The Impact

Oct 03 2022 34 ep. 12k
The Impact Podcast artwork

In Washington, DC, the story often ends when Congress passes a law. For us, that’s where the story begins. We examine the consequences of what happens when powerful people act — or fail to act. This season, Jillian Weinberger explores the big ideas from the 2020 presidential candidates: how their ideas worked, or didn’t work, in other places or at other times. Produced by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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40 Acres: Reaching reconciliation

Oct 03 2022 28 mins  
What good are piecemeal reparations? From Georgetown University, where school leadership once sold enslaved people, to Evanston, Illinois, where redlining kept Black residents out of homeownership, institutions and local governments are attempting to take reparations into their own hands. But do these small-scale efforts detract from the broader call for reparations from the federa

40 Acres: The old Jim Crow

Oct 03 2022 42 mins  
Why slavery? Marxist scholar Adolph Reed argues that Jim Crow — not enslavement — is the defining experience for Black Americans today. Reed recounts his childhood in the segregation-era South in his book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives. Fabiola speaks with Reed about his experience, his argument that reparations aren’t necessarily a healing balm, and what policies and

40 Acres: $14 trillion and no mules

Oct 03 2022 44 mins  
Paying the price. One of the typical questions asked during conversations about reparations is how to pay for them. Fabiola talks with economist William “Sandy” Darity and folklorist Kirsten Mullen about how reparations could be executed. The husband-and-wife team lays out a comprehensive framework in their book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twe

40 Acres: The original promise

Oct 03 2022 49 mins  
Fabiola Cineas talks with Nkechi Taifa, the founder and director of the Reparation Education Project, about the history of the fight for reparations in America. Though they came to the forefront during the 2020 election in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, activists have been fighting for repayment for slavery since the practice was abolished. This is part of 40 Acres, a four-pa

The Toll

Jun 10 2020 25 mins  
In this bonus, chat episode of The Impact, Jillian is joined by Vox's Matt Yglesias and Course Correction's Nelufar Hedayat to talk about how the data collected on Covid-19 deaths will help shape our world, now and in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Where the US already has a border wall

Feb 19 2020 32 mins  
Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are known as “Ambos Nogales” — “both Nogaleses.” The city straddles the border of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. For a long time, a hole-riddled chain-link fence ran along that border. Residents could cross back and forth with ease. But in 1995, the federal government replaced the chain-link fence with a wall. Over time, that wall has b

Free tuition is not enough

Feb 12 2020 26 mins  
Free college tuition seems like a solution to so many problems. After all, the price of tuition is the No. 1 reason students give for leaving school. And when students don’t finish, they can’t access the many benefits of a college degree. That’s why several presidential candidates have proposed some version of a free college program. But in Kalamazoo, Michigan, free college i

Family Dollar(s)

Feb 05 2020 20 mins  
Natasha Razouk wants to give her 7-year-old the best possible life. She buys big boxes of fresh tomatoes at Costco, and she gets her daughter warm boots, a good coat, and school supplies each year. But all that is expensive. Natasha’s daughter grows out of clothes quickly, and she needs books and health care and day care. That’s why the Canadian government gives every parent,

Saving Private Health Care

Jan 31 2020 29 mins  
Janet Feldman has been paying for private insurance for years. She does so even though Australia has a robust public insurance option. But when she was diagnosed with a serious illness, her doctor told her not to use the private insurance she was paying for. She stuck to public insurance — and she’s very glad she did, because using the private system in Australia can have some

How Taiwan got Medicare-for-All

Jan 29 2020 31 mins  
In the early 1990s, the government of Taiwan decided to try an experiment. In just nine months, they completely revolutionized their health care system, covering every Taiwanese citizen through a single-payer program. It’s a system that looks very similar to the Medicare-for-all proposals from presidential candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Vox health car