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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

This episode turns basic supply-and-demand economics loose on Idaho’s biggest fights: the abortion measure likely headed for the November ballot, price controls and the minimum wage, cheap immigrant farm labor and depressed wages, and the tax subsidies used to lure Micron to the Treasure Valley. The through-line is the seen and the unseen — how policies with obvious, well-publicized winners quietly hurt the workers,...