elizabeth Warren herself has published numerous papers or did back when she was a Harvard professor talking about how medical debt is like the number one on top two cause of personal bankruptcies in America.

14:15Obviously, a personal bankruptcy is something that affects your ability to repay other creditors, right? So obviously, medical debt, if it can cause a bankruptcy is going to be causing your ability to repay other creditors. That's just like, you can't argue with that. Most people who have medical debt don't go into bankruptcy. No, but... That's an exceptional case by itself. Sure. So we're arguing about the difference between what FICO says is relevant and what the CFPB says is relevant because they have conflicting research. And I'm just saying that FICO and Warren are agreeing with each other here, right?

14:49It's a weird sort of set of bedfellows. I don't think that's the case. I intuitively understand the argument you're making, but the research just contradicts it. It suggests that medical debt is a different kind of debt that's not really reflective of people's willingness to pay or ability to pay, and certainly not of fiscal irresponsibility.

15:07Felix Salmon: Why are you so against it, Felix? Why do you want people to have medical debt on their credit reports? Look, I'm just saying that - He's a contrarian. He's won an argument, so now I'm resorting to just bullying, I guess. Yeah. Why are you bullying me, Emily? in any case there is now a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how given the cuts to medicaid in the big beautiful bill individuals will wind up with higher medical costs than they have had here unto and those medical costs will become harder to pay they are not going to pay those medical costs immediately some of those medical costs are going to like accrue as payables rather than just past things that you had to pay.

15:54Once they become delinquent, they will appear on credit reports. And then once they appear on credit reports, people are going to find it harder or more expensive to buy a car. And then they won't be able to have a car to get to work. And then they won't be able to be employed. And it's all just going to be very bad for the economy. And I totally understand the argument here. And what's interesting to me about this is that we have two things kind of happening at once. One is that the Biden administration took quite a long time to try and get this rule in place, and they never managed to get it in place while Biden was still president.

16:29And it was just about to become law when the federal court said, actually, no, it can't. So we were about to make things better in terms of not having these debts show up on credit reports, but we never quite got there. And we sort of failed at the last hurdle. And then just as the time as we failed at that last hurdle, this new thing happened, which is the big, beautiful bill, which everyone expects is going to increase the size of the problem, because it's going to increase the size of medical debt. And it's that coincidence that I think has people very worried. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see how things play out because as we mentioned, I think last week on the show, it's still not obvious exactly how many of these Medicaid cuts are actually going to happen and so on and so forth.

17:22Felix Salmon: Yeah, I agree. I wonder if they'll just kick those Medicaid cuts and keep kicking them like Senator Josh Hawley this week said he's trying to reverse the cuts he voted for. But there's other stuff, too, like they're pulling these Affordable Care Act premiums, or they're not pulling them, but they're letting them expire. So there's a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week saying premiums for health insurance could go up in some states, 27%, 20%, etc. And for some people, that could mean like they just can't have health insurance anymore. And so even if those Medicaid cuts don't happen, which really like, why wouldn't they?

17:55Felix Salmon: I don't know the way things are going. But even if they don't, there will still be like millions of other people facing higher health care costs from these expiring premium subsidies and increased costs for the ACCA coverage. So they're going to have higher medical costs. And I don't see much of a political will to try and stop that from happening. So I feel like what I'm saying is even if the Medicaid cuts don't happen for some reason, there's still all these other headwinds that are making health insurance more costly. Yeah. And I think the very big picture here is that there is, you know, trillions of dollars worth of health care that takes place in the United States every year.

18:37And the government is going to be spending less money on that health care going forward. The final payer is going to be like the government to a lower degree than it has been up until now. And a bunch of that money is then going to get sort of shunted onto individuals. And individuals are really, I think we can probably all agree, like the worst possible people to ask to pay for health care. Like it just doesn't make sense to ask individuals to pay for health care. It's just so like come up with any system is better than one where like individuals have to reach into their checking account to pay those bills.

19:12Felix Salmon: You would think that people would agree with you. And to some extent, insofar as costs wind up being pushed onto individuals, that is going to result in individuals just consuming less health care. And people won't be going to the hospital and won't be going to the doctor. And the total amount of money spent on health care will go down. So it's not like every single dollar that used to be paid by the government is now going to be paid by individuals. But a large number of those dollars will still get paid by individuals. that's going to make people poorer. That's going to increase people's debts.

19:47That's going to, broadly speaking, decrease the credit worthiness of America writ large. And this is all bad. And I don't think this is a good thing in any way. We all agree on something. Don't send him hate now.

20:03Felix Salmon: He thinks it's bad. I do think it's bad. But I also think that, let's be honest about this, CFPB studies notwithstanding, it is going to make it harder for people to get by and pay their bills. And that's what FICO is trying to measure. Right. Because you can't just, I mean, you can a little bit cut back on healthcare, but that often will wind up costing you more. You stop going for your checkups. And then the next thing you know, blah, blah, blah, you're in the emergency room and that costs way, way more money. So yeah. Also there's bigger picture economic things to think about with the government pulling back federal government on healthcare spending.

20:41Felix Salmon: Healthcare is one of the fastest growing segments of the economy. The New York Times had a great piece a few weeks ago, just like healthcare has seen just enormous job growth because of the Affordable Care Act and all the money the federal government has been putting into the industry, this job growth, buildings, blah, blah, blah, industry. That's all going to be ratcheted back. And you wonder what that's going to mean, I don't know, for the economy, for the job market, etc. It is well known that healthcare accounts for a much larger proportion of the economy in America than in any other country.

21:16And that number is too large. And if that number has been growing, that is not a good thing. That's a bad thing. And if that number starts to shrink, I'm not going to get too upset by that. But I do take your point.

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24:25So write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SLATE at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code SLATE. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better.

24:57Felix Salmon: Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With AllTrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on-trail navigation. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with AllTrails. Let's move on to another piece of government cleverness, which is not only the President of the United States, but also the prime minister of France have a great, like this one weird trick will help boost your economy and your productivity. What is the one weird trick, Emily? They want to cut the number of national holidays.

25:47Felix Salmon: The French prime minister wants to cut two. And he says this will help rescue France's finances, will help solve their debt crisis if they get rid of two holidays. What is it? Easter Monday. Easter Monday, which who knew? And another one marking the end of World War II, which is May 8th or something like that. Which comes one week after May Day, which is May 1st. And so you get like two bank holidays in a row, which is great. But yeah. And if they fall on a Tuesday or a Thursday in France, you automatically get the Monday or the Friday also. So then you get a four-day weekend, which amazing. That should always be the rule.

26:25Yeah, it's a little bit like that. Like how many people actually work on the Friday after Thanksgiving?

26:30Felix Salmon: Nobody. I mean, exactly. But Thanksgiving is a holiday and it happens on a Thursday and everyone's like, I'll take the Friday off as well. It's optional up to your employer. Like I worked at it. The Wall Street Journal never gave the Friday, but like Axios gives the Friday. Good for them. Yay. Isn't that Black Friday, though? So like if you work in retail, you do have to work. Well, sure. But let's say that Christmas Day is a Thursday. Most people will wind up taking the Friday off as well, even though it's not a holiday. Yes, yes. But we digress. I saw this news and I talked about it on the BBC.

27:03Felix Salmon: And after everyone made fun of the French for being lazy or whatever, which I don't think is true and probably is a stereotype, but perhaps Felix, who's often in Europe, can enlighten us there. I was like... Well, they just take the entire month of August off. Have we forgotten this? Everyone in France takes a whole month off every year when they're worried about like two holidays. That's a great point. I don't think taking away paid holidays makes any difference to the economy. Like it's not solving anything. This is just a bad idea across all the levels. I love this debate because there is, again, this is one of those things where the theory and the practice kind of contradict each other.

27:45In theory, it is obviously true that reducing the number of holidays increases the amount that people work. it increases the amount of economic activity on those days those people are not getting paid anymore so your productivity which is like your amount you produce for a year's work goes up like it kind of makes intuitive sense on the other hand as per you know elizabeth in the previous segment talking about but there's a study like it's very hard to find any empirical evidence that these holidays reduce national productivity. So yeah, this is related to something that we were talking about back in sort of 2011 and 2012 during the Euro slash Greece crisis, which was this idea that the Germans were very hardworking and the Greeks were very lazy.

28:35And then you would actually look at the amount of days and hours that the Greeks work versus the days and hours that the Germans work. And the Germans have a million national holidays and the Greeks are very few, and the Germans work many fewer hours than the Greeks, they are much more productive and they earn much more. But it's not because they're harder workers. There are just much deeper things at play here. And making people work more turns out not to be a great way to boost the national economy. And this is something that, you know, the Prime Minister of France, I think he's, this is like what you might call a kind of labor market version of national austerity, right?

29:19His mandate from Emmanuel Macron is, can you get the budget in order? And one of the ways he's doing this is like, we all need to make a shared sacrifice by giving up some holidays. Mainly just, I feel like it's a vibes thing more than it is an actual like real economic stuff.

29:37Felix Salmon: It's like a moral hazard thing or like. You know what it is? It's a Protestant thing. France is actually a kind of Catholic country, but it is this kind of Protestant, we should all work more and then we will be better off. Whilst you have debt, you must be working. You can't be lazy when you're in this terrible situation. We're going to ding your credit score, but you better get out to the factory. Going back to this idea of shuld, that a debt is like a guilt, is a bad thing that we need to get out of but then you come to the united states which interestingly to me i didn't know this has exactly the same number of national holidays as france we all think of the europeans as having a million national holidays and they happen every other week but it turns out the u.s has just as many as france partly because we have this brand new one juneteenth and now donald trump has decided that he is not a fan of Juneteenth and he wants to get rid of it.

30:34But I feel like this one has got nothing to do with national productivity and much more to do with Juneteenth. If he had a sense of public service and wanted to eliminate one holiday, it'd eliminate President's Day, right? Yeah.

30:49Felix Salmon: Although in his statement, when he said we had too many holidays, it was like something, something, money, we need people working, something, something, something. think. Yeah. He also claimed that workers were in favor of reducing holidays, which is incredible. Well, because the right wing companies or right wing websites, they don't observe Juneteenth. I wonder why. Who could say? It has nothing to do with the fact that it celebrates the abolition of slavery. But also in America, at least, when we have our national holiday, those are also the days where the stores have their big sales and everyone goes and buys stuff.

31:22Felix Salmon: So I refuse to believe that's bad for the economy. To Elizabeth's point, yeah, the retail workers don't get the day off. That is 100 % true. They don't get the day off. Everyone is flocking to the malls to buy or wherever the stores are. Is that true, like Memorial Day and Labor Day big shopping days? Yes. Yes, they are. I know nothing. I am so not American sometimes. You didn't grow up in the giant mall era of American shopping, or I think of it as the 90s kind of branding of all these shopping holidays. But yeah, people buy tons of stuff ahead of holidays and on holidays for the most part, with the exception probably of Christmas.

32:01Felix Salmon: People don't go shopping on Christmas. Is there an optimal number of federal holidays for any country? Well, I mean, I think the revealed preference seems to be somewhere in the 11 to 15 range. Once a month, basically, right? But clustered in the summer. and I love, this is one of the things I love about America. America literally defines its summer by national holidays. Summer is defined as Memorial Day to Labor Day. They will just pick two holidays and whatever's in between them, that's the summer. That's when you're like allowed to wear white pants or whatever. Yeah, that's correct. And I think it makes perfect sense.

32:37Felix Salmon: And I don't think it's bad for the economy in any way. Like I just, of all the ways to fix the debt and deficit of which I guess countries now need to be thinking of in these times, this is a bad idea. It doesn't make any sense. And it's not an effective way to fix it. I am so shocked that Emily Peck is going to come out in favor of more holidays for workers. You could blow me over with a feather. Just not fewer holidays. Well, when it's been done, you know, it really didn't make much of a difference. So in 2003, Denmark abolished a federal holiday. And when it came to economic output, it just didn't make that much difference.

33:11The increase is between 0.01 % and 0.06 % of total economic output.

33:17Felix Salmon: And if you give people time off of, as I've written many times, it makes them more productive over the long term. It increases their morale and it increases productivity. So wait, Emily, does this mean that you are in favor of the entire country taking the entire month of August Earth? Wouldn't that be amazing, you guys? I am in favor of that. Of course I'm in favor of that. Maybe even a different month, like during the year so that you can travel. Yeah, I'm in favor of it. Yeah, just hands over. I'll never have a job that gives me a sabbatical. So it would be nice if everybody had a sabbatical in August.

33:51Felix Salmon: Nothing much gets done. I mean, we've all been in the workforce a long time. And we all know that in August, everything at work slows down always. Nothing's getting done anyway. Just call it. In the news media, it's known as the silly season because you wind up printing a whole bunch of silly stories on your homepage or your front page because there is no actual news going on. Which. Which brings us to our next topic. Which brings us to our next topic.

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35:09Felix Salmon: Less time stressing, so you can focus on the million other things on your plate. Can I hire more people? Should we get a bigger office space? Don't lose sleep over the small stuff. Keep focusing on the big things. AT &T Business built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. All right, I need to talk to you guys about calendaring, which is a verb, sadly. And it starts with me having not one, but two different Google calendars that I deal with. One is personal. One is for my work at Axios. And my work at Slate gets kind of spread over both the calendars. My doctor appointments hit one or the other.

35:52Felix Salmon: Y 'all, it's a mess. And that's just me. Okay. Then there are the kids. They have their own schedules. Work, school, back to school is underway. It can get really chaotic. But what's happened recently is that I have been given a Skylight calendar. Skylight is designed to bring families together for more time. It's an all-in-one smart calendar. It can bring all of the calendars together for a great calendar summit of calendaring and other verbs that we haven't even thought about that we could use to describe what happens when all the calendars converge. You can manage events, You can manage chores.

36:33Felix Salmon: You can keep a grocery list handy. Your happiness is Skylight's happiness. And what I'm hearing is if you don't like this, you can return for a full refund. They don't ask questions. Families are better when they're working together. Right now, Skylight is offering our listeners$30 off their 15-inch calendars by going to myskylight.com slash slate money. Go to myskylight.com slash slate money for$30 off your 15-inch calendar. That is M-Y-S-K-Y-L-I-G-H-T dot com slash slate money. Apparently, Trump did a tweet and then people got upset about sugar. Yeah. Trump took to Truth Social to make his opinions known and to announce a new policy, which later was maybe found to be not really a new policy.

37:27Felix Salmon: So he said, I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using real, in all caps, cane sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. And I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. Yes, that is what he said. So he said, to be clear, that Coke was going to be replacing all of the high fructose corn syrup in its Coca-Cola with cane sugar because it just tastes better. and he has decreed it and talked to Coke and they're on it. And then later Coca-Cola said, well, they put out a statement and they said, we are going to be making exciting changes. Didn't say what the changes are.

38:05Felix Salmon: And they also subsequently put out a statement in defense of high fructose corn syrup. So it's not really clear what's happening here, but it's fun to talk about Coca-Cola and soda and high fructose corn syrup and why it's in the soda. And would it taste better without the high fructose corn syrup so there is there is okay so there are so many things and i love this story and it is very silly and i love it but like number one as a new yorker i can attest that there are two types of coca-cola that right now already are made with sugar rather than corn syrup which is this thing called mexican coke which used to have to be imported from mexico but And now it's just the Coke that comes in glass bottles, basically.

38:51And that is made with sugar. And then number two, the kosher for Passover Coke, which also, for reasons, it comes with a little yellow cap and it's made with sugar rather than corn syrup.

39:01Felix Salmon: That's because in Passover, you cannot have corn if you're Ashkenazi and you observe that rule. And so what happens is the Coke brings out this kosher for Passover Coca-Cola and all of the hipsters go off, whether they're Jewish or not, and buy it up because they think it tastes better. So there is this vibe that it tastes better. But if you go back to the 80s, and because we're all Gen X, we remember the 80s, there was the whole fiasco about New Coke, and Coke changed the formula of the taste of Coca-Cola, and everyone was up in arms, and eventually they changed their mind and moved it back. And the taste did change when they introduced New Coke.

39:40But the thing that I want to mention here is that before they introduced New Coke, in the years previous to the whole New Coke fiasco, they had quietly, without any fanfare, switched Coca-Cola from sugar to corn syrup, and no one noticed, and the taste didn't change.

39:59Felix Salmon: Correct. That is all correct. And Jessamyn, who puts our research packets together, shared a piece, I think it was in Mother Jones, that sort of went into the whole history of the market manipulation going on behind the scenes between like big corn and big sugar. And it's really fascinating. There was a lot of talk of price controls last year. Kamala Harris was called a communist for talking about, I guess, price controls, not that she even was. But if you read the history of sugar and corn syrup and Coca-Cola, you're like, oh, the United States has been doing price controls for a very, very long time.

40:33Felix Salmon: Because part of the reason that sugar is more expensive is because they wanted to foster a domestic cane sugar production. So they charged higher tariffs to imports of sugar. So sugar is more expensive as compared to high fructose corn syrup. And one of the reasons we have high fructose corn syrup is because I guess the corn industry is a little bit subsidized and they overproduce corn. So they need something to do with their corn. So they make ethanol and they make high fructose corn syrup. So it's like none of this is like free market forces going on. Absolutely. And if you want proof that, you know, sometimes inflation is what the government wants.

41:11And when I say the government, I mean the people who are being lobbied by the Florida sugar lobby. and the florida sugar lobby wants higher prices and so what they do is they get the government to impose tariffs on foreign sugar and those tariffs increase the price of sugar from abroad which allows the florida sugar lobby to increase the price of sugar from florida and thereby make more money for themselves while still undercutting imported sugar this is like the whole point of the tariff was to create inflation in the price of sugar and it succeeded but yeah you're absolutely right at the same time the corn syrup lobby as mostly represented by archer daniels meddeland was lobbying aggressively for ever more corn subsidies to the point at which everyone who was growing corn was like great we're getting loads of money for growing the corn but now what the fuck are we supposed to do with all of this corn and so they started inventing whole new things for it like high fructose corn syrup and as you mentioned like ethanol and now we live in this dumb world where correct me if i'm wrong but basically every single gallon of gas that you pump into your car at the pump in america has some quantum of corn ethanol in it for no other reason then the corn growers need something to do with all of this corn.

42:40Felix Salmon: Yeah, I think that's right. I do see a little ethanol sign at the gas station that I don't understand. You're like, why? There was also a kind of change that was not necessarily price related, which was the point at which the corn growers realized they could just add an enzyme to the ethanol process and you would get high fructose corn syrup. So after that happened and got adopted, the price of sugar dropped from 65 cents a pound to 8 cents a pound overall. So in any case, high fructose corn syrup is one of those things that sounds high tech and unnatural and therefore has been in the eyes of the Maha movement.

43:20And so there is this kind of, you can kind of see the hand of RFK behind all of this. I have no idea whether Trump has actually been talking to Coca-Cola, who he's been talking to at Coca-Cola, what they promised him, how he may have taken whatever they promised and turned it into a truth that may or may not have had any relation to what they actually said. There's a huge number of known unknowns here. I think they found out via social media that they had promised Trump that they were going to start using cane sugar because it would cost them$600 million a year in sweetener costs. There's no incentive for them to do it just organically just because i guarantee you that what they promised was not we are going to replace all of the corn syrup in our drinks with sugar but that was kind of the implication of what trump said and so that's why coca-cola then came out and said well we are going to introduce something stay tuned but stay tuned high fructose corn syrup is still great so don't worry about it and it's just yeah it is a dumb silly season cycle but it did also like in thin pre-market trade, like move a few stock prices around.

44:27So well done, Trump. You can move pre-market stocks, but you can't really move stocks once they open for trade and everyone's like, oh, this is dumb as fuck.

44:34Felix Salmon: I've never talked about this out loud before, but what is going on with this Maha changing our beloved junk foods, removing dyes, taking out our American corn syrup and putting in the cane sugar. I'm old enough to remember when Michael Bloomberg, our three-term mayor of New York City, he wanted to make the soda sizes smaller or something or charge a tax because it was unhealthy. And all these same people who are now so upset about like green M &Ms or whatever, were like, you can't mess with our soda. You can't mess with our food. This is big government. We have the right to have as much sugar as we want and like got so upset.

45:18Felix Salmon: But now it feels like all the same people are like, we can't have the fructose corn syrup and we can't have this fake stuff in our food and government's going to fix it. Like what is happening in America? Yeah. It's a brave new world of a weird Trumpist party that doesn't really have an ideology getting bees in its bonnet and no one quite knows where they're going to land next. It's completely random. Like are the Froot Loops just going to be brown? Like, we can't have this. We can't have brown food, but we can have brown teeth because we're taking all of the fluoride out of water. There's a little bit of right-wing radicalization that actually emerged from the wellness industry.

45:58And I think that's part of it. But it is crazy to see the Maha movement demanding that, for example, school lunch programs not include certain foods. And when Michelle Obama just suggested that, they called her a Nazi and told her to get out of town.

46:13Felix Salmon: It's so weird. It's the horseshoe theory, man. And like, yeah, you just get far enough right and far enough left and they all meet in the we distrust government putting things in our precious bodily fluids. Excellent. And I guess it should be noted that like nutritionally, chemically, there really isn't a difference between the high fructose corn syrup and the cane sugar. Like they're both, you know, sugar and bad. They're both refined products. One is refined from sugar beet or sugar cane or whoever, and one is refined from corn. But like corn is just as natural as cane. I mean, they're basically the same word, right?

46:47They're four letters. Same thing. You have a C and an N. Yeah.

46:49Felix Salmon: Yeah, totally. And so can either of you tell me? I don't know that I've ever tasted a cane sugar Coca-Cola. Is it actually better? Does it taste any different? You know what tastes better? Is Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle rather than an aluminum can? Yeah, I can get behind that. And the aluminum can tastes better than from the plastic bottle. 100 % true. And then there's debate over fountain Coke. Is that better? Like, I don't know what your hierarchy is. It all depends on the location of the fountain because you need a, it's a bit like Guinness in Irish pubs. You need someone who knows how to set up a fountain correctly.

47:25If you get someone who knows what they're doing, fountain Coke is the best. But if you get someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it can be terrible.

47:31Felix Salmon: That makes sense. And also I feel like the ice is important. Like crushed ice. The quality of the ice is very important. You want pellet ice in Coca-Cola. But as to whether it's better with sugar or the syrup, you guys don't. Mexico has a little more sweetness. It's like a different quality of sweetness, but I don't think it's necessarily better. Wait, and kind of make the last point, which is that Trump likes Diet Coke, which is not natural in any way, and that's fine. It's so confusing. Maybe he just likes aspartame. Diet Coke is not fine. Do you remember when Larry Summers had to give up his Diet Coke addiction because he was falling asleep in meetings and he was like, and Diet Coke is really weird.

48:10He lost a bunch of weight when he gave up Diet Coke. Diet Coke is this weird thing which actually causes you to gain weight for reasons which I don't entirely understand.

48:18Felix Salmon: Because your body just thinks it's sugar. That's what I've heard, been told. It does things to your metabolism that make you eat more. Or probably reinforces whatever sweet tooth you already have. It changes your palate a little bit. We should become a health podcast.

48:47Let's have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number? My number is 25, and that's percent. And that's the amount drug claim denials jumped from 2016 to 2023.

48:58Felix Salmon: Wow. So we've learned nothing from the healthcare backlash, but it's been attributed primarily to Ozempic, which is very expensive, and it keeps getting denied more. The more people try to use it. Wait, Ozempic was already a thing in 2023? It was enough of a thing in 2023? No, but this is a range, you know. But it was sort of emerging then. And then also AI-based denials. So this was like a big spike in 2023. I feel like the 2016 baseline is a weird one to me. But okay, the idea is that 2023 is the point at which the ozempic thing and the AI thing both converge to actually increase drug claim denials.

49:36Yeah, so presumably if they had 2024 data, it would be higher, I guess. Wow. Emily, what's your number?

49:43Felix Salmon: I'm rubbing my hands together. All right, wait, hang on a sec. I'm going to do my number first because Emily is rubbing her hands together. What if it's my number? It won't be. I want to go off on a high point here. My one is not a particularly high point. So I'm just going to sneak in with the middle number here that no one ever notices. Five. Five is the number of years that it took the University of California to unwind its hedge fund portfolio. In 2020, the University of California had 10 % of its assets invested in hedge funds. And it saw all of the chaos that happened in 2020. And it's like, the hedge funds aren't making us safer.

50:20They're making us less safe. They're not anti-cyclical. They're pro-cyclical. And that's exactly what happened in 2008. And that's exactly what happens whenever there's a crisis. And they're incredibly illiquid. And they're not increasing our returns. And fuck these people. And they're just making hedge fund managers rich. They're not making us rich. So we're going to take our 10 % of allocation to hedge funds and just bring it to zero. But hedge funds being hedge funds, it has taken them five years to actually manage to take all of their money out of these hedge funds because there are so many gates and difficulties and illiquidity and stuff associated with hedge funds.

50:50So that's my number.

50:52Felix Salmon: You can't just take your money and go. There's like certain periods when you can do it. You have to hold your money in there for a certain amount of time, all that stuff. Exactly. Rats. Okay. All right. What's your number, Emily? My number is 15. 15 seconds. That's how long a video on a Jumbotron at Gillette Stadium in Boston this week, the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert, the Jumbotron scanned over to a couple who was just canoodling, just enjoying their Coldplay. and then the camera pans onto them. Everyone's already seen this. Camera pans onto them and the couple, which is just like, they're swaying back and forth, really nice.

51:35Felix Salmon: They notice that they're on the jumbotron and quickly the woman covers her face and the other guy runs out of the frame. And Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay is like, oh geez, they're either, they're having an affair or something. I don't know. Someone clips the 15 seconds. It goes crazy viral. The internet being what it is in these times identifies the guy as the CEO of a software development company called Astronomer, and the woman is his chief people officer. And the next thing you know, this is all the internet is talking about. And they're both married to other people. Both married to other people.

52:09Felix Salmon: Chief people officer, indeed. But I thought, at first, was amused, saw it everywhere. And then there's a good piece on 404 Media, which says, the Coldplay concert fiasco is emblematic of our social media surveillance dystopia, which I think is a fair point because my God, like what is this world where you're in the crowd at Gillette stadium? And the next thing, you know, like people on poly market are betting as to whether or not you're getting fired and you know, you like everything in your life has fallen apart. We used to have a little bit of anonymity when we were out in public, but now because of like Tik TOK and video and, you know, cashmere Hill has written about facial recognition technology, like nowhere is safe.

52:54Also, nobody who goes to a Coldplay concert expects to be on some, you know, internet version of Coldplay concert attendees gone wild, which seems like it could be a thing with Jumbotrons.

53:07Felix Salmon: The memes are so good. There's one where it's like a screenshot of them before they noticed they were being on the Jumbotron and it's like in a circle and it has open to work on it, like the LinkedIn badge. one of the things that i think about sometimes is the syntax of jumbotron which is the director of the show whoever it is sees someone looking cute and canoodly or like a fun kid with face paint or whatever it is and then says that's a great person to put on the jumbotron and then you see that great person looking cute and canoodly or face paint to you or whatever and then there's a beat and then there's a beat and then they see themselves on the jumbotron and then they like start screaming and looking somewhere and making a face and ducking out of camera and just doing something highly embarrassing and that like whole thing of like you have to wait for them to notice themselves on the jumbotron in order to get the full effect of the jumbotron and their self-reflexivity of that but this is this is the ultimate example of that everyone has been saying this but you know it's not remotely original, but if they just stood there and canoodled and never noticed themselves on the Jumbotron, nothing would have happened.

54:18Chris Martin would have never said, oh, I guess those two are having an effect because they weren't doing anything suspicious.

54:24Felix Salmon: Yeah, yes. Self-own right there. Just made it so much worse for themselves. And it's all about the semiotics of Jumbotrons. Someone needs to write about this. Maybe in my new job, I'll write about the semiotics of Jumbotrons. Where is Felix's substack? We are all waiting for it. we need it. I don't know anything that's going on with wine or diamonds or fancy watches or art auctions. Like I am bereft. Maybe I need to get back out of my fun employment and do some writing on the internet. I think that is it for us this week. Thank you, Emily, for bringing that number in at the end to make us end on a high note.

55:02We appreciate you. And thank you also to Jessamyn Molly and Shana Roth for producing. Thank you to all of you folks who subscribe and listen. Our email address is slatemoneyatslate.com if you want to email us. And we will be back next week with yet more Slate Money.

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