National Debt, Alaska Musher, Dark Side of the Moon

Guest: Doug Criscitello, Executive Director, Center for Finance and Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology The ongoing budget dispute and government shutdown in Washington is not really about money. It’s about politics –President Trump trying to fulfill a campaign promise to build the wall and Democrats hoping to stop him. What they’re not talking about in any serious way is the nation’s debt –that even with a strong economy, budget deficits are increasing.  And all that borrowing has a price. The amount of interest America pays on its debt is the fastest growing part of the government’s budget. In less than five years, we’ll be paying more interest on our national debt than we spend on national defense. What does that say about our priorities?

Guest: Zoya DeNure, Musher and Owner of Crazy Dog Kennels For many Americans, snow is a sign of the season.  For some, it means skiing or snowboarding, or cozy days inside with hot cocoa. Or maybe it just means the drudgery of shoveling walks and scraping windshields. But for mushers in Alaska, it’s a chance to start conditioning their dogs for epic sled races like the Iditarod, which spans more than 1,000 miles and kicks off the first Saturday in March.

Guest: Mike Joner, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University. China this week became the first country to land on the dark side of the moon. The robot lander will shed light on the mysterious moonscape that’s always facing away from earth, hidden from view. Exactly fifty years ago, the American crew of Apollo 8 were the first humans to lay eyes on the far side of the moon when they made it into lunar orbit. Here’s some cockpit audio of the crew scrambling to photograph another incredible sight as they came out from behind the moon.

(Originally aired October 1, 2018) Guest: Patrick Foy, Captain of Regulations for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement Division There’s a lucrative black market in China and Korea for succulent plants that grow well in the American West. Smugglers in California have been caught with 10s of thousands of plants worth millions of dollars. This is not exactly how we hoped to fix the trade imbalance.

(Originally aired June 20, 2018) Guest: Erin Beckloff, Co-Director of “PRESSING ON: The Letterpress Film”; Gregory Walters, Long-time Printer, Featured in the Documentary  Computers and easy-to-use software have turned the whole world into graphic designers capable of making a decent poster or party invitation from a vast array of templates. So maybe that’s why there’s such a fascination right now with old-school printing and design. Owning a vintage letterpress bestows all kinds of hipster cred.

(Originally aired September 10, 2018) Guest: Russell Lowery-Hart, PhD, President, Amarillo College Getting a college degree is a proven pathway out of poverty, but poverty itself is a major barrier to actually getting that degree. A national survey of university students found a third of them had been without a reliable source of food in the last month. And nearly 10 percent had been homelessness in the last year. Among community college students, those numbers are higher. There’s a community college in Amarillo, Texas with an unusually, aggressive approach to making sure poverty doesn’t derail students from their studies.