Today's headlines:
- WA Supreme Court to consider Let's Go Washington lawsuit challenging the new income tax's referendum clause.
- A new law in Idaho will ban transgender people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Some Idahoans say it will be difficult to enforce.
- Spokane Valley could be the next American city to ban cryptocurrency kiosks amidst a nationwide crackdown.
Plus, "Planet Money" has been making complex economic theories approachable to radio audiences for decades. Now—readers, rejoice!—there's a Planet Money book. SPR's Owen Henderson talks with reporters and authors Alex Mayyasi and Sarah Gonzalez about how you can harness economic factors in your everyday life.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting contributed by Sarah Mizes-Tan, Rachel Sun, Eliza Billingham and Owen Henderson.
The show is hosted and produced by Owen Henderson. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Tuesday, April 7, 2026.
On today’s show, Washington’s so-called “millionaires’ tax” contains a clause that says it can’t be challenged via a special ballot measure called a referendum. One conservative group says that’s unconstitutional.
Plus, some Idahoans are worried the state’s new transgender bathroom law will invite harassment and wonder how it could be enforced without invasive questions.
And do you think economics is boring or that it only affects the cost of living? The team behind NPR’s Planet Money podcast wants you to think again—and they have a new book to help you understand and use those economic forces in your own life.
Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
[FADE OUT THEME]
Washington’s Supreme Court will take up a constitutional challenge to a portion of the state’s new income tax on high earners.
State Government Reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan has more.
SARAH MIZES-TAN: Written into the law is a clause that prevents it from being repealed by voters through a method called a referendum, something that the conservative group Let’s Go Washington says is unconstitutional.
Writers of the tax say it’s a standard move for new taxes in particular because they are deemed necessary to keeping government running.
Brian Heywood, founder of Let’s Go Washington, disagrees.
BRIAN HEYWOOD: “In this case they’re saying we don’t need the money until 2029 at the earliest, it’s clearly not an emergency. They’re just saying anything that we want, anything that we deem necessary, we can protect ourselves from voters.”
SMT: Referendum aside, voters could still weigh in on the new law at the ballot box, it would just be in the form of an initiative instead.
Heywood and his group are expecting a ruling by the end of this month.
In Olympia, I’m Sarah Mizes-Tan.
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OH: An Idaho law that goes into effect in July will make it a crime for transgender people in the state to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
NWPB’s Rachel Sun reports.
RACHEL SUN: The new legislation in Idaho makes it a misdemeanor for someone to knowingly enter a restroom or changing room designated for the opposite sex. A second conviction within five years would carry a felony charge and up to five years in prison.
Proponents of the legislation say it protects women and girls.
Myndie VanHorn is a founding member of the Lewiston-based nonprofit Chroma LCV. She says the legislation encourages harassment — regardless of whether someone is transgender.
MYNDIE VANHORN: “ A butch-presenting female who's dressed in more masculine clothing, you know, with short hair, going into a female restroom can be questioned…”
RS: That term VanHorn uses, “butch,” is generally used to describe a lesbian woman with a more masculine gender presentation.
MV: “...I don't think that there's anything in this bill that is dealing with that.”
RS: The law also faced criticism from some law enforcement officials. Those officials told legislators that there’s no clear way to enforce the law without engaging in questions that quote “could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate.”
In Lewiston, I’m Rachel Sun.
— — —
OH: Spokane Valley could be the next American city to ban cryptocurrency kiosks.
As SPR’s Eliza Billingham reports, cities and states around the U.S. are cracking down on crypto ATMs.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Spokane was one of the first municipalities in the nation to ban crypto kiosks when its city council outlawed them last summer.
Crypto ATMs are often used by scammers to get people—especially older residents—to send them thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars.
According to the FBI, scammers used crypto kiosks to defraud Americans out of more than 300 million dollars in 2025.
This year, Idaho put certain safeguards on the ATMs, like limiting users’ number of transactions each day and requiring kiosks to be registered with the state.
Washington also considered statewide regulations but didn’t pass any this year.
Oregon is one of the handful of states that hasn’t yet considered or passed any guardrails.
Spokane Valley’s council will consider its own citywide ban on the kiosks tonight.
I’m Eliza Billingham, reporting.
— — —
OH: More people say they want an ecologically-friendly alternative to burial and cremation.
But there’s a gap between those who express that desire and those who get their wish.
Jenny Kinsey with our partners at the Mountain West News Bureau reports.
JENNY KINSEY: They’re called green or natural burials. They avoid embalming chemicals, metal caskets, and concrete vaults, instead using simple shrouds, biodegradable coffins, and shallower hand‑dug graves that hasten decomposition.
In a recent survey, the National Funeral Directors Association discovered two-thirds of people say they are interested in a more natural burial, with higher percentages of Millennials and Gen Zers feeling that way.
Kurt Soffee is a funeral director and spokesperson for the association.
KURT SOFFE: “Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada and even Washington and California would be more that have a higher selection of either green burials, cremation or alternatives.” (:12)
JK: Still, only about one in ten deaths actually results in a green burial, according to Soffe.
That’s because of fear of death, a lack of pre-planning, local rules, and limited knowledge of the environmental effects of traditional funerals.
For the Mountain West News Bureau, I’m Jenny Kinsey.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
OH: If you're a public radio fan, you've probably heard of NPR's economics podcast, Planet Money. The team behind the show takes real-world stories and explains the economic factors that shape everything from inflation to the dating market.
One long-time contributor to the show, journalist Alex Mayyasi, joined forces with the Planet Money hosts, including Sarah Gonzalez, to put together a book about those factors and how you can harness them in your life.
It's out today and called, very simply, “Planet Money, A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life.” Sarah and Alex, thanks so much for joining me this morning.
SARAH GONZALEZ: Thanks for having us.
ALEX MAYYASI: So great to be here.
OH: Your subtitle, “A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life,” is a pretty big promise for a 300-some page book.
SG: We deliver. We deliver.
OH: And you do, as someone who's read the book. It gets a little bit at the conceit of the Planet Money podcast itself, though. And so how do you make these ideas that seem unapproachable to lots of people actually digestible or just avoid readers' eyes glazing over?
SG: Yeah, I think for us at Planet Money, the podcast, the book, we think that the economy is not this scary thing that is too complicated to understand. We think that everything from sand, which is the main ingredient in concrete and glass and things like that, to oranges, all of these things, there is some big world behind them, like crazy market forces.
And our mission is to get you to, whenever you see sand, whenever you see a bag of cuties, you will never not think of the book or the podcast and what you learned.
OH: One of the many topics tackled in the book is housing, obviously a huge conversation here in the Northwest. And you all look at the case of the Squamish Nation in British Columbia. And after a drawn-out legal battle, Tribe got back about four blocks of land in Vancouver, and now leaders are developing about 6,000 housing units on those blocks. There's a lot of examples of municipalities attempting to tackle housing shortages. So why this one? What lessons can we draw from it specifically? Why did we choose this for the book?
SG: I love this example because it's like, it really is the story of what happens when cities get out of their own way. The Squamish Nation was able to build as ambitiously as they wanted to, because they didn't have to follow zoning rules, because it was native land that wasn't subject to the zoning rules. It's this great experiment in what happens when you allow that. There's a housing crisis because there's not enough housing and because cities block new housing developments that are anything other than a single family home, usually. It's just such a great thing to kind of be a fly on the wall on and just kind of follow that story. Alex, you can jump in.
AM: Yeah. I went to Vancouver to see the first of the three towers that have been completed by the Squamish Nation. They are very large and impressive, and they're amazing to see. People know that there's a lot of demand for housing, that these places need to build more housing.
But then you go there and you see that these 11 towers on this very small piece of land figured out how to place them around the bridge that cuts through that piece of land. It's just this demonstration of both what the need is for housing, but also if, as Sarah said, cities get out of their own way, just how much ambition is just ready to go to solve the problem. We are holding ourselves back in a really important way.
OH: A refrain I've seen on social media increasingly in recent years is that economics is, and this is a quote from a tweet, I believe, is astrology for men. This is a field that has theories about the invisible hand and animal spirits. How do you deal with what sounds like an increasing skepticism of economics at a time when a lot of the reporting around econ, like about a stock market that seems to often be going up when that doesn't really match what people are feeling in their everyday lives? How do you approach reporting on that and making it accessible to people when what they're hearing and what they're feeling don't seem to line up?
SG: I think a lot of people will say the stock market is not the economy. Some people will say that. I think for us, the economy is everything. In the book, we do say that 100 years ago, if someone were to ask, how's the economy going, people wouldn't know what you even meant by that.
We get into what created the concept of the economy in the first place. We would get into things like how many hours you used to have to work to afford to light a room in your home for one hour as a way to explain what we would now call the cost of living and why things like light and clothes and food have gotten cheaper and cheaper over time, while other things like child care, going to go see a play, have gotten more and more expensive. I think we do meet a lot of people where they are.
The book is broken up into sections that cover everything from love and family to saving and investing to work and career. There's the laws of the office. There's a concept in here which is called Parkinson's law, which is basically the work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
If someone says you have a week to finish that project, it will take a week. If someone says you have a day, it takes a day. We give employers tips like end meetings early. Give people their free time back. You might not actually need the full 60 minutes for that meeting. I think it's really like meet the economy and then we meet you at various stages in your life.
AM: One theme throughout this book is that the field of economics has undergone this transformation over the past 10, 20 years called the credibility revolution. To oversimplify a bit, I think if you go back a few decades, the type of economic work that was really prestigious and valued was that more ivory tower, coming up with theory, drawn on the chalkboard type work that I think people were skeptical of and had some reason to be skeptical of. In recent years, there's been a lot of effort by economists to be a lot more rigorous in terms of going out and finding data, finding natural experiments to test economist theories.
One great and famous example of this is the minimum wage that a lot of economists had thought based on theory would lead to job losses. There was a famous economics paper, one state raises the minimum wage, one state does not.
They look at what happened on both sides of that state border, comparing similar fast food franchises or similar stores on either side of the state border, one where the minimum wage had gone up to see what was the impact where their job losses. They did not really find job losses from the minimum wage going up, at least going up a modest amount.
That's the type of work that you see all over economics and I think has made the field a lot more rigorous. The idea that economists are just kind of throwing around grand theories and are totally ungrounded from our experience, not at all.
There are people going into grocery stores regularly, checking the price of lettuce so then we know how much is inflation. There are people testing their theories all over the world and I think that's made economics over the last 10, 20 years a lot more rigorous and grounded in the real world and data and our own experience.
OH: Alex Mayassi and Sarah Gonzalez are two of the journalists behind the new book, “Planet Money: A Guide To The Economic Forces That Shape Your Life.” Alex and Sarah, thank you so much for joining me.
SG: Thank you.
AM: Thanks so much, Owen.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
OH: SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Sarah Mizes-Tan, Eliza Billingham, Jenny Kinsey and me, Owen Henderson.
I’m also your host and producer. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Thanks for listening.
It’s SPR.
