Planet Money

On Jan. 8, 1835, all the big political names in Washington gathered to celebrate what President Andrew Jackson had just accomplished. A senator rose to make the big announcement: "Gentlemen ... the national debt ... is PAID."That was the one time in U.S. history when the country was debt free. It lasted exactly one year.On today's Planet Money: The legend of the national debt. Where the debt came from, what happened the one time we paid it all off, and why Congress created the debt ceiling in the first place.This episode originally aired on May 13, 2011.

The monthly jobs numbers are important — really important. They tell everyone from manufacturers to stock traders how the economy is doing. Billions of dollars ride on the jobs numbers.Get them early, and you'd have everything you need to make a quick fortune. And once — just once, as far as anyone knows — someone did get them early.On today's show, we talk to the guy who got the numbers before everyone else. And we learn the crazy lengths the government now goes to in order to keep those numbers secret until it's time to release them.

There's a pill called Suboxone that treats addiction to heroin and pain pills like oxycontin. Doctors and addicts say it's amazing."It was the best thing that ever happened," one heroin addict told us. "I was like OH. MY. LORD. This is a miracle pill."The government spent tens of millions of dollars developing Suboxone. Doctors can prescribe it in their offices. But a lot of people who want it can't get it from a doctor, so they have to buy it on the street.Today on the show: Why people have to turn to drug dealers to get a pill that fights addiction.

On today's show, we dive deep into the world of offshore companies and bank accounts.We set up our own company in an offshore tax haven, and we find out where the easiest place to register a business anonymously is.

On today's show, we dive deep into the world of offshore companies and bank accounts.We set up our own company in an offshore tax haven, and we find out where the easiest place to register a business anonymously is.

For today's show, we've collected three Planet Money radio stories never before heard on the show. All of them deal with people who handle other people's money — a politician's, a workforce's, and even a continent's:Just How Blind Are Blind Trusts, Anyway?: With questions swirling about Mitt Romney's investments, a look at how blind trusts really work.The European Central Bank's Guide To Influence: With much of the continent on shaky financial grounds, the ECB is all about influencing governments, not making friends.Public Pensions Are About To Look Less Healthy: Accounting rules are changing, and that could mean a nasty surprise for a lot of public employees. (And for more on just what's behind the change, see Monday's blog post, Why Public Pensions Are About To Look Less Healthy.)

Given a choice between $50 now and $100 in a month, many people would take the money now. But offered $50 in a year, or $100 in 13 months, they'd wait the extra month to double their money.The lesson: People have a "present bias," says Frank Partnoy, a professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego. "So people have more impatience in a one-month time period than they do in a one-year time period."This turns out to have immense implications for public policy — implications that add up to many trillions of dollars over time, and mean the difference between valuing the lives of future generations at a few pennies, or hundreds of billions of dollars.Consider: If it would cost several trillion dollars to save Los Angeles from being wiped off the map by massive floods that are likely to occur only once every few hundred years, is it worth it?The answer hinges on the discount rate — the rate you use to size up future costs.

There's a reason economists don't run for president.We assembled five prominent economists from across the political spectrum. We gave them a simple task: Identify major economic policies they could all stand behind.They did. They gave us five tax proposals — plus one change to the criminal code — that every one of them could support wholeheartedly, from left to right.And in the process, they gave us an economic platform that would surely sink any candidate that supported it.On today's show: The Planet Money economic platform. Backed by the brightest minds in modern economics. Pure poison to any politician that embraces it.

Everybody likes free. But free can be dangerous, too. Today's show is sort of the flip side of free. It is what happens when you take something that was free — and you give it a price, a decision many Internet companies face today. That is a highly risky move, it turns out. And the damage can be enormous.This week, free of charge, Chana Joffe-Walt and Alex Blumberg tell the story of the Red Cross and free doughnuts — that suddenly weren't free any more. It happened 70 years ago, and the Red Cross is still feeling the consequences.

You'll hear the complaint every now and then, when the global economy comes up, that the United States is becoming like Greece, or Spain, or Italy.But when Luigi Zingales says it, he should know: He's a University of Chicago economist. He was born in Italy. He studies, among other things, what has set the American economy apart from places like Italy.And he's worried.On today's show: How the U.S. is taking a few early steps down the risky road toward Italy, and how it could change course.

It's really, really hard to create the right kind of economic incentives — even if you're a professional economist, and all you're trying to do is teach your kids to use the toilet.On today's Planet Money, we talk to economist Joshua Gans and his 11-year-old daughter.Gans, who wrote a book called Parentonomics, tried to create a toilet-training economy for his young children. He rewarded them with candy for sitting on the toilet — and the older ones got candy if they helped the younger ones.But, like tiny Wall-Street bankers, the kids figured out how to work the system for maximum advantage.His daughter managed to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes, all day long. For a while, she got a treat every time.She also wrung everything she could out of her brother:I realized that if I helped my brother go to the toilet, I would get rewarded, too. And I realized that the more that goes in, the more comes out. So I was just feeding my brother buckets and buckets of water.Also on the podcast: We discuss the jobs numbers that the government reported today. And we talked about this graph, the most vivid illustration you'll see of how slow this recovery is.Note: Part of today's show is a rerun. It first ran in August, 2010.

There's a certain amount of trust underpinning the financial markets. But recent news out of the United Kingdom has shaken the world's faith in a key element of the system.That element is the number banks use to determine how much to charge their customers — think of it as the measuring stick that determines nearly every other other interest rate around: mortgages, credit cards, corporate loans, complex derivatives transactions. It's called LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, and it pretty much underpins everything.For years, the British Bankers' Association has calculated the rate by asking big banks what they are paying to borrow from other banks. The answers were largely taken on faith. Now it turns out that at least one big bank — Barclays — was skewing the numbers, during the financial crisis and before. Emails cited in a regulatory complaint against the bank show the casual way the efforts were discussed. Other banks are under investigation as well.The result: Criminal and parliamentary inquiries on two continents, lawsuits, and a lot of mistrust and uncertainty about interest rates across the financial markets.On today's show, we look at how Barclays bankers sought to manipulate Libor, and why the repercussions will be felt throughout the global financial system for years to come.

The Supreme Court's decision to uphold the health-care law will change peoples' lives. On today's show, we talk to a few of those people.When the ruling came down, we were visiting people who work at a health insurance agency in Connecticut. The Court's ruling means the company needs to find a new line of business or close down altogether. (Here's more on our visit.)Also, we hear how people's lives changed when they lost health insurance — and when they got it.

Public companies helped build America. They gave millions of people the opportunity to buy a stake in the national economy. And, of course, they made some people very rich.Today, though, going public doesn't hold the same allure it once did for many entrepreneurs. "In Silicon Valley, there is a general attitude that the cool kids sell their companies rather than going public," Spencer Rascoff told us.Rascoff is the CEO of Zillow — which did go public. On today's show, Rascoff makes the case for going public. And we hear from another CEO who is blowing off the bankers pushing him toward an IPO.

A few years ago, Jestina Clayton started a hair braiding business in her home in Centerville, Utah. The business let her stay home with her kids, and in good months, she made enough to pay for groceries. She even put an ad on a local website. Then one day she got an email from a stranger who had seen the ad."It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license," the e-mail read. "Please delete your ad, or you will be reported."To get a license, Jestina would have to spend more than a year in cosmetology school. Tuition would cost $16,000 dollars or more. On today's show: Why it's illegal to braid hair without a license in Utah. And why that rule — and hundreds of others like it in states all around the country — are a disaster for the U.S. economy.