Hi "Make Me Smart" fans! 

You'll still get stories from Kai Ryssdal and Kimberly Adams, but we're going to start including more Marketplace reporting to make you smarter on the news and the economy. 

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It's never too early to talk about taxes. Many provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, one of the signature achievements of the first Donald Trump administration, expire at the end of 2025. After promising voters major tax cuts, President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans are likely to move quickly to renew key provisions, including higher standard deductions and cutting individual income tax rates. 

Consensus is critical. Republicans will hold even slimmer majorities in the House and Senate in 2025 than they did in 2017. So party unity is a must to pass tax policy, and there are still some sticky issues up for debate, like a $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, which Republicans in high-tax states like California and New York don't want. 

What will it cost? That's a trillion-dollar question. In theory, tax cuts can indirectly "pay for themselves" if they spur economic growth. However, they almost never do so. The 2017 tax cuts didn't trigger enough economic growth to make up for the government's lost revenue.

Republicans must decide how much they're willing to add to the deficit for any tax cuts they pass and whether to cut government welfare programs like Medicaid or use tariffs to offset debt. 

If you subscribe to the music streaming giant Spotify, you’ve probably received what has become something akin to an end-of-year tradition: your Spotify Wrapped playlist.

That’s when Spotify tells you the artists and songs and genres you listened to most over the past 12 months . Then it's up to you whether to publicly disclose on social media that, yes, your top artist is Captain & Tennille and yes, you listened to 3,500 minutes of yacht rock in July.

Because we got the last jobs report for calendar 2024 on Friday, we thought it would be fitting to create our own version of Spotify Wrapped for the American labor market — the songs that captured the ebbs and flows of the workforce we devote so much coverage to. The perfect playlist for plugging away at your job.

If you are planning to spend money online this holiday season, stay vigilant against a multitude of scams that range from fake delivery texts to ads for nonexistent products. Now is the time to be especially careful when a deal looks too good to be true.

Experts warn that we should be particularly cautious if we are among the  100 million Americans expected to shop directly on social media.

“A lot of those advertisements are essentially fake brands which are being marketed,” said Abhishek Karnik, director of threat research and response at McAfee.

Watch out for fake celebrity endorsements generated by artificial intelligence, he said, along with sales on hot items that seem too good to be true and retailers asking for cryptocurrency or gift cards as payment.

Because often, “the product doesn’t exist, it doesn’t ever get delivered to you. Or if it does get delivered, it could be of substandard quality,” Karnik said.

According to the AARP, a Marketplace sponsor, about  82% of consumers have fallen victim to a scam in the past year.

Tony Wagner and Ellen Rolfes wrote and edited this newsletter. Kimberly Adams reported our top story about tax cuts and holiday scams. Matt Levin reported our story on the labor market wrapped.