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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, July 29th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shemitah Basu.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That massive infrastructure bill making its way through Congress just cleared a key hurdle in the Senate, though it's not yet a done deal. Now, there's a big sticking point in this debate about the IRS. Republicans are pushing back on giving the agency more money to go after tax sheets.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Who the IRS targets for audits is a big deal. And a piece on that in The Atlantic, quote our guest. It's by Dorothy Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth and a law professor at Emory University.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: You might expect the IRS to focus on the richest taxpayers. But I tell you that's not the case. The low-income taxpayers that are most likely to be audited are those who seek the earned income tax credit, which is a tax credit for low-income wage earners.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The typical earned income tax credit recipient makes about $20,000 a year. So these Americans are not represented by the best tax lawyers in America. They don't have tax lawyers. So they're easy prey for the IRS to go after when they are auditing Americans.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: The earned income tax credit is complicated to file for and easy to mess up. I say this hits black Americans especially hard. Race is a really interesting component of this. The IRS does not collect statistics on who they audit by race. So they tend to say since we don't collect statistics on race we can possibly be discriminating on the basis of race.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: But what research has shown is in fact black Americans who file the earned income tax credit are more likely to be audited even though almost half of earned income tax credit claimants are white. There's really a targeting of Black Americans.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: But as I've said before, systemic racism always finds a way, and it's certainly finding a way, with audits of low-income taxpayers.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The number of words a child knows is linked to their ability to learn and express themselves. Think of it this way. The more words you know, the easier it is to communicate and learn for yourself.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: For a long time, a lot of people believed children of more educated parents tend to hear more words and have a more extensive vocabulary. But a new study paints a more nuanced picture.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The Washington Post cites a recent paper written by researchers at UC Berkeley. Their work looks at the impact of financial stress and income inequality. They found that those things affect how much caregivers talk to their kids.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: When people are dealing with money stress, they're less likely to interact with their children, which means those kids don't hear as many words. In this study, researchers asked parents with three-year-olds to think about financial scarcity.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Some people thought about horrible situations like a house fire requiring extensive repairs or a stock market crash. Others were encouraged to consider problems with no connection to money, like running out of fruit.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Researchers then watched these parents with their kids, and the ones who were prompted to think about money problems talked significantly less to their children and used fewer word types.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: As the lead researcher says, it's not that people who are struggling financially can raise kids with big vocabularies. The point is the importance of providing parents with the resources they need to spend quality time having conversations with their children.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: There are a lot of stories about how the real estate market is hot right now. But for families in America living in public housing, many of them aren't thinking about bidding wars or realtors. They just hope the plumbing keeps working.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: We spoke with Vox reporter Jerusalem Demsis about just how bad it is for people who live in this type of housing. Public housing is in disrepair.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsis: What we're seeing across the country are buildings that aren't up to fire safety codes. We're seeing buildings that have lead paint in the walls, which is really dangerous for especially young children growing up and can experience long-term health issues, including cognitive decline.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: And it's really a situation that is at the feet of the federal government.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsis: Substandard living conditions for residents of public housing means that they are constantly living in dire straits.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsis: When you come home and your house is a mess, that can affect your mental health. But it's to the nth degree when it comes to public housing in certain places. It's not just a situation where you don't like how things look. It's that things are actually dangerous.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsis: You can live in fear that if a fire were to break out, you could die. In Minneapolis a couple years ago, five people died in a building that was not up to the standards of fire safety that we set out for public housing buildings.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The Biden administration wants to spend about $40 billion to shore up public housing. That may sound like a big number but a few experts and policymakers say given the system current problems that proposal may fall short by tens of billions of dollars.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Okay, so this week, Olympic fencing is going on. The outfits are a little strange, as they look sort of like a combination between a unitard and a hazmat suit with that face covering.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Well, in this sport, the concept should be pretty straightforward. Two people pick up these swords and they just go at it. So it might be surprising to learn that the sport had a big problem. Fencers refusing to fight.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yes, that's exactly it. The Wall Street Journal explains that for decades, major fencing matches would have these long stretches where fencers would sort of dance around and not really attack each other.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: In fact, in one infamous match, the fencers actually put down their weapons for several minutes. And there are a couple strategies for why they would do this, but there weren't any rules to stop them. And the sport could be super boring to watch because of this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Fencing's international leadership came up with the unwillingness to fight rule. It was introduced in 2019. So this is the first Olympics under the new rule.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Now fencers who don't attack, they get penalized. Fencers tell the journal that this rule has transformed the sport. It makes it much more exciting to watch.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As one American Olympian says, nobody wants to watch two fencers stand still.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: If you want to follow fencing or any other sport, we're partnering with NBC Olympics throughout the game so you can find stories, results, and videos, along with lots of other great journalism, all on the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: We'll talk to you again tomorrow.
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