Laurel Wamsley
speaker
60 appearances
12 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Laurel Wamsley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. So I spoke with David Torgerson. He's executive chairman of Wildfire Defense Companies, and they work on behalf of nearly three dozen insurers, and they're regulated under California law. So when there's a wildfire endangering homes insured by these companies, his crews arrive loaded with water, but most of what they provide is labor.
Embers can get into a house through the dryer vent, so his crews will tape those shut. They'll also come back after the fire passes to make sure there isn't a bush or a fence that's burning that could still ignite the house.
It's about prevention rather than having to pay for replacing all those lost homes. So more and more insurers are including this as a standard part of their homeowners policies in wildfire prone states.
Well, it's obviously sort of hard to know exactly what happens in the field. When I asked a spokesperson at the Insurer USAA that question, she said the providers that they work with don't just drive on by a house that's on fire, that they're staffed with a lot of retired fire chiefs, and it's just embedded in them to help the community.
But still, private companies obviously might have different priorities than firefighters who work for the public.
Yeah, I mean, I asked an ethics expert about this, and he said there are a whole host of ethical questions here. For instance, which firefighters get access to limited water supplies? It can be really divisive in society when it feels like even in a crisis, the rich and powerful get insulated from what's happening.
And I asked Torgerson about this, who runs that company that works for the insurers, and he said, well, in a crisis, we need all the help we can get, and it's better to have more structures survive. They're helping to keep insurance in the marketplace, he says, which has been a huge problem in California in recent years. So these are big questions and there are no easy answers.
NPR's Laura Walmsley. Thank you, Laura. You're welcome.
Because so many people aren't selling, we're on track for 2024 to have the fewest existing home sales since 1995. That's almost 30 years ago when the country's population was more than 20 percent smaller than it is now.
Sales of new single-family homes were more than 9% lower than they were a year ago, according to October data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sales dropped more than 17% from a month earlier. Analysts said sales figures were much lower than expected and showed Hurricanes Helene and Milton taking a large toll in the south.
High mortgage rates have hurt affordability, though many large home builders offer buyer incentives to bring down the cost. The median sales price of new houses sold last month was about $437,000. Economists are predicting a small decline in mortgage rates over the next year. Laurel Wamsley, NPR News.
Well, the biggest thing is that Trump is very likely to extend the big tax changes that he pushed through in 2017. That was a pretty sweeping law, and it did lower most people's tax bills. For households that say make $60,000 to $100,000 a year, extending these tax cuts means that those folks get to keep about $1,000 extra dollars a year.
But wealthy people saw the most benefit for those who make more than a million dollars. it means reducing their taxes on average by about $70,000. And there are also big corporate tax cuts as part of that package, too. But all these cuts are expensive. Extending the 2017 law could increase the national debt by more than $4 trillion over the next 10 years. And that really matters.
Less tax revenue coming in means cutting government programs, for example.
Yeah, this is a tax cut that made big headlines, but it only impacts a small part of the labor market, only about 2.5% of all jobs. And many tipped workers, over a third of them, earn so little that they already don't pay federal income tax. So now there aren't too many details on how exactly all of this would work, but eliminating tax on tips would probably lead to some kind of squirrely effects.
For example, say I hire a guy to trim the tree at my house, and that's something I usually pay him $500 to do. Now he might tell me that it costs $300 to trim my tree, but that he expects a $200 tip, knowing that he won't be taxed on that portion of the income. We could see tipping proliferate into places we haven't seen it before.
And employers could also attempt to reclassify employees as tipped workers and drop their pay to the tipped minimum wage. And for that, the federal minimum wage right now is $2.13 an hour. And like the 2017 tax cuts, this would blow another hole in the federal budget. This one would cost us about $100 billion over 10 years. Trump also says he would stop taxing Social Security benefits.
What sort of effects would we see from that? Well, for most current retirees, it wouldn't have any effect. Only about 40% of people who get Social Security pay federal income tax on it. But again, the effects of this change would be huge and it would make things worse for those of us who are still years away from drawing Social Security.
That's because a big chunk of those taxes on Social Security go straight into funding the Social Security Trust Fund. So eliminating these taxes means reducing the money that's available for Social Security. And that's a program that's already at risk.
If no one pays taxes on their Social Security benefits, that fund is going to run out sooner, perhaps two years earlier than it's already on track to do. That is NPR's Laura Walmsley. Laura, thank you. You're welcome.
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