This week’s show is sponsored by:

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The grifting is like a Musk rocket ship, soaring off to near space while the passenger has a big giggle. In this case, it’s a $400-million airplane for Donald Trump’s personal use now (after a $1-billion taxpayer-funded retrofit), and even beyond … assuming he agrees to leave the White House. In the time he’s able to take away from golf, social network posting and watching TV, Trump is getting occasional briefings on what his band of zealots are doing to the nation…and backing away from at least a few of his most damaging decisions. Case in point: tariffs. Yes, he’s still a fan of what amounts to a national sales tax, but he’s backing away from the most excessive as his approval ratings move into used-car-salesman numbers. We’ll talk about the economics of Trump’s ever changing policies with University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers.

Also on our political radar screen this week (between Newark-style outages!):

Joining the conversation this week is one of the world’s most respected economists, Justin Wolfers. 

Dr. Wolfers is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Sydney. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research; a non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn; a research affiliate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London; and an international research fellow with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. 

Dr. Wolfers earned his Ph.D. in economics in 2001 from Harvard University, and was a Fulbright, Knox and Menzies Scholar. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics in his native Australia at the University of Sydney in 1994, winning the University Medal. He was recently named by the International Monetary Fund as one of the “25 economists under 45 shaping the way we think about the global economy.”

This episode is sponsored in part by

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