• 49 minutes 53 seconds
    Progress is a Long Game

    (Originally aired 5/06/25) What sparks progress? The right political conditions? Social pressure? Economic upheaval? In response to two listeners’ questions, we say… both none of those and all of the above. As an example, we talk through just one bit of the New Deal in the 1930s, which was the law to limit child labor. That movement started decades earlier, and continued decades afterward. For those keeping score at home, this a sneaky third installment of Kathryn’s 68-part series on the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. 

    Chapters: 

    00:01:08 Announcements

    00:01:43 Retcon

    00:03:58 Terms & Conditions

    00:07:03 Centerpiece

    00:42:56 Executive Orders

    00:46:25 Spiritual Sponsors


    28 April 2026, 8:30 am
  • 46 minutes 54 seconds
    The Great Wage Stagnation

    Average U.S. wages have barely budged since the early '80s — and if you account for today's labor force being older and more college-educated, wage growth basically disappears. Economists have cycled through explanations: workers lacked technical skills, then couldn't compete with global labor, then lost the policies that once lifted paychecks, like strong unions and a meaningful minimum wage. The latest chapter is monopsony — the idea that as employers consolidate, people have fewer choices of where to work, and fewer places to land if they lose a job. Fix the market, and the paychecks follow.

    Chapters:

    00:00:45 Announcements

    00:01:01  Retcon: Double Taxation and Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act

    00:03:10 Terms & Conditions: Monopsony, Septel

    00:07:07  Big Pilcrow: Why Aren’t Wages Growing?

    00:40:37  Executive Orders: Reverse Billing, Leaked Chat Table Readings

    00:42:49  Spiritual Sponsors: Dole Whip, Sad Songs, Being Recognized in the Wild

    21 April 2026, 8:30 am
  • 45 minutes 36 seconds
    Tax Reform Gone Wild

    From California to Washington to New York, states are trying to tax the very rich. The press keeps rehashing whether millionaires and billionaires will flee those states. Wrong question. The more important one is why we’re improvising tax policy state to state when it’s the federal government that should be dealing with health care, child care and affordability—all of which are national problems. Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats are proposing to take even more people out of the tax system entirely. None of these specific proposals make income taxes simpler or fairer, but they do suggest there’s an appetite for reform. 

    ---

    Chapters:

    00:01:18 Announcements

    00:02:33 Retcon: Occupational Licenses

    00:06:16 Terms & Conditions: Progressive

    00:07:59  Big Pilcrow: Everyone Wants to Tax Millionaires

    00:38:23  Executive Orders: Unreadable Menus and Tax Complainer Merch

    00:41:42  Spiritual Sponsors: Dream Robin & the Nobel Laureate’s WNBA Contract

    Got economics questions, anxieties, or executive orders? Send them to [email protected]

    14 April 2026, 8:30 am
  • 45 minutes 49 seconds
    Nobody's Pulling Up Stakes Anymore

    Americans used to move a lot in search of opportunity. But in 2024, the share of Americans who moved at all hit a 76-year low. Barely 2% of us moved across state lines. Some of that is by choice: people are more rooted, and that's not nothing. But when workers stop moving, rich cities pull further away from poor ones, wages stagnate, and the gaps between thriving labor markets and struggling ones get harder to close. And when there’s a shock to a local labor market, moving is an important release valve. Fixing a fraction of this worker mobility breakdown could improve the labor market for everyone.

    Chapters:

    00:00:33  Opening

    00:01:45  Retcon: Trump Accounts & Career Pivots

    00:07:27  Terms & Conditions: Spatial Equilibrium

    00:09:55  Big Pilcrow: Does it Matter to the U.S. Economy if We Don’t Move from Place to Place?

    00:39:10  Executive Orders: Frances Perkins miniseries; Sleep Shaming; Election Day Weekend

    00:43:07  Spiritual Sponsors: The National Consumers League motto ("Investigate, Agitate, Legislate"); ACFC’s winning start

    READ MORE:

    The increasingly mobile US is a myth that needs to move on | Aeon Essays

    Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home? | Pew Research Center

    Job Changing and the Decline in Long-Distance Migration in the United States | Demography | Duke University Press

    The Economics of Internal Migration: Advances and Policy Questions

    Population & Migration | Economic Research Service

    Stranded! How Rising Inequality Suppressed US Migration and Hurt Those Left Behind


    7 April 2026, 8:30 am
  • 54 minutes 24 seconds
    The Optimists Have Questions…

    Fourteen questions. Zero softballs. Listeners from Tacoma to Montreal wrote in to ask about retirement savings, taxing capital gains, home-buyer assistance programs, corporate profits in the tariffs era, what one state employee can or cannot accomplish, and whether meaningful economic reform will arrive before Millennials drop dead. And more. The inbox did not disappoint. 


    00:00 Announcements

    01:59  Is a retirement savings crisis brewing? 

    04:32  Tax credits for first-time home buyers… good idea?

    08:10  What if tax breaks for capital gains only applied to new investments?

    13:39  Explain the $1,700 tax credit scholarship program in OBBA?

    16:23  Are institutional investors wrecking the housing market?

    21:37  What quick policy moves could reverse worsening inequality?

    27:32  Will meaningful reform arrive before Millennials retire?

    30:56  Is a hotel tax the right way to fund a stadium?

    33:05  Can I move the needle on labor policy from inside the system?

    35:08  Why has the responsibility and risk for employment shifted onto workers?

    37:50  Is fixing the care economy easier than we think?

    40:47  Do rent caps work?

    44:50  Can we prevent price gouging by companies?

    47:53  If states roll out good policies, does the federal government need to do it too?

    There’s a t-shirt in your size here.
    https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

    31 March 2026, 8:30 am
  • 42 minutes 22 seconds
    Corporate Profits Are Up. Their Tax Bill Should Be Too.

    The corporate income tax rate got hacked nearly in half by the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act. So nine years later, how’s that working out? Corporations’ effective tax rate (about 9%) is lower than what the average American household pays (about 14.5%). After-tax corporate profits have hit record highs for the last four years — about 9% of GDP, a figure not hit since 1929. Workers' share of total national income, by contrast, is at a 70-year low. If corporate taxes go back up, some companies may threaten to reincorporate somewhere cheaper. Call that bluff. Someone else will deliver the toilet paper and make the coffee.

    Got economic questions, concerns, or executive orders?  Send them to [email protected]

    24 March 2026, 8:30 am
  • 51 minutes 21 seconds
    If AI Gets Hired, America Can Handle It

    Switchboard operators. Typists. Secretaries. Lots of factory workers. The economy has a long history of technology slowly eliminating not just jobs but entire occupations. The U.S. also has a long history of not doing a lot to help those thrown out of work by major economic shifts. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, who literally wrote her dissertation on unemployment insurance (her professional assessment: "it sucks"), makes the case for a wholesale rebuild that triages joblessness, distinguishing between those who need time to job hunt and those who need to pivot to a new career. 

    Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to [email protected]

    17 March 2026, 8:30 am
  • 49 minutes 38 seconds
    Boomers Didn’t Ruin Everything. Really.

    The popular narrative is that baby boomers rode cheap houses and 401(k)s to wealth, dismantled the welfare state behind them, and left everyone else to fight over scraps. But conflating boomers and conservatives lets the latter off the hook for 25 years of tax cuts and disinvestment in children. It erases the Black boomers, poor boomers, and pensionless workers who never got a slice of that wealth. And it lays the groundwork for the one policy outcome its loudest advocates actually want: gutting Social Security. Who really benefits when you decide your parents' generation is the enemy?


    Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to [email protected]

    10 March 2026, 8:30 am
  • 48 minutes 48 seconds
    Can $1,000 at Birth Make Us a Country of Savers?

    “Trump Accounts” might evoke the president’s other side hustles, like gold-plated mobile phones or meme crypto coins. But these investment accounts for children are one of the actually beautiful things to come out of the "One Big Beautiful Bill." More than 30 years in the making, these accounts have previously been pitched as KidSave, Baby Bonds, the ASPIRE Act, 401Kids. They’ve been proposed more than a dozen times by Democrats and Republicans alike. Economist Kathryn Edwards explains the long journey, what the research says about why auto-enrollment is everything, and why the name won't last but the policy should.


    Read more:


    Every child deserves a Trump Account: Here’s how to make it happen 

    Op-ed by Ray Boshara and Michael Sherraden in The Hill [2026].


    “Check-the-Box” Enrollment Will Limit Participation in Trump Accounts: Lessons From Asset-Building Research — Center for Social Development at Washington University [2025]


    Why Automatic Enrollment Is Essential for the Success of Trump Accounts: Lessons from SEED OK — Center for Social Development at Washington University [2025]


    The (Unknown) Children’s Savings Accounts Federal Policy Landscape 

    — Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis [2024]


    Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to [email protected]

    3 March 2026, 9:30 am
  • 57 minutes 59 seconds
    Social Security Upgrades for Retirement's Realities

    Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards is a Social Security fan girl. Would it be possible for her to love it even more? Yes, if the old-age insurance program got some updates to handle the messy, gradual and interrupted way that retirement truly transpires. Her four blue-sky pitches: changing benefit calculations for caregivers, taking benefits temporarily, a sliding “full” retirement age based on years worked, and a tax on companies that abuse 1099 non-employee compensation. Plus: A big retcon segment including details from a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco that further explains why "more supply" isn't the whole answer to the housing affordability crisis.

    Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to [email protected]

    24 February 2026, 9:30 am
  • 52 minutes 45 seconds
    What The Actual Fed.

    The Federal Reserve is in the news constantly these days. Beyond the regular will-they-or-won’t-they question on interest rates, there are multiple legal battles with implications for the central bank’s independence, President Trump’s nominee for chairman may (or may not) get a hearing in the Senate soon, and Jerome Powell's may (or may not) leave when his term as chair ends in May. So let’s try to demystify the Fed. How does it stop bank panics? How did it make the Great Depression worse? What is a Fed Note exactly? And is the discount window a metaphor? From Glass-Steagall to the dual mandate to quantitative easing, here’s a crash course.

    And send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to [email protected]

    17 February 2026, 9:30 am
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