Episode 402: Free Heroin, And Other Ideas That Won't Get You Elected : Planet Money A new tax on financial speculation. Two trillion dollars in new deficit spending. Free heroin for addicts. And other pet ideas from our panel of economists

Episode 402: Free Heroin, And Other Ideas That Won't Get You Elected

Episode 402: Free Heroin, And Other Ideas That Won't Get You Elected

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Heroin. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption

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Mario Tama/Getty Images

Earlier this summer, we assembled five prominent economists from across the political spectrum and gave them a simple task: Identify major economic policies they could all stand behind.

They agreed on a broad economic platform. A platform that would sink any political candidate that supported it. (Here's the show we did on their platform; here's a blog post.)

Today, we talk to those economists again. This time, we hear a bunch of the ideas some of them liked but others shot down — including free heroin for addicts, a new tax on financial speculation, and $2 trillion in new deficit spending on infrastructure projects.

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