366: A Better Mousetrap 2008

Ira Glass

Andy's grandfather ran the business, then his father ran the business. They make mousetraps. Victor brand mousetraps with a big red V on them. But also glue traps and electric traps and those humane catch-and-release things and traps that only professionals use. Andy's in charge of the part of the company that develops the new products, and the job suits him. I called him in his office.

Ira Glass

So with all of these people trying to invent a better mousetrap, the dirty secret of trapping mice is mice are really easy to catch. That's why every inventor thinks that he can do it. Catching a mouse is basically playing against a casino where you always win.

The regular, old-fashioned, cheap, little mousetrap, Andy says, will usually catch the mouse in 24 to 48 hours. It will kill it 88% of the time. Other traps that aren't much more expensive have 100% lethality. Mice are easy to kill because mice, unlike rats, are incredibly inquisitive animals.

Ira Glass

So the problem for the mousetrap inventor is the world doesn't need a better mousetrap. You know that old saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat its way to your door?" Not true. Andy makes a traditional mousetrap that sells two for $0.99. It does the job just fine. But most inventors never understand this.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, we have four stories of inventions in a world that doesn't always need or want new ideas. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

We have four stories of ingenuity and heartbreak for you. Act One of our show today, "Mother of Invention," in which we look at an experimental child rearing technique, whose effectiveness you can judge for yourself. Act Two, "Financial Mousetrap," in which we return to our ongoing coverage of the economic crisis, a place where Wall Street invented all kinds of stuff and it turned out the world would have been better off without a lot of it. Act Three, "Everything Must Go," in which a man tries to solve the problem posed by big plastic bags of US currency. Act Four, "The Not-For-Profit Motive." Our own Alex Blumberg explains what happens when our government has to reinvent itself as a bank, and not necessarily a successful bank. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Mother of Invention." So we start with somebody inventing a new way to do something in an area of life where you might not think there could be any new ways to do anything left. Karen Sosnoski tells the story. Her son, Anton, was born with Mosaic Down Syndrome, which is this very rare form of Down Syndrome. Essentially, some of his cells have the extra chromosome that causes Down Syndrome. And the other cells don't.

So as he grows, he could actually end up having all the health risks and challenges of Down Syndrome, or very few of them. There's no way to know. Some kids with MDS look totally normal, but then have all kinds of learning disabilities. Others have all the physical features of a person with Down Syndrome, but then have a high IQ. It's a diagnosis that's so vague, it can drive a parent crazy. And Karen had no idea what the diagnosis would mean for her son's future.

So she started doing some research. She found a Mosaic Down Syndrome website. And on that website, she started reading about a boy named Tim. A boy who, in a bunch of different ways, was not what she was expecting. And whose mom had invented a radical way of dealing with the diagnosis, something Karen had never heard of. Here she is.

Karen Sosnoski

Tim was 13 when I first saw his picture on the Internet. He had geeky, blunt cut bangs and a wide, innocent smile. He had the same diagnosis as my son, Anton, but he had the happy face of an ordinary boy. And when I looked at this photo, my heart raced with hope. Here was a kid I could imagine as my own. a late bloomer, his mom wrote, but so what? He had hobbies and friends. He was a book worm like I am.

To be honest, Tim's bio made me feel less guilty about Anton. Part of me blamed myself for what had happened. Everyone knew advanced maternal age was a major risk factor for having a baby with Down Syndrome, and here I'd waited until 40 to have him. But maybe if I played my cards absolutely right from here on in, he could still turn out just fine.

Tim's mother, Kristy, was kind of like a role model for me. She founded an international support group for parents of kids with Mosaic Down Syndrome. She wanted us to be sure the world gave them a fair shake, and I liked this. But to make this happen for her own son, she did something I could never have imagined, something that shocks people every time I tell them.

For years, she kept her son's diagnosis a secret. She didn't tell his teachers, she didn't tell her neighbors, and, most incredibly, for the first 14 years of his life, she didn't tell Tim. I first heard Kristy talk about her secret at a conference. Then a couple months ago, I left my one-year-old son Anton for the first time and traveled down to Texas to find out more from Kristy and Tim.

How had Tim turned out so well? How much of it was because she'd kept his diagnosis a secret? She told me she didn't start off planning to deceive anyone. When Tim started kindergarten, Kristy did what most parents do. She didn't keep his disability a secret. She explained to the teachers that he had Mosaic Down Syndrome, she asked the teachers to treat him like any other kid, and she crossed her fingers. But it didn't work out as she'd planned. This is Kristy.

Karen Sosnoski

Which could get kind of complicated. She had to talk behind Tim's back and over his head. She had to tell family members never to mention Tim's condition in front of him.

Karen Sosnoski

This is Tim. He's almost 20 now but he doesn't look much older than his picture at 13. It's not super obvious that he has a medical condition, but if you're at all tuned into Down Syndrome, you could probably guess. His eyes have those extra folds and he talks in a slow, careful way like he's having to work to shape his words.

Academically, though, Tim blows any stereotypes about Down Syndrome out of the water. His IQ is 110, higher than the national average. He got A's and B's with no special help at a mainstream school.

But by junior high, Tim was starting to have a hard time fitting in with other kids. He would do weird things like burp, or rock on his heels in class. He'd say inappropriate things, like the time he got so excited about a slasher movie that he confused himself with the main character. "I started shooting people," he told the kids at his lunch table. As you can imagine, he didn't make a lot of friends this way.

Karen Sosnoski

But she couldn't bring herself to tell him the truth. She didn't know if Tim was ready and she didn't feel ready. She said nothing.

Karen Sosnoski

But they didn't. For another six whole months. It seemed so difficult. Here Kristy had to tell Tim that she'd kept the fundamental truth about his identity from him for most of his life. What's more, it seemed that her efforts to protect him might have actually made things worse.

Karen Sosnoski

And just like that, the truth was out. Ironically, what happened next was exactly the opposite of what Kristy had feared. Tim didn't seem angry. He didn't stop trying in school. The diagnosis actually made him more conscious of his strange behaviors, like the rocking on his heels, so he could work harder at controlling them.

Mostly he was relieved. He'd spent so many years feeling like there was something wrong with him that finding out there was wasn't so bad.

In his junior year, Tim came out to his classmates during a presentation on genetics. After that, the kids started cutting him some slack. He wasn't the weird kid anymore. He was the kid with that Mosaic Down thing and you couldn't blame him for that.

Karen Sosnoski

You would think given how things turned out Kristy might have had some regrets about waiting so long to tell Tim the truth. I kept waiting for her to crack or something during our interview, to admit she'd made a mistake, but she didn't, and frankly, I was relieved.

I don't want to cast judgment on Kristy. Tim's a great kid. Whether that's because of what Kristy did or in spite of it, I don't think anyone can say. And anyway, Kristy and Tim have moved on to other issues, like teaching Tim how to balance a checkbook, how to drive, how to get ready to live on his own. And from Tim's point of view, Kristy's got her own learning to do.

Karen Sosnoski

It's funny or maybe just typical. Tim's critical of his mom, but when I ask him how he thinks I should raise Anton, his advice to me is to do just what she did. Let people get to know Anton first before you tell them anything, Tim says to me. Tell Anton when he's a teenager, when he's old enough to handle it.

I know I probably won't do this. After all, Kristy's secrecy didn't protect Tim from pain, which is what I want for my son. So I'm back to square one with no trick to give Anton the perfect future, any more than I could give him those perfect chromosomes. And like any other parent, I'm waiting to see who my son becomes.

Ira Glass

Karen Sosnoski. She's working on a book called, Love in the Time of Brain Tumors.

[MUSIC - "I KNOW WHO I AM" BY BUNNY RUGS]

Ira Glass

Act Two, "Financial Mousetrap." As you've probably heard by now, over the last few years the mortgage industry and the banking industry have been places that were rife with invention. People coming up with all kinds of better mousetraps, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps, and novel kinds of mortgage backed securities, all of which has sent the world's economy into a tailspin these last few weeks.

As part of our ongoing coverage of that mess, we now turn to the politics of all this. Last week on our radio show, we debunked an idea you hear a lot from Democrats these days. That this financial mess can be blamed entirely on Republicans deregulating financial markets. Today we take a look at the other side of the aisle.

This past week it seems to have actually hardened into a point of Republican dogma that the whole financial mess can be blamed on the Democrats. On Wednesday of this past week, I attended a McCain Palin rally in Lehigh, Pennsylvania. And I was amazed that nearly every person I talked to in this Republican crowd was quite certain who the culprits were behind our whole financial mess.

Ira Glass

In this Republican version of the bailout story, there was a pivotal moment in 2005 when Republicans could have prevented a lot of the mess that we're in now, where they tried to regulate, where they tried to fix it, but the Democrats stopped them.

And the key to the whole crisis, they say, was the mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. They say Fannie and Freddie are at the center of the whole thing. Here's John McCain at the second presidential debate on Tuesday.

Ira Glass

This is Charles Duhigg who covers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other parts of the subprime crisis for the New York Times. He says that it was not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but Wall Street, international investors, brokers, and banks who created and popularized subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie didn't get involved in a serious way until relatively late.

Ira Glass

Nonetheless, Republicans say that if they'd been allowed to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2005, as they'd wanted, it would have prevented much of the current mess.

Ira Glass

Another thing that's come up as a political talking point is the question of who associated with who. And Senator McCain said in Pennsylvania this week that executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised Senator Obama.

Ira Glass

The McCain Campaign also has an ad linking Barack Obama to an executive at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Ira Glass

In general, Charles Duhigg says, it's true that Republicans have tried to rein in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for years. And it's true that, in general, Democrats have urged Fannie and Freddie to take on more loans and riskier loans and push for loose spending and low interest rates that led to the housing boom. And it's also true that Republicans fought regulation of the financial markets. But he says, none of that gets to the overall truth of what happened.

Ira Glass

Charles Duhigg of the New York Times. On Friday, the McCain Campaign released a brand new ad that they say will run nationally linking Democrats to the financial crisis. It's along the lines that we've talked about. The ad says, "Congressional liberals fought for risky subprime loans. Congressional liberals fought against more regulation. Then the housing market collapsed, costing you billions."

Ira Glass

Coming up, the underground economy comes up with its own plan to lose lots and lots of money and in their case it means cash money. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Make a Better Mousetrap. We have stories of people trying to make inventions in the face of a world that does not care, does not necessarily need or want what they're making. We've arrived at Act Three of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Everything Must Go." In the early 1990s, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh was researching the underground economies in the city of Chicago. He wanted to find out how people made money in the cash economy, off the books. And he spent a lot of time in the poorer areas of the city where people were inventing ways to make their livings.

He hung out with women selling food from their homes, car mechanics who ran their business from an alleyway, store owners who hosted late night gambling and dice games. None of them, of course, was reporting their income to the government. Then there was Nellie, who had a problem that not many people faced. Here's Sudhir.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Nellie Thomas was a hustler who worked in and around his South Side neighborhood and over the course of his life, he was a pimp, drug dealer, car thief, extorter, jackroller, prostitute and burglar. I met Nellie because I wanted to know how people bought guns in Chicago.

By the time I met him, Nellie had made a name for himself not because he sold guns, but because he sold ammunition. It's illegal to buy handguns in the city of Chicago. For guns and ammo, people usually have to trek out to the suburbs, which isn't so easy. Most gun stores are in white suburbs and the Black people in Nellie's community don't like to go there, so they buy guns in their own neighborhood for the most part.

Now in the South Side where Nellie lived, if you have money and a little patience, you can probably find a gun within a few days. But it's a lot harder to find ammo. Nellie understood this and he capitalized on the demand by becoming an ammunitions trader.

Nellie would drive to the suburbs or he'd hire people to go there and buy boxes of ammo for a few dollars each. Back in his own neighborhood, it might cost you $100 for a box. He sold bullets to gang members, robbers, drug dealers, prostitutes and just regular people who liked to have a weapon around.

And when the gang wars heated up in the mid- to late-90s, people bought several boxes at a time and Nellie was flush with cash. "Good money. No hassle," he'd like to say. "Cops don't care much about me."

When I started hanging out with Nellie, he was becoming bothered by his success. He was making so much money that he didn't know what to do with it. His needs were pretty minimal. He had a beat up old truck that he fixed himself. And his parents had long ago paid off the mortgage on the bungalow where he was born and where he still lived. The house was a kind of modest, two-story and basement and backyard design that you could see all over Chicago.

Nellie was hardly a big consumer. He liked to listen to a pocket-sized radio. And although he had a fancy TV, he usually watched a little black-and-white in his bedroom. And he never traveled. For 20 years, he'd been eating at the same soul food restaurant every day. He wore the same three or four pairs of clothes. And almost every day you could see him walking or playing golf-- "Very badly," he said-- in the park next to his house.

Nellie also lived in a world of cash. Like most underground traders, he couldn't take large sums of money to the bank, and for small sums he simply didn't trust banks. So he put his cash in mattresses and in large black trash bags that he hid inside his house, or that he buried outside in the backyard.

But Nellie was losing sleep because he was running out of places to keep his cash. He worried because there were other people living in his home, a girlfriend and her two children, a niece, his grandmother, an aunt, and a brother with his girlfriend and two kids. Nellie was scared he'd be robbed and so he began staying up all night with a big shotgun next to his window.

His anxiety grew so bad that he started taking medication and drinking more. He was restless and fidgety and he said he was yelling at his family for no good reason. Sometimes he'd call me early in the morning. We both knew many of the local gang leaders and he wanted me to tell him whether they were planning to raid his house.

He also asked me strange questions, like whether squirrels could smell paper money and whether they would dig in his backyard and eat his holdings. He admitted he was going to the hospital nearly every two weeks due to panic attacks.

At first I wondered why Nellie didn't just give his money away to his family, or to a charity, but it wasn't so simple for him. He said he was ashamed of how he'd earned it. He didn't want to tell people that he sold ammo to gang members for a living. I suppose Nellie could have bought some property or found a way to launder his money but that really wasn't in his character. Nellie didn't think in terms of the future, at least not in that way. And because he was very depressed and his job was so dangerous, Nellie didn't think he'd live long enough to spend his money on anything worthwhile.

One morning I went to Nellie's house and found him in tears. No one was home and he was lying on his bed with his money all over the room. He kept saying he couldn't take it anymore and he wanted a way out.

I noticed a few large bills but there were mostly piles and piles of one and five dollar bills crumpled up like waste paper. He was pleading with me to help him to do something with all of his money, which he estimated was about $15,000 or $20,000.

He asked me, "What do your people do when they have all the stuff that they can't use?" I'm Indian, but I assumed he meant middle-class folks. "Well," I said, "when my family has a lot of stuff, we give it away or we have a garage sale." His eyes lit up. "That's it. I'm going to have a garage sale." I wasn't sure I understood what he meant. "Let me get this straight. You're going to sell your money?" He grinned, stood up, hugged me, and said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you for getting me out of this mess."

So I made myself a cup of coffee, sat on the couch, and watched as Nellie put some of the money inside a television. Then he dumped a handful of bills inside a vacuum cleaner. Then he shoved bags full of cash inside his couch cushions and in a mattress. He picked up a basketball, examined it, looked over to me, and agreed when I shook my head, no.

And then with my help, he dragged everything out to the front lawn. He ran into the garage and came back with a hammer, nails, and cardboard. He made several for sale signs and tacked them on to the trees and on the windshield of his car.

He was so happy. He was running around like a child building a tree house. For his final gesture, Nellie ran back inside the house, grabbed two chairs and a six pack of beer and brought them outside. He told me that I couldn't tell anyone what he just did.

I exchanged my coffee for a beer and sat on Nellie's well-manicured front lawn unsure of exactly what was supposed to transpire. We sat on the lawn for about 10 minutes. I was getting a little agitated. My cell phone rang. Nellie looked at me and said, "Remember. You can't say what's in them things. You can't mention the money."

It was a friend of mine, Autry. He had three children and he had been looking for a job for about a year and now he was living off food stamps and was about three months late on his car and rent payments. Autry could definitely have used the money not to mention the nice TV set sitting in front of my feet.

"I'm at a garage sale," I told Autry, checking with Nellie to see if that was OK. Nellie nodded approval. "You should come over," I said checking with Nellie again, who didn't nod. "Autry, listen. You should really come over and see if anything interests you." Autry asked me why the hell would I want him to come to a garage sale when I knew he didn't have any money. I kept telling him to come anyway. Nellie began shaking his head. I sank in my chair, lowered my voice and told Autry to call me if he found some cash and wanted to buy some appliances, and then I hung up.

Nellie and I waited for what seemed like hours though my watch said only 20 minutes had passed. Every so often I asked him again whether he really wanted to do this. He would just stare out and tell me that he'd never been more sure about anything in his life. "I feel like the Lord gave me a sign," he said.

Just then a woman came by and looked at the couch. I leaned forward as if to pounce out of my chair and I could see that Nellie was doing the same. "Nice couch," she said. "Yeah," said Nellie. "You ain't never going to find another one like it."

"That's right, ma'am," I chimed in. "This is certainly a one-of-a-kind couch. You can take my word for it." "$20," she said. "For a couch?" said Nellie. "Ma'am, I need to make a little more than that." "But, sir," she said, trying to be polite, "it ain't worth more than that."

"Ma'am," I said, "I think on that count you are mistaken. It is certainly worth more." "Hey, shut up," Nellie yelled at me. The woman watched as Nellie and I began bickering. "You two need help," she said, and walked away.

As the morning turned to afternoon, more people came. The first successful sale was to a man pushing a shopping cart. He eyed the vacuum cleaner.

"What do you want for it?" he asked. "Give me $15," said Nellie. "$15. Are you nuts?" I said. I couldn't believe Nellie would charge so little. Nellie shot me a glance and I put my head in my hands.

"$15, my man, and it's all yours," Nellie said calmly. "All right. That'll work," the man said. He paid Nellie with some bills and a lot of loose change. Then he grinned and said within an hour he could sell the vacuum cleaner down at the thrift store for $30, double his take, just like that.

"You might want to take it home first," I told the man as he started walking away. "Just clean it out. Put a fresh bag in. Try it out. Take it apart, maybe." "Home?" the man said, looking at me. "Boy, are you blind or something? I live out of this cart. I live under the EL tracks. Home? [BLEEP] I ain't got no home. [BLEEP] What am I going to do with a vacuum cleaner?"

A Saturday morning church service must've ended because a line of black women wearing beautiful dresses and hats was coming our way. They looked at the items on the lawn and liked what they saw. One played with the television set, hitting it every so often while a few others sat on the couch.

"A little soft and, well, not so even," one said to me and Nellie. "These cushions are a little old, aren't they? How old are they?" "Oh, they're fairly new," I said. "Made fresh this morning actually." "Boy," Nellie yelled at me. This time he threw some beer on me.

"Don't mind him, ma'am. He's not the God-fearing sort. You understand." The woman cast a disparaging look my way and said, "Mm hm, I understand and Jesus do, too. OK, I'll take this couch. Probably throw these cushions away. The other parts are fine but I can't have people sitting on these raggedy things all day." "I would rethink that strategy," I shouted. My voice crackled and beer spilled down my shirt. "I'd probably not throw them away just yet."

"What he means to say," Nellie interrupted, "is that you may want to take it home first. Don't do anything so quick. You know, take your time." "I'm not sure there's really anything to think about," a second woman said, feeling the cushions stuffed with America's legal tender. "Yunella, you could replace these for $5. Ain't no need wasting your time with these cushions. Smell like cat piss anyway. Just throw them out."

"Oh, lord, I'd really think twice about that," I said, bending over in frustration. I was starting to feel delirious. "Why don't you go inside for a while," Nellie said, pushing me over and making me fall on the ground. I got up and walked toward the house.

"What is wrong with that young man?" I could hear the woman ask Nellie. "Oh, nothing that a little religion couldn't fix," Nellie said. Then he told them, "Listen, the truth is, ma'am, that I'm trying to buy my family all new furniture before they get home and I really need to sell this stuff and get rid of it so that I can surprise my wife."

"Oh, isn't that sweet," one of the women said. "Well, I'll take the television." "Yes," another one chimed in, "and I could use an extra bed." "I'd keep that mattress," I shouted from inside the house. "Don't throw away the mattress, please." "That is the strangest young man I have ever seen," one of the women said. "Yes," said Nellie. He twirled his finger in little circles next to his head. "He has a little bit of trouble, you know."

The woman then turned to me and spoke very slowly. "You be careful now, young man. And beer probably isn't very good for your health." "Neither is throwing away that mattress, ma'am."

Nellie asked the women for their address and he loaded the bed into the truck and drove off. I drank the rest of the beers and stared out into a warm blue sky. Nellie sold almost everything on the lawn that afternoon. The only thing that was left was a torn up pillow that couldn't attract anyone's interest. I tried for a while to find the people who had bought some of Nellie's furniture and appliances, but I didn't have any luck, so I'm not really sure if any of them found the cash.

Nellie didn't have anymore garage sales. He was still making money by selling ammo and he still kept the money in those big black garbage bags. He just stored them all in the attic where nobody ever went.

And Nellie's depression didn't end. For most people, all that money would have been a sign of success, but for Nellie it was just a bunch of paper that he couldn't get rid of. His problem was that he liked his job. He liked the fact that he worked and that he earned a living. The part he didn't like was the actual profits. They made him feel ashamed and he had to hide them from almost everyone he knew and loved.

A few years later, Nellie's girlfriend left him, his kids married and moved out, and there was no one else living in his house. He started going to church to ease his depression. It wasn't really helping, he said. But he did start talking a lot about charity and how he wanted to do something good for people. And he did it in his own peculiar way.

Nellie would leave a bag of money on a street corner or late at night he would quietly put some cash in front of a homeless person sleeping outside in the park. He would tell me that it was the only pure thing you can do on this earth, help people without taking credit for it.

I know of only one person who actually found Nellie's money, my friend Darrell. Nellie had stuffed $800 into the bottom part of a toaster oven and he left it near a dumpster where Darrell picked it up. Darrell figured some drug dealer had hidden the money there so his wife wouldn't find it and she accidentally threw the toaster out.

A day before his 45th birthday, Nellie was found dead inside his house. He'd had a massive stroke. No one was quite sure exactly how long he'd been lying there. I went to his funeral. Not many people were there and I felt sad for Nellie. I hoped that maybe the homeless man who had bought the vacuum cleaner would come pay his respects, but he didn't show up. In the middle of the room there was a casket but it was closed. Nellie's body was too decomposed for us to view.

In the end, Nellie's family got all his money when they cleaned out his house. That's when I finally met them. They told me that they'd known all along the thing that Nellie was ashamed for them to find out, how he made his money. But they could never figure out a way to tell him that it didn't matter.

Ira Glass

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. His most recent book is called, Gang Leader For a Day. It tells the story of the neighborhood in and around the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. He's a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

[MUSIC - "EVERYTHING MUST GO" BY WEAKERTHANS]

Ira Glass

Act Four, "The Not-For-Profit Motive." In responding to the current financial crisis, our government has had to invent all kinds of better mousetraps to fix the mess. With that in mind, one quick follow up to something I have here. It was on last week's radio show.

Last week NPR'S economics correspondent, Adam Davidson, reported on our program that one of these inventions, the Wall Street Bailout Bill included, buried deep inside, something called stock injection that had a number of advantages over the original bailout plan. The way it worked is that rather than buy a bank's toxic assets, stock injection would essentially buy stock in the bank. Infuse the bank with cash that way.

The banking industry and government officials mostly seemed to hate this idea a week ago, but if you've followed the news of this last week, treasury officials have now declared in the last couple days that they might actually try the stock injection plan. That would be in addition to their original plan of buying toxic assets. The advantage of the stock injection is that they can do it quicker.

With this action and many others recently, the government is reinventing itself, doing certain things that it has never done before. Alex Blumberg had been trying to figure out exactly what that means.

Alex Blumberg

Here's how the US government usually behaves. It borrows money, in the form of selling treasury bonds, and then it spends that money on stuff for the country, Black Hawk helicopters, or cancer research, an occasional bridge to nowhere, stuff in the budget.

But with the passage of the bailout bill, it's going to be doing something entirely different with that money. It's going to be buying up mortgage related assets from banks. And that's not all. Just this week it announced it would start lending the money it raises directly to individual companies in something called the commercial paper market.

Brad Setser is an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations and he used to work in the Treasury Department. NPR's Adam Davidson and I sat down with him a couple of days ago, and he told us that by doing all these new things, the United States has started acting like something completely different than a government.

Alex Blumberg

The US government doesn't want to do that because making the most possible money means, in effect, buying these assets at the lowest prices possible. And there's a problem with that.

Alex Blumberg

OK, let's review that list. Indonesia, leadership deposed. Argentina, leadership deposed. Thailand, leadership forced to resign. Russia, leadership returned to authoritarian roots.

Alex Blumberg

In other words, people are saying, I don't want to put my money in stocks that are plunging or in bonds of companies that might go out of business or in any country that doesn't happen to have the most powerful economy on the earth. No. I want my money in the one safe place I can think to put it, US treasuries.

And this is another way the US government is different from a typical business. The more it screws things up, the more it mismanages its own economy, the more people want to lend it money.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our show. He's also one of the people putting together NPR's daily Planet Money podcast. You can find that by Googling Planet Money or going to the iTunes store.

Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Thea Chaloner, Sam Hallgren, Seth Lind, and PJ Vote.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free or sign up for our free weekly podcast, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management over sight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia who I walked in on this week in his office.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This America Life.