Idaho Pulse Podcasts

Conservative legislators lost seats and four counties shifted — and the episode reads that as a warning rather than a verdict. The discussion runs from Idaho’s $3.6 billion debt and a budget doubled in seven years to the dairy industry’s reliance on illegal labor, Micron’s $15 billion fab and the taxes it doesn’t pay, the state’s grocery tax, H-1B visas in the Treasure Valley,...

A pre-election run through the Idaho fights on the table: a biannual pork report putting identified state waste at over $2 billion — enough, the episode argues, to abolish property taxes outright — a grocery tax credit sold as a tax cut, breaks handed to data centers and Micron, a state budget that doubled in seven years, the savings case for school choice, protests...

Two ballot items anchor this episode: Proposition 1, the abortion initiative, and HJR4, which would move Idaho’s drug law out of the initiative process. The discussion tracks the $9.7 million cited as flooding in on both sides, argues a simple-majority threshold invites out-of-state proxy wars, and reads a trip to Spain as a cautionary tale about planned economies. Also here: a $2 billion waste...

Four weeks out from Idaho’s 2026 election, this episode works through Prop 1, the abortion ballot measure, and the objections to its undefined viability standard, its silence on parental consent, and who could perform abortions under it. Then: a new 44-page Pork Report on state and local government waste, an Econ 101 case that barriers to entry rather than big companies drive up gas,...

This episode runs the Idaho fights shaping the stretch before Election Day: Prop 1’s bid to undo the state’s abortion trigger law and the out-of-state money pouring into that campaign, access politics at the Statehouse and the lobbyists buying it, and a new pork report cataloging billions in waste, fraud, and abuse — from $72 million to teach teachers to teach reading to hundreds...

This episode covers the case for disciplined, diversified index investing. It explains why stocks have built real wealth about three and a half times faster than bonds after inflation, and how owning more than 13,000 companies through four funds avoids betting on anyone’s genius. It also covers why a five-year bond “war chest” lets investors ride out crashes without selling. The discussion then turns...

This episode runs from culture to cash: the case that American culture is being diluted, the American Dream as its author defined it in the 1930s, Coolidge’s tax cuts set against FDR’s New Deal, a bleak set of numbers on Gen Z and student debt, AI as equalizer or divider, and an Econ 101 breakdown of inflation — why gas leads, why wages lag,...

Three fights in one episode: Proposition 1, the November ballot measure the episode argues would push Idaho’s abortion law past where it stood before Dobbs; a Charlie Kirk memorial on the Capitol steps, where a heckling crowd across the street becomes the proof that the message landed; and a full economics lesson on the “curse of machinery,” running from the tractor to Carnegie’s Bessemer...

Idaho’s kindergarten vaccine exemption rate has climbed to 17.5% — the highest in the country and well above neighboring Utah’s 12.7%. From there: $4.6 billion in continuous appropriations that never face a legislative vote, elective continuous spending up nearly 600% in five years, a teachers’ union insurance shortfall claim, Micron’s $50 billion plant and the 2008 tax cap that could shield most of its...

Idaho’s Prop 1 abortion ballot measure dominates this episode: targeted voter-registration mail, well-funded pro-abortion ad campaigns, and the warning that complacency — not public opinion — is what could pass it in a pro-life state. The Lindsey Clancy trial raises hard questions about the insanity defense and a fix-it-with-a-pill culture. Then an Economics 101 segment on consumer choice: utility, inflation’s income and substitution effects,...

This episode sounds the alarm on a federal plan it says would bring fuel-rod reprocessing and a third of the nation’s nuclear waste to the INL, above the Snake River Aquifer, then weighs that fear against the case for nuclear power. From there: Idaho Power’s rate hike and cloud-seeding doubts, Idaho’s claimed 40% dependence on federal dollars, evidence that school choice lifts public-school students...

This episode runs through Idaho’s fastest-moving fights: license-plate flock cameras and the Fourth Amendment privacy questions they raise, a local-government transparency story out of Lava Hot Springs, and the case for tariffs over federal income tax. It covers the labor market, immigration, and Prop 1, the ballot measure that would roll back Idaho’s abortion trigger law. The back half is a free-market economics lesson...