June 25, 2017
Takata Corp. CEO Shigehisa Takada speaks during a press conference in Tokyo, Monday, as the Japanese air bag maker announces filing for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo and the U.S., The company has been under financial pressure from lawsuits and recall costs related to its of defective air bag inflators.
Shizuo Kambayashi/AP
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Long crippled by lawsuits and recall costs over its faulty air bags, Takata, the Japanese auto parts maker, filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan and the U.S. on Sunday.
Takata is on the hook for billions of dollars to banks and automakers, which have been covering the replacement costs of tens of millions of the recalled air bag inflators.
The company plans to sell what’s rest of its operations to the rival U.S. auto parts supplier, Key Safety Systems, for $1.588 billion.
Automakers will be able to recover some costs from Takata’s remaining assets, but “experts say the companies still must fund a significant portion of the recalls themselves,” reports The Associated Press.
It’s the largest safety recall in automotive history. Worldwide, 100 million inflators have been recalled, 69 million of them in the U.S., affecting 42 million vehicles by 19 different automakers, according to the wire service.
Takata’s air bag inflators are blamed for rupturing and spewing dangerous debris into a vehicle’s cabin, as NPR’s Sonari Glinton reported.
In January, the auto parts maker pleaded guilty to concealing the defect in millions of its air bags as the Two-Way reported earlier this year.
In that settlement, as NPR’s Bill Chappell noted,
“Takata agreed to pay $1 billion over air bag fraud; three of the company’s executives were also criminally charged. That total included $125 million that’s earmarked as restitution to people who are physically injured by defective air bag systems.”
At the time, the defective air bags were linked to at least 16 deaths, including 11 in the U.S.
And U.S. lawmakers have criticized Takata’s slow pace of addressing the recalls. As Bill reported last month, “As of late April, they say, all of the auto makers in today’s settlement had completed less than a third of their air-bag related recalls.”
“There are not very many airbag makers,” Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs tells NPR. “So a lot of these recalled vehicles have not been fixed, the airbags don’t exist for them to be fixed yet.”
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NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas about how to balance the need for health care with the need to reduce the federal budget deficit.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We’re going to turn back to the health care bill presented by Senate Republicans last week. They say the plan will cut costs and stabilize insurance markets. Yesterday, we heard from Lynn Cooper of Pennsylvania’s Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association, which represents facilities that treat substance abuse. She was particularly concerned about the proposed caps on Medicaid, the national program that pays for health care for people with low incomes. She said it would be devastating at a time when the nation is struggling to contain a crisis of opioid abuse.
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LYNN COOPER: The loss of Medicaid expansion will be like the bottom dropping out for thousands of Pennsylvania citizens and their families.
MARTIN: Today, we wanted to get perspective from a different vantage point from someone who’s primarily concerned about the size of the federal budget and the federal deficit. Maya MacGuineas is president of the committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. It says it’s a nonpartisan organization focused on fiscal responsibility in government. She also chairs a group called The Campaign to Fix the Debt. And she’s with us now. Maya, thanks so much for joining us.
MAYA MACGUINEAS: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: So let’s talk about why you and others who share your perspective believe that restraining the cost of entitlement programs, of which Medicaid is one, is so important. Why does that matter?
MACGUINEAS: So right now, we have a federal debt that’s the highest it’s ever been since World War II. That affects our economy. It affects wages. It lowers our standard of living. So we need to get control of the national debt. The fastest drivers of the debt come from the aging of the population and growing health care costs. So focusing on cost control of health care and our Medicare and Medicaid programs will give us more freedom in the budget so that we’re not borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
MARTIN: As I mentioned earlier, yesterday, we spoke with a woman who represents Pennsylvania’s drug rehabilitation programs. And she was telling us in fairly graphic terms how, you know, capping Medicaid in her view could harm tens of thousands of people in her state alone. And this at a time when the opioid problem is being called a national crisis. So how do you make the argument that their needs right now are less important, if I could use that term, than the long-term need to control costs?
MACGUINEAS: So I wouldn’t make the argument that any particular group or person’s needs are less important. I would make the argument that we need to look at a budget as what budgets are actually supposed to be, which is trade-offs. So what we need to do is figure out what our national priorities are. And then we need to figure out how we’re going to pay for it. I would argue that the most important thing is that we ensure everybody is able to afford a reasonable amount of health care.
Now, people will disagree on what reasonable amount is, and that’s a big part of where the fight is. But we want to make sure that the subsidies are flowing to people who we should be subsidizing. And there’s different questions. Do we have the young subsidize the old, the healthy subsidize the sick, the rich subsidize the poor? There is no one right answer, but you have to make some choices. And budgets push us to make choices.
MARTIN: Does this argument become more difficult, speaking of trade-offs, when it appears that the agenda of this administration – and frankly, congressional Republicans at the moment – is to use these costs savings to provide tax cuts which disproportionately benefit the wealthy?
MACGUINEAS: Well, it makes it more difficult for those of us who care about reducing the deficit because if I were structuring something like this, I would keep that revenue because we need it. And I would worry about, how are you going to make sure that people who need health care get it as efficiently as possible? How do you control the cost of health care? And how do you help use these savings to bring our debt down before we go forward with cutting taxes?
Which it seems like at a time of record debt levels, tax cuts don’t make a lot of sense. And that does include making reforms to entitlements and thinking about things in Medicare and Medicaid. People never like those changes, but you actually can’t get control of these programs if they go uncapped with no control.
MARTIN: Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and The Campaign to Fix the Debt. Maya, thank you so much for speaking with us once again.
MACGUINEAS: Thanks so much for having me.
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John McEnroe reacts during a Men’s Legends match against Jim Courier at the Connecticut Open in August 2015.
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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, tennis great John McEnroe triumphed three times at Wimbledon and four times at the U.S. Open. But all his achievements on the court did not prepare him for life off of it. After his professional career ended, he dabbled as a talk show host and as an art collector and appeared in movies and TV shows.
Above all, McEnroe wanted to be a rock guitarist in his wife’s band, but, he admits: “That was not going to happen.”
His wife, singer Patty Smyth, told him, “I want to play mixed doubles with you at Wimbledon.” To which he replied, “Well, you don’t play tennis.”
And she said, “Exactly.”
During his tennis career, McEnroe became known for outbursts on the court when he thought umpires had missed a call. In one classic exchange, he yelled at an official, “You cannot be serious! That ball was on the line!”
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That line has followed him for decades. “If a day goes by where I don’t hear that at least a couple times, it’s a miracle,” McEnroe says. So he has decided to embrace it: His first memoir was called You Cannot Be Serious, and his new memoir is called But Seriously.
On reinventing himself after his pro career ended
I was actually going through what turned out to be a separation and divorce from my first wife, [actress Tatum O’Neal], so I was unable to really think about anything else. We had three kids together and my head was all over the place and I couldn’t even think about … the transition that I was anticipating I was going to be making. …
I was sort of lost, but was open enough to experiment … so that I can find myself again, which isn’t easy when you’ve peaked in your career at 26 years old.
On why there aren’t more great male American tennis players right now
There’s a lot of reasons, but the biggest one to me is the cost of it: the cost of play, the cost to train, the cost to get a court. All of this factors into the difficulty of getting a champion. The truth is … the game has become more athletic than ever, and quicker, you need to be more athletic, and our best athletes mainly are playing in basketball or football. …
If you take a court the size of a tennis court and you decide you want to use it for a soccer field, say, you could fit a lot more kids. … When you talk about schools, they say: Well, it’s better if we put a little soccer field in there and we get 20 kids running around kicking a ball. … Whereas tennis doesn’t come as easily.
On calling Serena Williams the best female tennis player in the world
Garcia-Navarro: We’re talking about male players but there is of course wonderful female players. Let’s talk about Serena Williams. You say she is the best female player in the world in the book.
McEnroe: Best female player ever — no question.
Garcia-Navarro: Some wouldn’t qualify it, some would say she’s the best player in the world. Why qualify it?
McEnroe: Oh! Uh, she’s not, you mean, the best player in the world, period?
Garcia-Navarro: Yeah, the best tennis player in the world. You know, why say female player?
McEnroe: Well because if she was in, if she played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world.
Garcia-Navarro: You think so?
McEnroe: Yeah. That doesn’t mean I don’t think Serena is an incredible player. I do, but the reality of what would happen would be I think something that perhaps it’d be a little higher, perhaps it’d be a little lower. And on a given day, Serena could beat some players. I believe because she’s so incredibly strong mentally that she could overcome some situations where players would choke ’cause she’s been in it so many times, so many situations at Wimbledon, The U.S. Open, etc. But if she had to just play the circuit — the men’s circuit — that would be an entirely different story.
Garcia-Navarro: Many people over the years, including, we should mention Donald Trump, the President, wanted you to play her, and you seemed to have at least thought about it.
McEnroe: Well I’ve thought about it. I didn’t really want to do it, personally. I don’t know, people always seemed — I would say why don’t they go ask Roger Federer? Or someone, you know they added the old fart that’s you know 25 years over the hill. And I think I can still play and I think I could still — I mean my kids don’t think I can beat her anymore. Maybe I should get her now because she’s pregnant, but the truth is that I think that sometimes —I don’t know why in tennis, I get it’s that one battle of the sexes when Bobby Riggs played Billie Jean.
Garcia-Navarro: Billie Jean one of the most famous, iconic and most watched, I think tennis matches at the time.
McEnroe: Yeah, it was no question. I think there was the most, the biggest attendance at the Houston Astrodome, and it was great that Billie Jean did that but…OK, but that doesn’t mean, talk about other sports. If you go look at the times, for example, of the world’s fastest females — and you know maybe it will change! You know my daughter, one the things she says is ‘You’re a feminist, Dad.’ OK. I started with two boys, I got four girls now and I’m all for it and I’m trying to just get with it and figure it out.
Garcia-Navarro: So, you’re a feminist.
McEnroe: Maybe at some point a women’s tennis player can be better than anybody. I just haven’t seen it in any other sport, and I haven’t seen it in tennis. I suppose anything’s possible at some stage.
Garcia-Navarro: You really think at 60, you could possibly beat Serena Williams? Maybe pregnant.
McEnroe: The way you put that makes me think that you have your doubts.
Garcia-Navarro: Far be it from me to question you Mr. McEnroe.
McEnroe: Well, you know, my kids do, so feel free to. But there’s people that because of course as you get older — I’m not sure how athletic you are and how often you get out in whatever sport it is, but I have kept at it regularly. I’ve done it sort of doing this playing some other guys close to my age even though they keep getting younger and younger. Obviously, if I was going to do something like that, I would train very seriously for that to make sure my body was at, like, the peak it could be. Absolutely — to try and be as ready as I possibly could, but I bring things to the table, certainly until recently. I may be way past it, but I can still bring a few things to the table and so that’s why I guess people still find it interesting to even talk about.
On where to go from here
I need to make sure that I enjoy the upcoming 10 — hopefully 20 — years of my life and just appreciate the ride that it’s been, and be able to continue to … find that inner peace, in a way, because that’s difficult for me. I grew up a perfectionist getting pushed, pushed, pushed a lot. … Especially when my dad passed away a few months ago, I said, Wait a second, you’ve got to just take a step back here and smell the roses a little bit more. That would be my Number One goal moving ahead.
Radio producer Peter Breslow, radio editor Stacey Samuel and Web producers Beth Novey and Wynne Davis contributed to this story.
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