Planet Money

On today's show: Three short stories from the far flung shores of New Zealand, Ireland and New Jersey. First up, it's no secret that some Americans hide money offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Over the past decade, some 39,000 people have come forward voluntarily to tell the IRS about their offshore money. This group provides a small window into the world of people who are hiding money in offshore havens. Also: how a single page in a report written decades ago by U.S. consultants, and funded by the U.S. State Department, brought Apple to Ireland.

On today's Planet Money, we meet a single mother who makes $16,000 a year — and who managed to fund a vacation at a Caribbean resort with an interest-free loan from one of the world's largest banks. Edith Calzado gets credit cards with teaser zero-percent interest rates — then transfers her balance before the rate ticks up. She signs up for store cards to get discounts — then pays off her bill on time. She gets food stamps and lives in subsidized housing. Her son is doing well in school. She may be the single most successful and productive beneficiary of government assistance you'll ever meet. Note: This podcast was originally posted in 2010. 

In 2010, we reported on a poor town in Haiti, where school was held in a small, one-room church. Planet Money listeners were moved to donate some $3,000, which the principal of the school thought would be enough to build a school. A few months later, the money was gone, and all there was to show for it was a foundation, some concrete blocks and some rock and sand. We thought that would be the end of it. Then we heard from Tim Myers, a retired contractor from Colorado who decided to go to Haiti to build the school — and who realized, in 2011, that the project would cost more than $100,000. On today's show: We return to Haiti, to see how the project is going. And we hear from Tim Myers, who says, if he had it to do over, he might do things differently.

On today's show: Three short Planet Money stories about trying to figure out what things are really worth. When Lady Gaga writes a song, does that count as economic output? Is a $20 worth $20 in Myanmar (Spoiler: Probably not.) And economists help a young college grad think through what to do with his life. Also: An update on our t-shirt project.

H&M, Zara, Wal-Mart and JC Penney all buy t-shirts from Bangladesh. Soon, Planet Money will too. As you may have heard, we're making a t-shirt and telling the story of how it's made. We decided a few months ago to work with Jockey to make our t-shirts. Our women's shirt will be made in Colombia. Our men's shirt will be made, in part, in Bangladesh. But horrifying news has been coming out of Bangladesh's apparel industry recently. A garment factory collapsed a few weeks ago, killing more than 1,000 people. Last year, a factory fire killed hundreds of workers. As part of the t-shirt project, we'll be traveling to Bangladesh to report on the industry. On today's show, we start to ask: Is buying a t-shirt from Bangladesh a good thing or a bad thing for the people of Bangladesh? For more: See Adam Davidson's latest New York Times Magazine column, Economic Recovery, Made in Bangladesh?

We're making a t-shirt that tells the story of its own creation. Part of that story — color. It took long meetings, late nights and endless discussion to choose the exact hues for our Planet Money t-shirt. On today's show, we'll explain what the color of our women's t-shirt has to do with this painting from 1976, and we'll tell you how unfinished buildings halfway around the world are shaping what we see on store shelves right now. You only have three days left to get your very own Planet Money t-shirt. All it takes is a $25 pledge on Kickstarter.

Nearly 20 states have legalized marijuana to some degree. As it turns out, this has profound economic consequences for dealers all across the country. On today's show, we meet a wholesaler who moves weed across the country, a California weed dealer seeking higher profits in New York, and a special agent who may be inadvertently helping the dealer out by trying to put him in jail. For More: See The Weed Trail, from WNYC

On today's show, we meet a Brazilian who took on the world's largest superpower; a Texas cotton farmer who's tired of hearing the Brazilians complain; and a guy named Renato — a.k.a. Retaliation Master. And we hear why U.S. taxpayers are paying Brazilian cotton growers nearly $150 million a year. This show originally ran in 2011, near the beginning of our quest to make a Planet Money t-shirt. We're re-playing it now because we just re-launched the t-shirt project. If you want a Planet Money t-shirt, visit our Kickstarter page. We had more about the project in our most recent podcast, The Planet Money T-Shirt Is Finally (Almost) Here. Music: Johnny Cash's "Cotton Fields" Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

We're making a t-shirt that tells the story of its own creation. To help make it happen, visit our Kickstarter page.

Sugar costs more in the U.S. than in the rest of the world. If you're in the candy business — if, say, you make 10 lollipops a day — that's a big deal. On today's show, we visit a candy factory in Ohio (where they want U.S. sugar to be cheaper) and a sugar-beet field in Minnesota (where they don't). And, perhaps inevitably, we hear from Washington, where the fight over sugar has been playing out for years. For more, read our post from earlier today. Subscribe to the podcast.  Find us Twitter/Facebook/Flickr.

What causes what? The human brain is programmed to answer this question constantly. This how we survive. What made that noise? Bear made that noise. What caused my hand to hurt? Fire caused my hand to hurt. We are so eager to figure what causes what — that we often get it wrong. I wore my lucky hat to the game. My team won. Therefore, my lucky hat caused my team to win. On today's show we dive deep into the world of correlation and causation with Charles Wheelan, author of the new book, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data.

Three years ago, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a study that quickly became one of the most famous, most talked about economics papers since the financial crisis. It got so much attention because it answered a basic question everybody was asking: How much debt is too much? Reinhart and Rogoff looked at what had happened in many different countries over many years. And they found a what looked like a clear debt threshold: 90 percent. Average growth was much, much slower in countries with debt-to-gdp ratios over 90 percent. The paper got a lot of coverage in the press. Politicians cited it in the U.S. and Europe. Then, this week, a 28-year-old grad student and his professors published a startling finding: Reinhart and Rogoff had made a simple Excel error in one part of their study. The authors of the new critique also questioned other elements of the study and argued that, in fact, there is no debt threshold. On today's show, we hear from the grad student who found the error. And we ask: How much should we trust economics?

The U.S. has a really conflicted history with the income tax. For most of American history, there was no income tax at all. At one point it was ruled unconstitutional. Today, income tax is the federal government's main source of revenue. That raises a question: How did something that was once so strange to us become so central? The answer includes a few wars, a Supreme Court justice on his deathbed, and Donald Duck. For More: Read our post, "From Abe Lincoln To Donald Duck: History Of The Income Tax."And see War and Taxes, the book Joe Thorndike co-wrote. Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Nero's "The Promise" and Danny Kaye's "I Paid My Income Tax Today." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Note: This podcast was originally published last year.

Last year, a federal program took about $60 billion from wealthier Americans and gave it to the working poor. This program — a massive redistribution of wealth --has been embraced by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. On today's show, we look at a huge, often overlooked, surprisingly interesting corner of the tax code: The Earned Income Tax Credit. For more, see our story A Surprisingly Uncontroversial Program That Gives Money To Poor People.

Since the start of the year, the Japanese yen has risen by about 12 percent against the dollar. The euro has fallen by about 1 percent. Then there's bitcoin, a virtual currency that doesn't even exist in the physical world. In the past few months, the value of bitcoin has risen by more than 1,000 percent — from less than $20 per bitcoin a few months ago to more than $200 today. On today's show, we ask: Is a skyrocketing value a good thing or a bad thing for bitcoin?