The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•April 11, 2025•9 min

IRS information sharing, bonds bust, and a chorebot future

Today on the show, we discuss why the IRS is sharing some taxpayer information, why bonds and stocks both fell, and how robots will replace you,or at least most of your chore wheel, in the near future. Related episodes: Why are stocks and bonds both falling? (https://www.npr.org/2022/10/06/1127357539/why-are-stocks-and-bonds-both-falling) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-26724/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

0:01

Npr.

0:11

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma here with Darian Woods.

0:15

Hey. Hey.

0:16

Coming to us from across interstellar Planet Money galaxy is Planet Money's very own Amanda Ronczyk.

0:23

Hello. I come in peace.

0:25

Amanda, you picked the perfect time to join us.

0:29

I did? How so?

0:31

It is Indicators of the week.

0:34

Indicators of the Week. So many things happened this week.

0:40

Today on the show we are talking

0:42

about the IRS makes a deal with dhs, Department of Homeland Security bonds and stocks went down.

0:49

Is that meant to happen?

0:51

And robots are coming to replace you or maybe at least most of your chore wheels.

0:58

Ooh, that sounds nice. All of that after the break.

1:04

All right, Indicators of the week. Amanda Aronczyk, kick us off.

1:07

Very good. My indicator of the week is $59.4 billion. That is a number from 2022, and that is about how much people without legal status contributed that year in taxes to the irs.

1:21

I think a lot of people often think that being without legal status means you're kind of living in the shadows, but that's not really true.

1:29

Not entirely. No. You know, so immigrants without legal status often do end up paying taxes. You know, that might be through payroll taxes. That can happen if they're using like a fake or a borrowed Social Security number or they might be filing taxes with an individual taxpayer ID number. Either way, the money is still going to the irs. And you know, they don't receive some of the benefits that most people get from paying those taxes. Things like Social Security or Medicare or most of those stimulus checks. Usually they're just paying in.

2:00

I'd imagine that the IRS knows a fair amount about these people.

2:04

The IRS knows a fair amount about all of us. I would say they would have our full names, our birthdays, our addresses, where we work, and our tax filings. Of course, historically, though, that is not information that the IRS would share with, you know, something like ice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So you probably heard that that changed this week. This there is a new agreement that requires the IRS to share some info with the Department of Homeland Security in some cases. But while it sounds like the IRS did consult on the agreement, there was a new head of the irs, a woman named Melanie Kraus. She learned that the deal was finalized from Fox News. So she is apparently now resigning from the job.

2:49

And didn't Kraus just take the job?

2:51

Yeah, that is right. She's been the acting commissioner of the IRS only since February. She is the third person in that role in just three months. You know, because I think this Seems to go against a very core principle of the irs, that your tax data is private information, regardless of your immigration status. It is not something to be shared. And the IRS has worried in the past that if people are too scared to pay their taxes because they're worried about being found or deported, that that will be a loss in revenue. So even though now you know all of the stuff going on at the IRS right now, please don't forget, you should still be filing your taxes. Darian, what is your indicator of the week?

3:35

My indicator is negative 1.3%, which is one measure of how much the value of some treasury bonds fell during the week that followed the big tariff announcement that happened at the start of April. So this is like the government wrote you an iou, but now that IOU you have in your hands is kind of crumbling apart. It's worth less now.

3:54

So bond prices went down, but the stock market also went down over that week. And that is unusual. Right? Because usually when stocks go down, bond prices go up. Yeah.

4:05

A lot of people invest in a mix of both stocks and bonds because a lot of the time they do move in opposite directions. When investors run away from the riskier stock market that might be tumbling, they look for something solid, dependable, something easy to buy and sell. So something like US Government debt.

4:24

So, I don't know, does it make it seem like investors do not think that the US Government is all that dependable right around now?

4:31

It's certainly a concern you hear from investors. Like these tariffs that President Trump announced were so high and so sweeping that some people are worried. What else could this administration do?

4:41

I kind of feel like the tariff on switch, tariff off switch is really like, that's a lot. And that could go on and off endlessly.

4:48

And the worst case scenario would be like, the government doesn't make good on its debts. Right. It doesn't pay off its bonds like it's supposed to.

4:56

So things that might have seemed impossible a few weeks ago are now seeing maybe possible. Investors are just questioning everything.

5:04

So if U.S. treasury bonds are less attractive to investors, what is like, fill in the gap?

5:11

Investors have been buying up German government bonds. Huh. But there's only so many of them. And in a world that's been thrown into chaos, pretty much everything else is looking uncertain, too.

5:22

Is there any good news? Come on, Darian, a little good news, please.

5:26

I'm not going to give you any good news, but I can give you a fun analogy.

5:29

Oh, all right. I'll take it.

5:31

So we have been here before in 2022. There was also a fall in both stocks and bonds. We explained why on this podcast, and we used an analogy of turtles racing against each other. And we'll have a link to that in the show Notes.

5:44

Oh, I hope it's a video that we can watch.

5:47

No video. No video for this pivotal video in this case.

5:49

Fine.

5:50

We're podcasters.

5:51

We're podcasters. We love analogies.

5:53

Videos for your mind, Amanda.

5:54

Oh, sorry. Okay, Adrian, what is your indicator of the week?

5:59

Excellent throw.

6:00

Thank you.

6:01

I will start off my bit by asking a question to you all, which is, who here likes doing housework?

6:07

I think it's a great time to listen to podcasts, but I have hurt my back cleaning the bathroom tub a couple of times.

6:13

Ooh.

6:14

Okay. I don't know about you, Amanda. Any favorite or disfavored chores?

6:18

I don't really believe in sweeping.

6:20

You don't believe in sweeping? I've seen it happen, Amanda.

6:23

Okay, well, good news for the both of you, because in the future, humans probably won't have to do as much of these chores ourselves. And in fact, we will have robots to do them for us. And I am not talking about room buzz buzzing around your floor. I am talking about humanoid robots with arms and legs and maybe faces.

6:45

I will interrupt to just say that I love that, because I had a Roomba, and it just gets stuck with hair and doesn't work almost immediately. So bring on the humanoid robots. The Roomba is a bust.

6:54

Yeah, if it had a hand, it could, like, unclog itself.

6:57

That would be amazing. Yeah.

7:00

And this prediction, specifically what it says is by the year 2055, which is just three short decades from now, there will be more than 2 billion humanoid robots in operation, and about half of them will actually be working in people's homes. So that is my indicator of the week. Two billion humanoid housework robots.

7:21

All right, so where did this come from? Like a science fiction novel, this forecast

7:25

was actually tucked into a report that bank of America did focusing on housework, and it highlighted a couple interesting data points. One is that the amount of time Americans spend doing housework has gradually increased over the past decade. And maybe not surprisingly, there is a consistent gender disparity in how much time people spend doing housework. For women, it's a little over two hours a day. For men, it's a little over one hour a day. Both these trends, of course, not the

7:54

situation in my household.

7:56

Oh, yeah. Anyway, good for you. We're here for it.

7:59

Thank you. Appreciate it.

8:00

We're here for gender parity in housework. The trends highlighted by bank of America. However, they do have implications not just for society, but for our economy. Right. Researchers at bank of America were thinking about whether humanoid robots might eventually take over a lot of housework. One thing these researchers were looking at was they sort of estimated what chores robots would save the most time at. And I thought this was kind of an interesting prediction. What would you guess are the chores that robots could help the most with?

8:33

Oh, I'm going to go with mopping. So time consuming and so difficult to do. That would be so great. I don't know. Mopping.

8:39

Oh, you got to get the water and the bucket.

8:41

Sourcing laundry.

8:43

You're both right. I mean, they're in the top five. Grocery shopping.

8:48

Huh?

8:48

Cleaning, dishwashing, cooking, and laundry were the top five.

8:53

Wait, so the robot's allowed out of the house?

8:55

The grocery shop?

8:56

What about its safety? What if it gets bullied on the way to the grocery store?

9:01

On that note, that's Indicators of the Week.

9:05

We did end on a fun note. I appreciate that. It's been a long week.

9:09

That is what we're here for.

9:10

Amanda, thank you for blessing us with your presence.

9:13

Oh, thank you. Always a pleasure to visit from Planet Money.

9:16

This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Kwesi Lee. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show and the indicators of production of NPR.

IRS information sharing, bonds bust, and a chorebot future

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