Social Security Don’t Miss

What’s with the persistent narrative of Social Security's impending doom? Are the baby boomers draining the trust fund? Are Americans living too long? No and no. There are just two of the many misunderstandings people have about what economist Kathryn Edwards will tell you (for hours if you let her) is, truly, the most popular and effective public program in U. S. history. She’s also optimistic that Congress will make necessary reforms just before the trust fund is depleted in 2035. Which is good. Because Robin does want to be able to retire. ✨ Support the Optimist Economy podcast at: https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/subscribe or https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy ✨ Read More: A Young Person’s Guide to Social Security https://www.nasi.org/sites/default/files/research/Young_Person Ten Years Since Hurricane Katrina | SSA https://blog.ssa.gov/ten-years-since-hurricane-katrina/ You can also find Optimist Economy on: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy Instagram https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or-

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Politics.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Country music.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Hockey.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Sex of bugs.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  And hopefully, make you see the world anew.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  What is going on in the country?

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.

• 0:44Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  For our long-time listeners, you'll know that Robin and I are struggling with the transition between segments, as well as coming up with names for them. But we've had a breakthrough. We have a new segment. It's not called Segment One. It has its own name, and it has its own purpose. Robin, why don't you tell us about it?

• 1:17Robin Rauzi?

  We're calling this section "Retcon." And "retcon" was a word I actually looked up a few weeks ago, and I was shocked I didn't know it. But it means retroactive continuity. I guess it's a portmanteau, and as Catherine knows, I love a portmanteau.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I do, too.

• 1:34Robin Rauzi?

  So, in television or movies, it's when you insert some sort of plot device that explains a bunch of other stuff that didn't connect, and you make these connections after the fact. So that's what we're going to do in this segment.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yes, we're going to do a retcon, where we think about the conversation we had last time, which, you know, we don't really rehearse it. Robin didn't even know what I was going to talk about. So there are things that, once the conversation is over, we remember, or where we consider, or we wanted to bring up. And so we have retcon. And what I realized last time- At the end was that this show has optimist in the title and it was kind of a down conversation. It was some real gut punches in there and we came up with the takeaways, but not necessarily like the point of light. I wanted to do a retcon to say, what is, what is the silver lining to the end of DEI?

• 2:25Robin Rauzi?

  I'm curious.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I'm curious, yes. So I've been, I've been thinking about it, you know, it kind of goes back to my first reaction when I saw the executive order, which was, if I'm being completely honest, my, my very first reaction was, who are they going to blame now? And DEI as a fall guy for so many people's economic frustrations. I mean, it's, it's this point, it's so ridiculous. Like a plane crashed over the Potomac because of DEI. The LA wildfires were the worst in LA's history because of DEI and the fire department. It's such a, let's stay with the TV show talk. It's such a jumping of the shark to make DEI the blame for this.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  But I think it's just you blame someone for so many problems for so long, you don't realize how ridiculous you're starting to sound. And I, I took away from it of like, okay, you take away DEI, a program that wasn't necessarily working very well or transparently in a lot of places. I think that people who were opposed to DEI leaned more on the rhetoric than the people who actually used it. And the rhetoric against it was larger than the program itself and they have a bigger vacuum than we do.

• 3:37Robin Rauzi?

  That makes sense. I see what you're saying there. Yeah.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  So it's not like, yeah, listen, I'm not going to throw a party. I'm not, I mean, it's not like, not optimism optimist, but there's, there's a silver lining for who's lost what. If DEI is gone, who, who's actually lost the most? In some ways it's them because they've lost their fall guy. I mean, at this point, like I am waiting for an executive order that's like. The Super Bowl halftime show was too black. Or, you know, according to the president is now officially law of the land that Drake won the feud because Kendrick made the halftime show too black. Like, that's like the next step for them.

• 4:16Robin Rauzi?

  In our last episode, we debated the etymology of the phrase "on the bubble."

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23Robin Rauzi?

  Turns out Catherine was actually much closer to accurate than I was on the, on the root of that. But one of the things I've been thinking about since last week was "on the bubble" is used all the time in sports. I thought it had an origin that went, that preceded sports that had to do with like a leveling device, but not according to the OED and-

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Sticklers, they are.

• 4:44Robin Rauzi?

  I know, right? The idea of being on the bubble had to do with not rising, like through, like a bubble rises through water, which is kind of what I thought, but about sitting atop of something that could explode. And how that is a little bit how people feel about the economy right now.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  So I would say this retcon was net neutral in terms of optimism. I don't know if we really stuck the landing here. This is good. We used "on the bubble" correctly and DEI was the biggest boogeyman they've ever seen since the last one.

• 5:20Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, so it was a segment 1.5 that comes up next?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Segment, previously segment one, now segment after retcon, which I guess is two. Okay, so we've been thinking about calling this one Terms and Conditions because Robin and I are both naturally curious people, especially about words, wordplay, and we like to look stuff up. So Terms and Conditions is, it's kind of clever, but-

• 5:42Robin Rauzi?

  It's kind of clever.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  It's kind of clever. I'm not going to say full-blown clever.

• 5:47Robin Rauzi?

  Solid hard.

• 5:51Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. Catherine, what did you look up this week?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Oh, I have a good one. My term and condition for this week is papuchik, which is the Russian word for fellow traveler. So here's how I got here, is a journey. I wanted to look up when the term Orwellian started to be used, which is reference to the doublespeak and the dystopia of George Orwell's 1984. And I wanted to know how long we've been appropriating this as just Orwellian. The first kind of known reference as Orwellian came from a American woman who was a writer and a critic. Her name was Mary McCarthy. And I was like, how, what? I'm sorry. There's a woman writing in the 50s that's progressive that I haven't heard of yet? No.

• 6:37Robin Rauzi?

  You hadn't heard of Mary McCarthy?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I hadn't heard of Mary McCarthy.

• 6:40Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, my Lord.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  You've heard of Mary McCarthy?

• 6:42Robin Rauzi?

  Of course, yeah. She was a famous American critic and writer and...

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yes, all of these things I looked up on this amazing dive about this woman, Mary McCarthy, who I had never heard of. And she popularized the use of Orwellian. And she was described as a fellow traveler, one of many of the kind of mid-century liberals who were sympathetic with the Communist Party, but never officially joined.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I mean, that got me on this whole thing of like, well, where did fellow traveler come from? And it's actually a, comes from a Russian word that they used to describe people who were not Bolsheviks, but were sympathetic with the Bolsheviks taking over. And it was interesting because it's fellow traveler is not necessarily positive or negative. It's truly someone who just doesn't formally join something that they might support, either out of self-preservation or cowardice, or out of like sympathy that they are supportive. It could have both connotations. Now, in Russian, when something is plural, you add an I at the end. So that means that fellow travelers are papuchiki.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And I just thought that this was so, like, this was so like little like hands waving, like finger waving cute of like, oh, look at all the little papuchiki. Standing up to the Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk, like, they're not a part of it, but they're not doing much about it. And so, papuchik.

• 8:03Robin Rauzi?

  Like it.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Is my new term and condition.

• 8:05Robin Rauzi?

  Though, I saw that you have it written in Cyrillics, and I would not have ever known that that's how you would pronounce.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  This is gonna sound wild, least knobby, but it's easier to know how to pronounce a word in Russian if you read it in Cyrillic. And the transliteration to English into the, to our alphabet can actually make it harder to figure out how it's said.

• 8:27Robin Rauzi?

  Well, thank you for that. You can coach me on that later. So, I worked, looked up something that has, like, literally noth- well, I'm not gonna say nothing to do with the economy. So, I just finished reading This Other Eden, which was a Booker-nominated novel by Paul Harding. We had a kind of vicious fight about it in my book club on Tuesday, and-

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Oh, no, stop. Let's stop and, let's talk about the fight. Who started it? What side was it on? How much wine was spilled? Like, let's, let's talk about Fight Club, Book Club.

• 8:55Robin Rauzi?

  So, the book club is made up of a number of journalists who stood on the sidelines and watched. And the question really was whether or not this is a historical novel and whether it is responsible for Paul Harding to be writing about the people of this island, which in the book is called Apple Island. But what I looked up was the inspiration for the novel, which is an island called Malaga Island, which is very close to the coast of Maine, and it housed a few dozen mixed-race Indian, Black people who had lived there since the late 1800s and who were expelled in the early 20th century.

• 9:36Robin Rauzi?

  And it sort of is a combination of racism, eugenics, gentrification. But the book itself is very, very dreamy and almost supernatural in some ways. And so, I, I thought that this, this story was really interesting, and the history of this island is really interesting and tragic. And, you know, I have a link to the Maine Historical Society or some similar organizations retelling of what happened in 1912 there.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I like, I already ordered the book.

• 10:09Robin Rauzi?

  Good. I mean, it's enough to say that they not just ejected everybody from the island, they burned down all their houses and eventually disinterred every cemetery. Cause, cause it's not enough, it's not enough to like- Yeah, sorry. You're an optimist economy, but it is, um,

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Really?

• 10:27Robin Rauzi?

  But it is a really lyrical book.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Okay. So luckily, we don't, this like bar that we set for ourselves to be optimistic doesn't apply to terms and conditions.

• 10:39Robin Rauzi?

  No, it doesn't. Okay. Are you ready for our pitch meeting?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Let's pitch.

• 10:45Robin Rauzi?

  Let's pitch.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  I'm pitching you.

• 10:47Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  I mean, let's talk about the mother of them all. Let's talk about social security.

• 10:51Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, let's do it. You know, I'm concerned.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yes. So fun fact about Robin, I think actually you should, you should share this.

• 10:58Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. So, um, the, are you going to correct me when I say it? The expiration-

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Careful.

• 11:06Robin Rauzi?

  The, the date when the social security trust fund should run out of money is more or less my projected retirement date.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Unlucky.

• 11:18Robin Rauzi?

  Unlucky for me.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  No, you'll be fine. We'll be fine.

• 11:21Robin Rauzi?

  Catherine says I'll be fine and she's going to tell me how.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. I'm going to tell you how. So,

• 11:27Speaker 02

  social security turns 90 this year. It was passed in the social security act of 1935 and it paid out its first benefit in 1940. So 90 years of programmatic history, 85 years of benefits. It has so many victories to its name. It's never missed a payment.

• 11:47Robin Rauzi?

  Never?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Never. After Hurricane Katrina, people from the social security office were at shelters with like a card table, a computer and a printer, and they were giving people their checks.

• 11:58Robin Rauzi?

  Wow, they're, forget the post office. It's the social security administration.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  They, I mean, they were in the superdome, like their social security administration was there. They don't miss, they've never missed a payment. They've also never had a data breach.

• 12:12Robin Rauzi?

  Really?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Really.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I would say that, believe it or not, the volume of data that the Social Security Administration has, which is the universe of every employer, worker, their earnings, and address and location in the industry, a lot of people want that information, in particular, the governments of China and Russia. And Social Security has never been successfully breached. And it has probably tried to have been breached, I would say, all the time.

• 12:41Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean, the healthcare systems get breached every other day, as far as I can tell.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Other victories for Social Security: the lowest fraud rate of any public program. Depending on how you define fraud, it's pretty loaded when you come to a public program, but it is a rate, 0.3% gets classified as what most programs call fraud. We call it improper payments, whereas money went somewhere where it wasn't supposed to go. And most of the improper payments come from an error from Social Security and not necessarily the person. This program, which has been around, I think it's older than 98.5% of the US population, so there's almost no one alive who is older than Social Security. It doesn't miss payments. It never runs short on funds. It is a fortress of data protection

• 13:31Speaker 02

  that has delivered a benefit as promised to the American people. And it is a much beloved program.

• 13:37Robin Rauzi?

  True.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  I mean, Social Security's approval ratings are high. They're bipartisan, and they've always been high and bipartisan.

• 13:42Robin Rauzi?

  People love their Social Security checks.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  People love their Social Security checks. Really good program, pays a lot of benefits. It has 69 million beneficiaries.

• 13:51Robin Rauzi?

  Currently.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Currently. The faith that people have in this program has been so undermined by political messaging.

• 13:58Robin Rauzi?

  I have spent my entire adult life saving extra retirement funds because I don't trust that Social Security will, not that it'll go away entirely, but that the promises or the statements that I get from Social Security will accurately reflect what I can plan for in retirement.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's nothing to support that.

• 14:18Robin Rauzi?

  I am totally wrong.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:20Robin Rauzi?

  Is what you're telling me?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so let's, let's. So, Social Security's performance is like, it don't miss. Like, it's, it's so flawless. It's, it is always delivered. And yet, we have this pervasive belief that Social Security won't be there for us. This was the only line of attack that detractors of Social Security had. And they've spent 40 years on it.

• 14:39Robin Rauzi?

  You don't think that this comes from a place of concern? The, the political messaging around the Social Security trust fund?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  I think it truly depends on how you phrase it. So, so, Social Security is in between two financial milestones. The program was last reformed in 1983. When the hit of inflation, which was automatically used to adjust benefits and make them higher, with, you know, very deep recessions and stagnation in the economy, had pulled down how much it collected in taxes while pushing up how much it was paying out in benefits. And they had to have a reform commission to try and design Social Security reform. It is such high stakes drama. I'm going to get back to it in a second. But in 1983, they passed a series of tax increases and benefit cuts to put the program on sound financial footing.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  The central idea of this reform is that, shock of shocks, there's this thing called the baby boom generation. And they're very large. And so, we need to save up for their retirement because they're going to be followed by smaller generations. They raised taxes on the baby boomers as they hit their peak earnings year to pre-fund their retirement through accumulating funds in the trust fund. To make clear, Social Security was in an annual surplus from 1983 to 2010. So, even through the 90s of like, Social Security is the third rail of politics, there was a West Wing episode about it, like, where they fixed it.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  This just might be the break we need to save Social Security. To save Social Security. Yes, sir. This is right after we colonized Ontario.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Like Bush tries to dramatically reform the program in 2001 and privatize it. And you're hearing so much about how social security is running out of money. That happens throughout the more than three decades that social security is bringing in money hand over fist.

• 16:30Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  And they put it into the trust fund. And in 2010, it hits the first big financial milestone, which it starts to draw down on the trust fund.

• 16:38Robin Rauzi?

  And the milestone is the baby boomers start retiring, the oldest baby boomers start retiring?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  The first milestone is moving from annual surplus to annual shortfall. And they start to draw down on the trust fund. That's milestone one. The second milestone is when the trust fund will be depleted.

• 16:53Robin Rauzi?

  Got it. So the first milestone is 2010?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:56Robin Rauzi?

  And the trust fund being depleted is my retirement day?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  2035?

• 16:59Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, 2035. So between 2010 and 2035, the trust fund will make up whatever is the annual tax shortfall. So I think it is somewhat lost in the messaging that before I was born, Congress put social security on a path that is going to last to 2035, when I turn 50.

• 17:25Robin Rauzi?

  And it was deliberately a 50-year glide path, right?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Yes. So that alone makes it basically the best planned part of the federal budget, the most secure benefit that exists. The most secure funding is social security. So this kind of like this doomerism that exists around the program is in spite of the fact that it does so much better than the rest of the government. Like Congress has not been able to pay its own tax bill and has been borrowing from social security. The trust fund is what Congress uses to cover its own annual shortfall. And now Congress is very mad at social security because since 2010, they've been had to pay it back. $3 trillion is not a small amount of money even for your federal government, and that's what they owe social security.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  And they are none too happy that they have to pay it back.

• 18:16Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  They are legally required to. They do so by law. They pay it back with interest, an interest rate that they set, by the way, and they still complain about.

• 18:25Robin Rauzi?

  So the trust fund itself, it's not like a, it's not like a big bank account? Or is it?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  It's kind of a big bank account, but your holding isn't in cash. You're holding this in treasury deposits.

• 18:34Robin Rauzi?

  Got it. And because they're holding the treasury deposits, they'll have to sell them.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  No, they're basically reimbursed. It's a treasury bill, like a very specific treasury note that only social security has that has special legal status that social security can redeem at any time it wants for the exact amount of money promised.

• 18:53Robin Rauzi?

  And Congress is like, you want your money back?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Congress is like, well, that's a bummer. You broken program that's so broken and running out of money that we've been borrowing from it for 40 years.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Like, that's the part that I'm like, man, when people are like, I don't know, social security is not going to be there. I'm like, yo, man, Congress is going to go before social security goes.

• 19:15Robin Rauzi?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think that that's, but it's an interesting point, right? Which is that I think people's anxiety about how well Congress functions is really underlying the anxiety around potential cuts to social security. You and I have talked before that the potential cuts are something like 20 or 30%.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so if-

• 19:35Robin Rauzi?

  If nothing gets done.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  If nothing gets done and the social security trust fund is depleted, you know, social security is still taking in all of your payroll tax contributions. You see it through your FICA on your paycheck, federal insurance contributions act. I mean, social security is still collecting trillions of dollars a year. It just doesn't have enough to meet the promised benefits and it doesn't have a savings account anymore to plus up their revenue. And if that occurs, it's a one-time benefit cut that is whatever is necessary to bring the 75-year balance of social security's projected outlays and projected revenue into balance. So it'll be about a 20% cut on all future and current beneficiaries, and then it's fine again.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  So the worst-case scenario is that everybody gets a 20% benefit cut in 2035.

• 20:24Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  However, this is not the first time social security has been at the, if we don't do something, we're going to have to cut benefits. And this has, you know, Congress has never allowed this to happen because it would be so politically unpopular to cut social security benefits. You know, I've written about social security since I was like 22.

• 20:42Robin Rauzi?

  High school.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, high school. Yeah, definitely. In college, when I was 22, I was commissioned to write kind of like a short textbook called A Young Person's Guide to Social Security, where I explained why the program is so advantageous to young people in particular, and that truly the strengths of the program are what it does for young people. I've written PhD research journal articles about it. I've testified in front of Congress about it. I have written, you know, dozens of columns and op-eds about it.

• 21:11Robin Rauzi?

  You're a social security fangirl.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  It is my Roman Empire. You know, social security is both wildly popular, and there is almost no disagreement among people of how they would like to see social security fixed. So if you were to put into surveys, "Social Security has this shortfall, how should they meet it?" 85% of Americans will say, "Raise my taxes and don't cut social security." Like, we're not torn. There's no divide. I mean, the more than 80% of Republicans said, "Raise the taxes and don't cut social security."

• 21:46Robin Rauzi?

  Because, I mean, everybody knows someone who would be on the street in retirement if it weren't for social security.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Or maybe not on the street, but in your guest room.

• 21:55Robin Rauzi?

  Or that.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  This is the, this is why I say social security is so important for young people. I mean, the government spends a trillion dollars to social security recipients every year. I mean, they turn off that money, you think those people are going to starve on the street? Yeah, maybe some of them with particularly cruel progeny, but most people, if the government wasn't sending a trillion dollars in social security to your grandma and other grandmas in the world, like, she'd be in your house, you'd be paying for everything for her, you'd be paying for her medical care because she wouldn't have economic independence anymore, which means she would be economically dependent on you. That is why social security is such a windfall for younger people, because when you make one generation economically independent, you take that responsibility off of the subsequent one.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And that is, you cannot put a price on not having to pay for your parents and grandparents out of pocket as you are trying to go to college, have kids, buy a house, invest in yourself, invest in your children. That money is freed for you to spend on yourself and your children because you don't have to spend it on your parents and grandparents. I mean, that's ultimately... Probably one of the biggest advantages that social security provides because the majority of the 69 million people who get social security, it is either all or most of their income. And so if it went away, it would move all of these 69 million people into the caretaking and economic responsibility of their family to pay for out of pocket. That's not a loss to the elderly, it's a loss to the young.

• 23:22Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. So you want to argue that, I mean, it sounds like you already wrote a book about the social security is really a program that saves the young. That is a nice angle.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it saves the young. I'm going to say right now, I'm a little bit deep on social security. It's hard for me to perceive what's a new, interesting thing to say because I'm a little bit of a walking social security encyclopedia and have like written a book as well as books worth of essays about social security.

• 23:48Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Social security saves the young and that's who's targeted through this political machination slash stratagems of we need to convince people it won't be there for them. You're not going to convince a 60-year-old that social security won't be there for them. Or a 90-year-old for that matter. You're not going to convince them that like actually Congress is going to cut your social security benefit. But you can try to convince young people who are told through their entire life, social security won't be there for you, when they are the ones that have the most to lose.

• 24:18Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, yeah, I mean, I think the reason that it's called the third rail, the idea that you couldn't touch it was, in my mind, always the idea that you couldn't cut it, not that you couldn't fix it.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so this is like, this is like one of my things that like, don't ask me about, especially if I'm holding a beer at a bar. I don't think it's the third rail because the third rail reputation is if you touch it, you die. So you can't, you can't increase taxes because people hate that, because people hate taxes going up. And you can't decrease benefits because people hate that because they love their benefits. And so politically, social security has you in a box that you can't touch it or you die. But that's not true. Most people are like, very much like, raise the damn taxes so I still have my benefit and so do all of my family members. That is incredibly popular. So I think the third rail reputation is not earned and it's not supported by evidence, even though it is, I will say, it is devastatingly clever.

• 25:13Robin Rauzi?

  Very clever.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  It's super clever. I mean, whoever came up with is the third rail politics, you touch it, you die. Like, they were like feeling themselves, they were firing on all cylinders, but they were wrong. They were incorrect. This is not true. I think the part that I'm, I also want to emphasize is just how easy it is to fix social security. It's so easy. High school students in a civics class, if they still teach that, in a social studies class or a history class, they can be assigned, hey, guys, you need to fix social security, 10 minutes, not even. It's so easy to fix social security. The Office of the Actuary publishes a set of policies that they score relative to social

• 25:57Speaker 02

  security's 75-year shortfall. So they basically tell you, here's the size of the shortfall, and here's what percentage of the shortfall is fixed, or here is how much the shortfall increases based on this policy. They're like a little shopping cart, and if you can add to 10, you can just slide over the policy you want, and they give you four different options of how much it would decrease or increase the shortfall, and you can work your way to zero shortfall.

• 26:24Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, so what are the, what are the policies that are on the choice list?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  So they have a ton. They're organized into sections, and each section has like a dozen policies that you can pick from, as well as variations. Now, what makes the list is if a member of Congress has seriously proposed it. And so they, they try to, if someone has introduced a bill, or if there's been some mention of from Congress that they'd like to do something, that's where it comes from. So the most popular policy, at least in polling, of how to fix social security is also the most effective, which is to get rid of the tax cap. That would take care of about 70% of social security's shortfall.

• 26:58Robin Rauzi?

  Explain what the tax cap is.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  So social security only taxes up to a maximum income amount, which right now is around $170,000. So all your income up to $170,000 is taxed and afterwards is not subject to the social security tax. So if you make like $200,000 a year, you'll pay social security out of your paycheck until you hit the cap, and then your paychecks for the like last two months of the year are larger, 6.2% larger in fact, because they don't include social security. So. If you got rid of this cap and just taxed all earnings, all wage and salary earnings, that is.

• 27:36Robin Rauzi?

  I say wage and salaries, right? Now, this is capital.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  It doesn't have, it doesn't include capital earnings. But if you taxed all wage and salary earnings, you would get rid of about 70% of the shortfall. So let's, so Robin, we're worried about the Robin deadline.

• 27:50Robin Rauzi?

  We, we are, yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  The Robin deadline is fast.

• 27:53Robin Rauzi?

  The truth is, I can't actually retire in 2035, now that I think about it. But I think my full retirement age is 2037.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Oh, because they raised it to 67 in 1983 and didn't tell anybody about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your full retirement age is 67.

• 28:05Robin Rauzi?

  67.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:07Robin Rauzi?

  But I want to retire at 65.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I kind of want to retire at 40, so.

• 28:12Robin Rauzi?

  I kind of want to retire at 55, but you know.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Here we are. Podcasting instead.

• 28:19Robin Rauzi?

  Investing in our future.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. The Robin plan. We've got, we've got until 2035 to make sure social security does right by Robin. Yeah, I mean, if you were to just, if they were to say like, look, we're not going to fix it completely, but starting next year, we're not going to have the cap anymore, they will tell you what year that will push it back to. So it would push it from like 2035 to like 2055.

• 28:43Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Or 2060. So it would be both an effective way to kick the can down the road if you wanted to do some immediate stopgap. And then, of course, it would itself would take care of about 70% of the shortfall.

• 28:53Robin Rauzi?

  You know, and per our conversation a few weeks ago about income inequality, I mean, how many people would that even affect?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Not that many. So the average earnings, excluding the top 1%, which is wild, but the average earning of the next 4%, they earn about $240,000 a year on average.

• 29:12Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  So when you're talking about social security's tax, you're really talking about the top 5% of wage earners.

• 29:20Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  So the other tack that you could take on social security, I think there's a very clear story of young people have the most to lose, young people are kind of the most vulnerable to feeling unconfident about social security because it's so far away from when they themselves would receive a benefit. And that they have been told their entire life, social security is running out of money, or social security is going bankrupt, which is categorically not true. It can't go bankrupt and it can't run out of money. The only way that you won't get social security is if Congress votes to take it away from you.

• 29:56Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  That is the only possibility in which you, American citizen, will not get social security, is Congress has intervened to make sure you don't. There is a story there about young people and how to manipulate them so that they feel like they don't get something. But the other part of it is there is this gross misconception that people have that what's wrong with social security is the baby boomers. That there's a lot of them and that they live too long and that that makes social security untenable because it's built on population growth. So if the population's not growing anymore, then we don't get to have social security. That is also not true. The reason for social security's shortfall is the lack of wage growth.

• 30:39Robin Rauzi?

  Oh.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  So most people think that the reason why social security has a shortfall is because we're living longer. Or the reason why we have a shortfall is because we're not having as many children. Or the reason we have a shortfall is because there's so many baby boomers.

• 30:51Robin Rauzi?

  Or that income is happening outside of the wage and salary rubric.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yes. But really, what is the main driver of social security shortfall is that the wages, the taxable wage base, is not growing as fast as they thought it would. What has truly changed about the US economy since 1982 that they did not account for and that they did not predict is that they were on the cusp of a massive turn in our wage distribution, where for the next 40 years, wages at the bottom were going to fall and grow slow, and wages at the top were going to accelerate.

• 31:27Robin Rauzi?

  And those are the ones that are all outside the cap.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Those are the ones all outside the cap. And social security, the 40 years of data they had when looking at wage growth was that wages at the bottom grow at a healthy clip, that there is a set of wages above the top, and that, you know, we didn't have crippling wage inequality, we didn't have crippling income inequality. All of that took off the last time, right around the time the last time social security was reformed, and they didn't, they didn't plan for it and they didn't, they didn't project it. And that was, I mean, if you go back to the 1982 and 1983 projections, that is what they were the most wrong about. I mean, they weren't perfect about everything, but they were the most wrong about wages. And one way you can see that is the portion of wages that are subject to the tax cap. So again,

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Like if numbers break your brain, I'm gonna try to do this as like kindly as possible. But in 1983, they set the tax cap. And in 1983, that tax cap included, basically covered 90% of all wages earned in the United States. So if I were to add up every paycheck of every person, the tax cap fell so that 90% of all wages were taxed and the 10% was not. Now that cap adjusts automatically every year with the change in average wages. And today, it collects only 82%.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  And now, a full 18% of wages are not subject to the cap because the wages above the cap have-

• 32:55Robin Rauzi?

  They're not subject to social security tax because they are above the salary cap.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  And the salary cap is not keeping pace with the 90th percentile wage growth. It keeps pace with the average, but the 90th percentile has grown so much faster than average, the wage base of social security is eroding.

• 33:11Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. And this is why this is the easiest way to fix this.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  This is, well, it's one reason why it's the easiest way to fix it, but the, it's, the another reason is that it's, it's, um, like this is one of the biggest problems that social security is facing because it's the one they didn't see coming, that gross wage inequality and decades of wage stagnation would hit their bottom line so hard, even as wages at the top pull away.

• 33:33Robin Rauzi?

  Can you explain why there's a cap beyond which there is no tax on your salary for social security benefits?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we only have a cap, this is kind of, goes back to how you see social security as a program. The idea is, it's not an investment, it's not a savings account, like, it's not like your tax collections go to a little account that says like, "Robyn's Money, do not touch until 2035." It's a pay-go insurance system. And, and all of the insurance that you have in the private sector is also a pay-go insurance system. Like, when you pay your car insurance or your homeowner's insurance, it doesn't go to like, "And this is the money for Robyn's car." Right, it goes right into their system. So they're pooling the risk together in a PEGO fund that is then met with current beneficiaries. This is how all insurance payments works.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Well, social security is an insurance payment, and what's insured is the risk of poverty and old age. If you work in the United States and you pay into social security, you have now purchased insurance coverage that will mean that you will never be poor when you get old. And for the most part, it is very successful doing that. There are people who are on social security and poor, but most of them were not working for the full, like, they earned social security, but they only worked for 10 years and not the typical 40.

• 34:50Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  It's an insurance payment. You're buying protection from economic insecurity and deprivation and old age. So the thought of the tax cap was, as you earn enough money, that risk gets low enough that you don't need coverage anymore.

• 35:08Robin Rauzi?

  But they still collect social security?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  They do, but it's essentially like, we're going to insure the bottom 90% of earnings, was the thought of the cap, is that once you get above the top 10%, you know, your risk falls, so we don't need to insure 100%. We only need to insure 90. So it comes from social security's, like, insurance identity that we have this cap at all. But there are diehard social security insurance people who are like, we still need the cap. We just need the cap to be at 90.

• 35:37Robin Rauzi?

  Would that do it?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it wouldn't do it, but it would do a lot. And you can find all of this on the Office of the Actuary's page, and they didn't pay me to say this and advertise for them. So the policy of social security is easy. We know how to fix it. We know how people want us to fix it. It's not that hard. We can put it on sound financial footing. The politics of social security is disaster. I mean, absolute disaster. It's the biggest disconnect that I think between DC and, like, Main Street, USA, is social security.

• 36:10Robin Rauzi?

  Why? Why the messaging, the anti-social security messaging? I don't think anybody ever thinks we're going to get to completely privatized social security. It seems to me that ship sank long ago.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Oh, no, they're just as active. The "we need to turn this into a system of private accounts that people can invest on their own," those people have not gotten any quieter over time. And they wrote Project 2025, if that makes you feel any worse. Sorry.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  For what it's worth, for what it's worth, Project 2025 was written by people at the Heritage Foundation, which has been arguing since about 1980 that we need to privatize social security. And that is a position that they have published as recently as 2023. I mean, they, they have 40 years of saying social security needs to be privatized. It's not fair. It's cheating the American people out of prosperity and the chance to invest their dollars. They have never wavered from this belief. But there was not even a word on social security in Project 2025, despite being written by the think tank that is the architect of privatization. Why is that?

• 37:14Robin Rauzi?

  Because it's a popular project.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Because the person they wrote the policy for had said many times on the campaign trail, I will not touch social security. I actually wrote a column about this for Bloomberg, you know, during the election. And I said, a version of silence is violence. Like, they have omitted any mention of social security because they are not telling us what their agenda about it really is. And that he can say all he wants, I'm not going to touch social security, but he's also a notorious liar. And what I said in the article was, they don't have to talk about social security on the campaign. What they can do is pass a $4.5 trillion tax cut, devastate the federal budget, and then say, you guys, we can't afford social security more. It's not our fault. We have to get rid of it.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  And I was like, this is my prediction of what is going to happen.

• 38:01Robin Rauzi?

  And we're seeing that dynamic play out on Medicare, on Medicaid.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yes. And it's, it's already coming of like, well, we can't afford it, so we need to make cuts. We have to tighten our belt. It's just the economy doesn't support it anymore. It's just, it's this like very long argument of like, sorry, we can't afford social security. And then they'll put, like, they'll find like a 22-year-old to be like, I didn't want social security anyway. And then they'll cut it. That is what they, that is definitely what they want to do. I mean, the saving grace of social security is that nobody else wants that.

• 38:29Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, nobody else wants that. And I also, I'm very puzzled where they think we're all going to invest all this money when there are fewer and fewer actual channels to, I mean, we have the, like, the fewest number of publicly traded companies in 50 years currently.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Where's that money?

• 38:45Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, where's it gonna go? Anyway, that's a whole other conversation.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  I mean, I honestly, on some level, I think they're right. Not enough people have access to private investments in order to support their retirement, which is the fault of the awful 401k system that we have, that has never extended retirement accounts to the bottom half of Americans. Forty years, we've had 401ks, and in 40 years, half of Americans still have never had access to a retirement account through their job. It is an awful system. If they want people to have the chance to invest a set of money in order to get wealth, they should focus on, hang on, the investment device that some people have access to and others don't. And they're like, man, if only-

• 39:23Robin Rauzi?

  And expand that.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, if only people could invest, we should probably end social security. Like, my brother, there are so many things in between social security and people investing. Like, you got, like-

• 39:34Robin Rauzi?

  Like having money.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Like having money.

• 39:36Robin Rauzi?

  Like having sufficient wages.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, having access to an investment account. I actually think that this is coming. I'm very optimistic about this.

• 39:44Robin Rauzi?

  I know. You've said that before, that you're really optimistic that-

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:47Robin Rauzi?

  That that's coming.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yes. This is a very popular policy. It has Republican and Democratic support. There are a couple of things that they disagree on, but there is one thing that they agree on, that as soon as you start working, you get access to a savings account that is associated with you your entire work life, that you can automatically contribute to with every paycheck.

• 40:09Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  And that money is basically a 401k, but everybody gets it and the government sets it up.

• 40:15Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  They disagree on some of the details. So, some of the details would be, does the government put money into it?

• 40:21Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Does the government put money into it for everybody, or just for people who don't have access to an account at their job? I think this question is kind of moot, because 401ks are already falling in terms of who has offered them. And so I think, once the government says everybody gets their own government- 401k account, you are going to see employers, I mean, it's just going to fall off a cliff. They're not going to do it anymore. The other thing that they disagree on, of course, is the fringe right people who are like, and that's where social security goes. And it's again, my brother, there's like so many steps between. We all get to have a bank account that helps us save for retirement versus let's end social security. So they're like very quick to jump to like, you know, what would be great? Taking all the money from social security.

• 41:05Robin Rauzi?

  But you are feeling less positive that social security can get its fix, even though we have all of these, these plans to repair it?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  I'm very confident social security will be fixed too. It'll be fixed in like November 2034. Like it's not, it's not, I don't think, I have very little faith that they'll do anything before then. But I have a high amount of faith that they, by 2034, they will get their act together. I think something needs to force Congress's hand. That is the end of the day. Like that is why action hasn't happened. Social Security, I mean, they collected more in revenue than it needed in benefits through 2010. And actually, it was supposed to go a little longer, but the Great Recession was so devastating through job loss and through wage growth depression that it was cut short,

• 41:53Speaker 02

  I think like three or four years early. It was, it was, and also part of the Recovery Act in 2009, 29, included a slight decrease in payroll tax contributions. So, I mean, wrap your head around this for a second. In 2009, social security cut taxes for a small period of time on people.

• 42:16Robin Rauzi?

  I remember that.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  During the worst recession since the Great Depression and the poverty rate for the elderly fell.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  That is a program that can do its fucking job. So when I say I am confident about social security, it doesn't, it's not like, it's not born from like a naive, like, hope that the world will be a better place. I'm like, no, because when it needs to deliver, it has always delivered. So I, I'm, I'm confident that social security will be reformed before the trust fund is depleted. I don't think there's going to be, I'm not like. Confidence is going to happen more than like a month before that happens, but I know they'll fix it. And the other thing that would force its hand is some kind of debt crisis that is forced by another, you know, four and a half trillion in tax cuts.

• 43:01Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  So they could force a social security reform from the debt crisis.

• 43:07Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  But even then, like, the reason for that would be that they would not want to pay back the last, like, trillion. So right now, they owe about $2 trillion to the trust fund.

• 43:16Robin Rauzi?

  This is the federal government owing this money to the Social Security Trust Fund.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Congress owes the Social Security Trust Fund about $2 trillion. And every year that Social Security doesn't collect enough in revenue, they have to give it back. And they're required, when Social Security will say, "I need this much", and they have to pay it to Social Security with interest. That is a legal obligation. So what I think is going to happen is that we've got about $2 trillion left, and that $2 trillion gets kind of like frozen in time if Social Security doesn't need it anymore. So if they fix Social Security's revenues so that it doesn't have a shortfall anymore, they don't have to pay it, they don't have to pay it back, or they don't have to pay it back right now.

• 43:56Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  So there is a debt solution to fixing Social Security early that this completely ill-advised $4.5 trillion tax cut might force. But that's, you, you, something just needs to force Congress's hand. In my grand tradition of, like, pulling reference materials, this is a memoir of what really happened, written by this fox right here, Bob Ball, who was very high up. I think he was the chief actuary at the time of the reform. But the 1983 reform, this is like a tell-all of how the 1983 reform occurred. And it is, it is salacious. It is high-stakes drama. Netflix, need the movie. But yeah, the whole endeavor falls apart.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Even as Social Security is months away from not being able to write a check, the brilliant commission headed by the young upstart Alan Greenspan to fix Social Security has, like, completely fallen apart. And Ball and a few other people meet in secret to design reform and then present It as if the commission designed it, but actually they did it in secret. And at one point, like the climax of this is when Bob Ball has to sneak out of his backyard and meet a car that's parked on the side of the Beltway in DC. Because news reporters are camped out front and they can't, they're, they're trying to see where he's going and who he's meeting with. And so he sneaks out the back to hold secret sessions to fix social security. Am I proud of this? No. Is this the best way to do it? No.

• 45:27Robin Rauzi?

  Did he get it done?

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Did he get it done? It got it done. So, you know, that's what matters is that this is the program that gets it done. And it doesn't have to be pretty when it is the most effective anti-poverty program in the history of the world and keeps over 20 million people from economic deprivation at any given time. It don't gotta be pretty. It just has to get done and it'll get it done. I promise.

• 45:48Robin Rauzi?

  I don't know if we've got a column there or not, but um.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. Like if the story is, let's talk about the young and the political stratagems, or if the story is this is easy to fix and they'll wait till the last minute or, you know.

• 46:03Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, I think that it's easy to fix is like, I think it's a paragraph. I don't think it's the whole story.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, or, or it's the wage thing of like, you know, look like.

• 46:11Robin Rauzi?

  The wage thing is also interesting, like that the real problem isn't the baby boomers. The problem isn't that we're living longer. The problem isn't the size of the generation. The problem is wage stagnation. You know, I pay a reasonable amount of attention to this issue. And I also know a reasonable amount about income inequality, thanks to working with you over the years. And I don't think I've ever put those two things together.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Okay, so maybe that's it. Maybe it's the like, you think social security can't support an aging, long living population and therefore it just has to cut benefits. And like, we don't get to have this program anymore because it's just not like physically possible. And that's what you've been told and messaged. But like, what no one has explained to you is that it is suffering under the weight of wage inequality.

• 46:53Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  And it does not require infinite population growth. It requires robust wage growth. And that is what is tearing it down on its financial side.

• 47:01Robin Rauzi?

  Yes.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  And that like you, like the more someone talks about old age, the less they're talking about the decades of. Wage stagnation that brought social security down. Maybe that's it of like this one, two of like, here's what you probably think. And you were told that so that you would buy the conclusion that we don't get to have social security anymore. As opposed to it is a runaway wage inequality that is hurting the most beloved program in the United States. And if you're mad about that, you'd be mad about wage inequality too. So.

• 47:31Robin Rauzi?

  Yep.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yep, that's it.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Did we record? What did I just say? I felt like it was a brilliant moment and then when I.

• 47:38Robin Rauzi?

  This is why.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  And then I said, yep, and now it's just like dead air. Okay.

• 47:42Robin Rauzi?

  That's good because you know, it's because your brain just relaxed like.

• 47:47Robin Rauzi?

  It's time for executive orders. Did you hear the, did you hear the gas powered leaf blower outside my window?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  I did, I did. And I was like, uh-uh, not in this, not in this house or outside this house in this republic in this proverbial house. Okay, what is your executive order?

• 48:01Robin Rauzi?

  My executive order is, um, this is kind of weak, but I have been, I moved back to Los Angeles recently and I have determined cars should have two horns. They need a horn that is like the, you know, hey neighbor, or could you inch up? So I'm not hanging out in the intersection horn, the little beep beep horn. And then you need the like, somebody's life is in danger horn. They need to be totally different.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Is LA a horn friendly city? Like they honking a lot?

• 48:25Robin Rauzi?

  It's not like New York. It's not, but as it gets more crowded, uh, I think that there's more, you know, just need for, and people are looking at their phone, they're missed, they're not noticing the lights change. You know, there's just more need to be honking and I don't want it to become, you know, loud, lay on the horn. Sound all the time. I think there's a certain amount of friendly honking that needs to happen.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Okay. Um, my executive order is that airplanes need to be redesigned to seat people by height. You know, I was just on a plane recently and I sat next to just a tragically tall woman who I could not imagine how uncomfortable she was the entirety of the airplane ride, but I do know she spent with most of it with her elbow up against my ribs because they had nowhere else to go. And I was like, if you're over six, five, you, you deserve a different seat and I shouldn't be next to you.

• 49:13Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, at the end of the show, we also like to thank our sponsors. We don't actually have any financial sponsors, except, you know.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Our spouses, sure.

• 49:20Robin Rauzi?

  And spouses. The money we're not putting into our 401ks. So my spiritual sponsor this week is Pet Sitters You Can Trust. Particular shout out to my downstairs neighbor who took care of my colony of cats so that I could go on an actual getaway for the first time in a long time.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I love to hear that. Thank you, responsible and reliable pet sitters. My spiritual sponsor for the week is a maroon trench coat that I bought a couple of years ago. I paid way too much for it, but actually I feel so powerful and cool when I wear it that I need to say that it is my spiritual sponsor. The confidence I have wearing a bright maroon, very high-end trench coat, I needed it.

• 50:06Robin Rauzi?

  Love it.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And I appreciate it.

• 50:08Robin Rauzi?

  Good, good.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Hey, optimists, it's Keds. We're adding this note after recording, which we made a few weeks ago, because something has been happening to Social Security since then,

• 50:24Speaker 02

  which is that the Department of Government Efficiency has arrived at the headquarters of the Social Security Administration, and it's making its usual path of stupid destruction through a federal agency. So what does this mean for Social Security? Elon Musk is nothing compared to it. This is a great program. It does a good job. There it's possible, because there's been lots of red flags and warnings raised by people inside and outside of the Social Security Administration, that because so many key staff have been fired, that the integrity of the payment system and the data is at risk. That's an absolutely just fear. But it reflects the Department of Government Efficiency. It doesn't reflect Social Security.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  This is still the biggest, the oldest, the best, the most effective, most efficient social program in the history of our country, arguably in the history of the world, goes out to 69 million people, keeps 22 million people out of poverty every day. He is not going to be able to mess with it as much as he thinks he is. And remember that it has been a successful program for 90 years. He is a footnote. 90 years from now, he might be mentioned in a social security history at the bottom in a tiny little footnote that nobody will read. He might be the richest man in the history of the world, but he is outgunned and outmatched when it comes to social security. So maybe he'll cause some damage.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Maybe they'll have a payment system error, but social security will recover. So if you have any questions, if you have any worries, if you want us to answer anything else, email [email protected]. We hope you liked the social security episode. We hope you send it to all of your crazy uncles who tell you that it's a Ponzi scheme. We hope that you bookmark it so it helps you stay prepped and ready for Thanksgiving dinner. You got this, y'all. We got this because we got social security and social security has got us.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for listening to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine Edwards, AKA Keds Economist, and you can find me on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram and on Blue Sky at @Keds underscore economist. You can find the show Optimist Economy on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Blue Sky at optimist underscore economy. You can't find Robin anywhere, and that's how she likes it. And as we exit, we ever want to thank our producer, Sophie, for all of her inspired work and the confidence she instills on us. She is the proverbial really awesome maroon trench coat of the show.