EP 981 Is Donald Trump Presiding Over a Manufacturing Boom or Bust?
President Trump’s most prized word is ‘tariffs’ and on Liberation Day he extolled their virtues and told us that this would usher in a new era of reshoring and renewal of the manufacturing sector. He has also touted $18 trillion dollars in manufacturing investments here in the United States, but according to our guest that has yet to result in shovels in the ground. After a year of on again, off again tariffs and testy interplay with allies on many of the levies, is it having the desired effect of creating new investment and employment in the manufacturing sector? Our guest, Paul Lavoie is the vice president for Innovation, Corporate Partnerships and Career Success at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. As the State of Connecticut’s former chief manufacturing officer, he was named one of top 5 Chief Manufacturing Officers in the world. He answers a range of questions about the current manufacturing policy in the United States and offers his six steps to bend the curve back toward growth in that sector of our economy.
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Underpinning the growing use of AI is the need for state-of-the-art data centers. These data centers host a large number of file servers and networking equipment that can store, process, and analyze text, images, code, and other information sources. While data centers have been around throughout the computer, internet and cloud eras none so big and controversial as these. One proposed in the state of Utah is larger than Manhattan. Really! The objection to these data centers has formed in red and blue states. The concerns relate to the impact on water supplies needed to cool them, particularly in the Southwest, the spikes in electricity costs, the noise emitted and the giveaways that communities and states have bestowed upon them even if the economic impact on the local workforce is not very impactful. Large tech companies are feeling the backlash and trying to develop community impact packages that deliver more to the sites where they are being built. More than 4,000 are already in operation and 3,000 more are being planned or under construction. To discuss this issue of growing importance is Darrell West, of Brookings, co-author of the book, “Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence.”
Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, and the author of “Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate”, joins us today to discuss the three, five-alarm issues facing the globe: fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty. Assuming that there is generally global consensus that these issues are paramount, he believes that the outdated policies that focus on one of these issues alone worsens the trade-offs between each of them. He is calling for a bold new vision of globalization, one in which we accelerate the green transition to achieve a sustainable planet, shore up the middle class in order to restore democracy’s foundations, and hasten economic revitalization in the developing world to put an end to poverty. It’s a sweeping agenda. Are the leaders atop the major nations of the world up for the challenge? We’ll discuss this topic today.
If you’re like many people, their mood is sour about their station in life and that of our nation. It is a malaise, of sorts. You can tell that Americans are struggling to determine who they are, their role in the world and what life is all about. These are high order issues that people are struggling to address. They are going to therapy, meditating, buying books and wellness products and yet often the answers are elusive. Our guest, University of Chicago professor, J. Eric Oliver, has taught a legendary course–The Intelligible Self–that students describe as life-changing. He has encapsulated his thoughts in this new book, “How to Know Your Self: The Art and Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.” He draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, physics and ancient philosophy to explore the mystery of the self. Interspersed in this conversation and the book are practical insights into the process of living better. Let’s take a deep dive into a topic we all struggle with.
Secretary of Defense (or ‘War’, as he prefers) Pete Hegseth is a poster child for the way military education likes to inculcate recruits and students into a macho culture of masculinity. The Pentagon has a vast educational network through which to teach these lessons. It includes basic training, service academies like West Point, JROTC, ROTC and dozens of military schools and war colleges. This has given the military brass outsized power in shaping our young men and, by extension, society at large. In “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood,” investigative journalist Jasper Craven explores how the military formed and fuels increasingly volatile strains of American masculinity. While many people benefit greatly from the structure and discipline of military training, others have scars from it having been cut off from the development of the other traits that define men, like empathy and caring for others. It’s provocative exploration of men in our society as the messaging about the training and service focuses more and more on a warrior culture.
America’s First Amendment is a model of free speech protection unparalleled across the globe. Yet, the United States saw the third largest decline in free speech between 2021 and 2024. And 2024 marked the 19th consecutive year in which civil and political rights declined globally. While it may seem paradoxical that while the new voices who are speaking out on unregulated platforms seem to proliferate daily so are attempts to monitor, filter and block content. Or at least encouraging people with large platforms to give their audiences over to purveyors to speech which is objectionable to many. Our guest, Jeff Kosseff, and his co-author, Jacob Mchangama, in their new book “The Future of Free Speech,” call on us to become better informed consumers of what we read and watch but to avoid the desire to have the government censor content. More speech is the antidote to what is a growing public sentiment about our public discourse. As one who grew up in an era of fewer choices and more gatekeepers, who curated our news, I am torn between the benefits of our ‘say anything’ culture and the perils of out and out censorship. Clearly, I do not want government limiting speech, but I do wish that those who platform certain speech, and we as consumers, were able to develop policies and make decisions that do not further inflame our fragile democracy at this moment. Civil discourse anyone? We try here.
The host of America Trends, Larry Rifkin, has in the later stages of life taken up keyboards and songwriting. He is putting out his third album of originals, in collaboration with Alasdair MacKenzie, as part of the music project he calls Rockaway. The album, titled “Wrong Side of Love”, contains 16 songs that still offer political and social messaging, as in the first two albums, but redirects much of its focus toward love–its textures, complications and quiet endurance. Jon Krofssik, the technical director behind the podcast, steps out of the shadows to conduct the interview with his long-time friend and broadcast partner. Rifkin discusses how he and the much younger and multi-talented, Alasdair MacKenzie, formed this interesting collaboration, thanks to the kindness of his daughter, Leora, and son-in-law, Peter, and how another young man, Matt Terribile, of Ace Tone Productions, gave Rifkin the confidence to put these tunes out as demos some years back. The story is interesting and the songs of a yacht rock flavor with a contemporary sound, are different one to the next. You’ll hear a number of them on this podcast. The album will be available in digital stores, including Spotify and Apple Music, on Tuesday, June 9.
The pardon power that the President has is, as Constitutional prerogatives go, about as absolute as it can be. Coupled with the friendly majority Donald Trump has on the United States Supreme Court, which gave him immunity from prosecution for many crimes charged in connection with his pardons, and you have what some call a pardon-palooza going on in his second term. Most egregious to some, like this observer, was the blanket pardon of all those involved in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol (not to mention the ‘stupid on stilts’ weaponization fund.) Remember when his former Attorney General, Pam Bondi, in her confirmation hearing, said that such pardons would be handled on a case -by- case basis. President Trump has been doling out pardons for political loyalty, pay-to-play corruption, and even state prosecutions, over which he has no say. It boggles the mind how far we’ve come from the framers’ intent which was to give the President the ability to show mercy and heal national wounds. This President isn’t the first to expand its use to miscreants, but as tens of thousands of requests for clemency go unanswered the friends and family plan grows and metastasizes. Now he’s telling staff not to worry about whatever questionable actions he requests because they will be pardoned on his way out of the Oval Office. To discuss this trend is Professor Mark Osler of the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an expert on the topic.
Deborah Schwartz, a healthcare attorney, saw how medical insurance companies put profit over patient and the impacts it had. While inside the health insurance industry, she tried to change the practices she saw which were antithetical to better health outcomes, but since leaving the field, she’s writing about in her new novel, “EmmaCare” and sounding the alarm about what she saw. By whatever measure, claim denials, coupled with prior authorizations and other practices, are growing and put the onus on the patient to fight for and appeal judgments from the insurers even when their doctor prescribes various drugs and procedures. It’s a maze that leads to financial strain and bankruptcy, delayed or denied care and mental and emotional stress. We all know that our health care system is broken. These practices are chief among the issues, though there are many more. So, what can we do? Aside from a universal health care model which is unlikely in this country at this time, how do we proceed? We’ll discuss on this podcast.
Most families require two incomes these days to survive. Thus, by definition the working parent is populating every workplace. And while accommodating the needs of working parents may be difficult for some small companies with not a person to spare at any time, what about the larger companies that have infrastructure to do so? Are they waking up to the types of policies and approaches that allow the working parent to thrive in their corporate environments? And why should they? Our guest Mason Donovan, along with Mark Kaplan, have written a book titled ” The Parenthood Advantage: Building Corporate Cultures that Value Working Parents.” Their cogent argument is that working parents have skills that make them MORE valuable. Things like adaptability, efficiency and empathy. And yet most workplaces have yet to figure out how meaningfully to accommodate them. And the legal culture in America has never significantly strengthened laws around parental leave, daycare and other practices which might support these dual roles, so they harmonize better on a day- to- day basis. It’s an important subject that we explain in depth on this podcast.