Business

Both presidential nominees support no tax on tips. But this now-popular campaign issue is making tax experts and economists shake their heads.

This week, the Biden administration announced it is taking on more of what it calls "everyday headaches and hassles that waste Americans' time and money."

And it's doing that by having federal agencies make new business rules.

There are actions to simplify health insurance paperwork, crack down on fake product reviews, streamline parent-teacher communications in schools and circumvent those automated customer service calls that the White House labels "doom loops."

It's all part of a wider economic mission to eliminate modern business practices that the Biden administration believes exploit Americans.

Neera Tanden, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, breaks down why this is happening and how it will work in reality.

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U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor had been overseeing two cases filed by Musk’s social media platform X. Records showed O’Connor was also an investor in Tesla, another Musk company, as well as Unilever, a defendant in the Musk case.

Homelessness is a pervasive issue that cities across the country struggle to address. This led an entrepreneur to team up with researchers and local foundations for an experiment called the Denver Basic Income Project. The goal was to see how different variations of a basic income program would impact the local homeless population. What the researchers found could become a guide for how localities in the United States could address the problem of homelessness.

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It's that time of year when we want to lie on a beach and lose ourselves in a good book. Today on the show, three summer reading recs that got our hosts thinking about economics. Remember, anything read on the beach is, in fact, a "beach read."

Books recommended in this episode:
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (B&N, Bookshop)
• Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World by Tom Chivers (B&N, Bookshop)
• Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (B&N, Bookshop)

Related episodes:
How Asimov's 'Foundation' has inspired economists (Apple / Spotify)
The carbon coin: A novel idea
Beach reads for econ nerds

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

The mayor of Philadelphia ordered all city employees back to the office full-time this summer. Now some workers are wondering whether their jobs are worth the flexibility they're giving up.

Indicators of the Week is a show dedicated to highlighting some of the most interesting numbers in the news. Today, we break down our favorite indicators in Google's antitrust defeat, the currency trade in Japan that jolted global markets and another way of creating an Olympic medal tally.

Related episodes:
Is Google search getting worse? (Apple / Spotify)
Why the Olympics cost so much (Apple / Spotify)

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.