Thanksgiving Prep: An Optimist’s Guide to Dinner Table Debate

Your drunk uncle calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Your crypto-bro cousin thinks tariffs make China pay. Your grandfather blames working women for tanking wage growth. Economist Kathryn Edwards takes on a dozen hostile dinner-table challenges to help optimists everywhere prepare for dinner table debate. Robin plays every annoying relative you've ever argued with. Pass the [expletive] gravy. Ready to rep Optimist Economy with a shirt, hat or tote bag? Hit up our new website and merch store at optimisteconomy.com http://optimisteconomy.com Take the listener survey first to get a code for a free Original Optimist sticker: https://tinyurl.com/op-econ-survey

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

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• 0:30Robin Rauzi?

  Hey, optimists, it's Robin. We are, as you know, on hiatus, but we have a little surprise episode for you while Catherine's off on her family leave. We did want to tell you about two updates. One is we have a new website, and more importantly, on that website, you can find our merch store. So if you need your tote bag, and who doesn't, go to optimist economy dot com, and we'll help you out.

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine Ann Edwards, economist.

• 1:02Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin Rousey, editor.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  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. And if there were ever a time to talk about problems in the United States, it's at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Optimist Economy is in the middle of a break between season one and two, but we recorded this episode in October before I went on maternity leave to keep our fellow optimists rhetorically armed and ready for the holidays. So if you're new to the show and haven't heard us before, we encourage you to check out our back catalog. Each episode takes on a different socioeconomic problem, but we're going to have fun with this one. This is a bonus episode. Our listeners have told us that we are a mix of humor,

• 1:49Speaker 03

  education, hope, joy, insight, in a way that is, quote unquote, delightfully unhinged, and, quote unquote, an assault on the medium of podcasting with our lack of professionalism. So y'all, let's bring it to the Thanksgiving table. Let's get ready.

• 2:03Robin Rauzi?

  Let's get ready. In this episode, I'm taking on the role of, think of me as, who's the guy who plays Madea in all the, you know, all the characters in the family drama? I'm all the characters in the family drama, starting with your drunk uncle who starts asking not-so-nice questions. Tyler Perry, that's right. Thank you, Andy.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And if you've listened to the show, you know that I make a lot of proverbial shout outs to a drunk uncle, or like, that's something the drunk uncle would say. So this is like, Robin is like, all of the drunk uncles.

• 2:33Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  The drunkles.

• 2:35Robin Rauzi?

  The drunkles.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  So, Robin is gonna read off some tough, pointed questions with a somewhat of a persona that could come up at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and I'm going to give a response to help all of you respond similarly, should it come up at your Thanksgiving table.

• 2:52Robin Rauzi?

  I asked Catherine if she really wanted three questions on social security, and her response was, in type, in text, "Did I stutter?"

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Facts.

• 3:06Robin Rauzi?

  I was like, "Okay, we're gonna do three questions on social security. Are you ready?"

• 3:11Speaker 03

  I'm ready.

• 3:11Robin Rauzi?

  You're so ready. Okay. Your libertarian cousin, who works in crypto, this is what he says, "Social security is literally a Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff went to prison for that exact same thing. You pay in, they pay current retirees, then new workers pay for you. It only works if you keep getting more suckers in at the bottom. How is that not fraud?"

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Calm down, Robin.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Okay. Libertarian cousin who works in crypto, which is not a bubble, sure.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  All right, a Ponzi scheme is an investment scam. It's built on fabrication and deception. It only works so long as the lie is believed. As soon as the lie is revealed, the entire scam collapses. In contrast, social security is an insurance program. It's not an investment. It has no fabrication, no deception. It's not maintained through some grand hoodwinked lie that Americans have bought, hook, line, and sinker, for 90 years. You know where your money goes, to whom it goes, for what, for how long, and what you'll get out of it. There's no deception, there's no scheming, and there's no scam. There's also no investment. It's an insurance program. So if it's literally anything, crypto bro, it's literally like your car insurance, or your homeowner's insurance, but administered through the tax

• 4:29Speaker 03

  system instead of private carriers and payment. You pay a flat amount, you pay it regularly, and you don't get paid out until you meet certain circumstances. In this case, not the car crash, but getting too old to work.

• 4:43Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  How was that? Was that okay?

• 4:44Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, that seemed pretty good.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:48Robin Rauzi?

  This is your uncle who's an accountant and he's been planning for his own retirement for 20 years. The Social Security trust fund, did you see it's now going to run out in 2033? I've been paying in since I was 16 years old and the money will be gone. Benefits will be cut at least 30%. Congress won't touch it because it's political suicide. So what, I'm just screwed?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  No, accountant uncle. Social Security has never missed a payment in its 90-year history and it has been at the brink before. And in fact, because of its consistency, I don't think people realize just how close it has come and has run out of the trust funds and yet still didn't miss a payment. In fact, in the run-up to the last big reform in 1983, the trust fund was completely depleted and Congress had to pass an emergency measure for the trust fund to be allowed to borrow in order to make payments, which it did. Congress passed the major reform. The trust fund was replenished. They paid back the loans in 86. You don't know any of this because all you know is that Social Security has never missed a payment, not in 90 years.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  So it's not a reflection of the strength of the program that Congress will wait until the last possible minute to address an issue they've known about since 1995. And for what it's worth, most people don't think that it's political suicide because there is broad consensus even amongst Republicans of exactly what Americans want done to Social Security. They want to raise taxes in order to preserve benefit levels and over 80% of Republicans would agree with that. So it's not political suicide. We know how to save it. I can't make Congress better, but I won't blame Social Security for Congress not being better. Social Security, don't miss.

• 6:29Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, alright.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Rounding out the Social Security appetizer course.

• 6:33Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, really, this is the main course. Let's not lie. Your aunt who watches Fox Business every morning. When social security started, there were 16 workers per retiree. Now it's less than three. People live to be 90 years old, they're collecting for 30 years. You're not having kids, who's gonna pay for all these boomers? First of all, you are having kids, I know, but I'm not having kids. Who's gonna pay for all the boomers?

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Well, aunt who watches Fox Business. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a pretty common misunderstanding to treat social security as some kind of numbers racket as opposed to a wage insurance scheme. The number of people paying in matters less than their wage growth. And the biggest hit to social security's finances, as repeated over and over again by the Office of the Actuary, has been wage stagnation and wage decline. And frankly, that social security's taxable wage base is declining. And that doesn't have to do with the number of people, that just has to do what workers in the US are earning. So, another way I would think about it is that demographics, we can see coming. You know, the last big reform was in 1983, and the youngest baby boomer was turning 20 years old.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I mean, the birth rate had declined, and they assumed that it would decline further. The life expectancy had increased, and they assumed that it would increase further. The entire reform package was built around those demographic facts, taking into account fewer babies, longer lives, and a big generation that was going to retire. And what they didn't plan on wasn't the demographics, which were all predictable. They didn't plan on wage inequality. They didn't plan on an eroding tax base. I mean, the early 1980s had seen 40 years of broad wage growth across the wage distribution. People who didn't make that much money, people who made a lot of money, their wages grew at a roughly similar rate. They passed the 1983 reform,

• 8:27Speaker 03

  and we enter four and a half decades of unprecedented economic inequality. The hollowing out of the middle class, the decline of manufacturing employment, and social security's taxable wage base gets smaller every year because they only tax benefits up to a cap. So the reason why social security is having problems with money is because it's basically giving a like de facto tax cut every single year and collecting less in taxes than it could. That's a fixable problem as well, and it doesn't have anything to do with the number of kids or the number of old people or how long they live. They just need to shore up their tax base back to what it was in 1983.

• 9:02Robin Rauzi?

  All right.

• 9:08Robin Rauzi?

  You've got another uncle.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:10Robin Rauzi?

  He's a small business owner uncle who complains about payroll taxes.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 9:15Robin Rauzi?

  You know, half this country doesn't even pay federal income tax. They're on food stamps and Medicaid and they're living off my taxes. I see them buying steak with EBT cards. You want benefits? Get a job. Why am I subsidizing laziness?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Well, Uncle, I am incredibly happy that you're here to have your cake and eat it too. So let's, let's go through these non-taxpayers and tell me how you really feel about them, if they really are a bunch of lazy steak-eating bastards. So, right now, do you think that elderly people who are living on fixed incomes need to pay federal income taxes? Because as it currently stands, 80% of people over age 75 do not have enough in social security benefits or non-social security income to have a tax bill. So we don't make them pay federal income taxes. And you were wrong, it's not half of Americans, it's 40% of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes, and a large share of them are old and retired and living on social security. Another question for you. In 1996, the US ended cash entitlement for welfare.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  We just didn't think it was right that there were poor people, even if they had children, that got cash from the government with no strings attached. And so we replaced that cash welfare system with a tax bonus for working. It's called the earned income tax credit. If you are low income and you have children but you work, the federal government will not only waive your federal income taxes, but they'll make sure you get a bonus at the end as a, you know, reward for working. So they don't pay income taxes either, and there's a lot of them. Do you want to go back to the cash welfare system, or do you like having a certified tax bonus for working? So let's forget elderly people who are too poor and the poor people who are working, who are doing what we're telling them to do via the tax system, and get back to this,

• 10:54Speaker 03

  like, now fractional share of the 40% who don't pay taxes, who don't earn enough in a year to pay taxes. The standard deduction for a single filer in the United States is $16,000. The standard deduction for a head of household is $24,000. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. If I work the minimum wage 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and not miss a minute of work, I earn $1,000 less than the standard deduction. And I won't owe anything in taxes, no matter how hard I work or how long I work, because my wage is so low. If you want more people to pay taxes, you need to raise the minimum wage.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  What I would add, and what makes me so mad about a comment like this, all these people who don't pay their taxes, is that Republican-controlled Congresses have passed over $11 trillion of tax cuts this century. And every single time, it's billed as, "This is about helping families. This is about helping working people." And then you turn around and you're saying, "We're not collecting enough in taxes from working people, or we're not collecting enough in taxes from certain people, or people need to be taxed more." If that's how you really feel, raise taxes. You've cut taxes five times in a quarter of a century. And then you're upset that there are people who don't pay taxes. So which is it? Because what it kind of sounds like is that you don't want to pay much in taxes, and you want other people to pay more in taxes.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  And frankly, that sounds a little freeloady, and some would say, "Borderline lazy." So have your cake, eat it too. God, I'm so fucking sick of taxes. Pass the mashed potatoes.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  That would make me really mad. Sorry, of all the personas that you adopted, this one, like, really was like knife. I was like, "That is it."

• 12:40Robin Rauzi?

  This is from your aunt who doesn't have any children and who makes a point of mentioning that all the time. "If you can't afford kids, don't have them. People pop out five kids and then they want government assistance. I'm paying for your kids because you couldn't plan ahead? Birth control exists, why is this my problem?"

• 12:58Speaker 03

  What an excellent and insightful point. I actually think we should operationalize your plan. So, I mean, let's come up with a test. If you don't have enough money, you don't get to have children. First year of life, you've got to pay for labor and delivery out of pocket with your private health insurance. That's like three to five grand. You've got to pay for your other health bills for the baby. You've got to have food, maybe formula, childcare, clothes, crib, that whole deal. Estimates are that the first year of life for a kid is going to cost a parent somewhere between $16,000 and $25,000. Okay, but you can't work right after you have a kid. You have to have some type of leave. Of course, we don't have paid family leave in the US, so that means you have to go two to three months without earnings. That takes a quarter of your income for the year. So in order to be able to afford a kid to your measurement, which we want to implement in the United States, you need to make at least $33,000 a year.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  We wouldn't want to end up with a marginal case. Let's make it an even $35,000. So now, question back for you is how do you want to make sure that people who don't have $35,000 a year in income don't have a kid? Forced sterilization, forced abortion, do you want the doctor to give the income test? Do you want it to happen at the hospital? Does it make more sense to give the income test at pregnancy or at delivery? So at least we get our fertility numbers up and those deserving rich families get to have a kid. I'm curious as to how you want to put this in action and what you see happening first. Or maybe all of that is grotesque. As grotesque as the stereotype that lives in your head that poor people pop out kids in order to get welfare money for a cash benefit program that ended when I was nine

• 14:29Speaker 03

  years old. You know, get mad, get riled up and like, you know, dramatically pour yourself another glass of wine, but the truth is, we're already living in your world. The reality is that families in the US have internalized your criticism that they shouldn't have kids they can't afford and they're not having them. Fertility in the United States has never recovered from the housing bubble, the financial crisis, and the horrible recession that followed. Families in the US repeatedly and consistently say in survey after survey, they want more children, but they can't afford them and they don't have them. What it means to be a family or to have a family in the US is constrained by the reality that kids are so expensive. We are living in your world.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  We didn't need to operationalize it. People don't have kids that they can't afford and they lose the ability to have them or have that type of family that they want. Your world in which children are a luxury good, a prize for the richest, we're on our way there. We didn't even need forced sterilization or adoption or income tax. We just needed to structure our economy in a way, and our social policy in a way, that being a parent is so expensive and so difficult that families will willingly and painfully forego children. They meet your test. Lack of paid family leave, lack of childcare, expensive health insurance that taxes birth, infertility treatments that have to be covered out of pocket. We don't do anything. We live in your world. And you know what?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  I understand that if we lived in the world in which families got to have children, that you'd have to pay more in taxes. In 2025, Congress passed the one big, beautiful bill, a $4.5 trillion tax cut over a 10-year period. And unless you're in the top 10%, you're going to get $1,000 back from that. It's $450 billion a year. $450 billion a year would pay for universal-paid family leave, universal and affordable childcare, accessible childcare. It would probably pay for free school meals and a cash benefit for all children in the US. But we don't have any of those things, and now you get $1,000 a year. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you nurture it. I hope you take that $1,000 a year and enjoy it to the fullest extent possible. And I hope you love it as much as a family who didn't get to have a kid would have loved that kid.

• 16:46Robin Rauzi?

  Ouch.

• 16:49Robin Rauzi?

  It's kind of hard being me, I just want to say.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Fuck you, Robin. That's the end of that one.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  And you know what else? Robin.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  And Robin, maybe you should put on sunglasses and a hat.

• 17:05Robin Rauzi?

  You know, if I'd been thinking, I'd have a whole different outfit for each of these. So, your cousin who lost his factory job back in 2008.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 17:16Robin Rauzi?

  You know, China has been ripping us off for decades. Tariffs will make them pay. Don't tell me Americans pay tariffs. That's not how it works. Your iPhone costs more? Boo hoo. That's the price of not being their doormat. When do we stand up for ourselves?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Uh, let's assume you're right.

• 17:36Robin Rauzi?

  I'm sorry, your relatives are all so angry.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I should say, I come from a very large, loving family. All right. I mean, okay, cuz, let's assume you're right.

• 17:47Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  And tariffs work the way that you say they will, and no US company or no US consumer pays for tariffs, and China pays for all of that. I mean, is the idea that... I mean, so the idea is that we're gonna put a tariff on China and somehow charging them and making them pay for it will somehow make them fall in line and do whatever we want them to do in every other respect. So not only will they pay whatever we ask them to pay, but they won't retaliate in any way that could hurt us. They won't do anything we would disagree with after that. I mean, your theory to the test, China is the world's largest buyer of soybeans and the US is their largest supplier. And in fact, 30% of all

• 18:31Speaker 03

  soybeans made in the United States are sold to China. So we slap a tariff on them and tell them, you need to now pay to sell us iPhones. How much of our soybeans have they bought since?

• 18:44Robin Rauzi?

  I don't know.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  None. They've bought none. Sure, maybe they'll pay the tariff for the iPhone. Maybe, maybe they'll, they'll just, you know, suck it up and pay a tax to the US government in order to sell the iPhones made in China in the US, but they've decided that they just won't buy soybeans from our farmers anymore. Ever. None. It's a third of our market almost. I think that the problem with tariffs is that, you know, even if you can get them to do what you want in relation to the tariff, you don't have any control over what they do outside of that. So say all these trade wars work out perfectly, exactly the way that you want, and all of these other countries pay, and we don't. You think that makes us stronger? I think it makes us weaker because now our revenue, the revenue that

• 19:30Speaker 03

  pays for our military, the revenue that pays for our infrastructure, for our health, for investments, for education, now all of that revenue is at the mercy of other countries because they're the ones that pay it. They get mad at us. They don't just have a military threat. We've given leverage to other countries because they hold the purse strings instead of us. I mean, if China pays 20% of our federal budget, and then they call us and say, hey, by the way, it's Taipei again, not Taiwan, and we're taking it back. Are we gonna risk 20% of our revenue for Taipei? How big of an aggression do they have to have before we actually start to risk all of the revenue that supports government spending in order to punish them? It's too much leverage. It's too much concentration.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  All right. Can we make comments of like, and now let's get to the turkey?

• 20:20Robin Rauzi?

  I'd been thinking we would have paired each of these with a

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Oh, like a wine plate pairing? Of like, and now let's

• 20:28Robin Rauzi?

  I know, this is the green bean course, you know, cranberry sauce from your brother, as your brother hands you cranberries.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Okay, let's do it.

• 20:38Robin Rauzi?

  All right. Your brother, who's a construction worker, says, Americans just can't find jobs right now because immigrants take them. They work for peanuts and the companies, of course, love it. But real Americans can't get hired. When you complain, they call you a racist, but it's just economics. American jobs should go to Americans, right?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Well, your question implies that Americans can't be immigrants, and I assure you that they can. So I assume that when you're talking about immigrants stealing our jobs, you don't actually mean immigrants. You're talking about unauthorized immigrants who don't have permission to be here and not the 25 million or so immigrant American citizens. Yeah? You know, the most interesting part of your question was when you said that they work for peanuts, implying that immigrants make so low of wages that they undercut Americans. Well, I would say that there's two types of peanut work in the US labor market. Wages that are so low because the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and wages that are so low because even with a minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, employers violate labor law.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  And in the case of the latter, employers are violating labor law, not because they're necessarily employing unauthorized immigrants, but they're taking advantage of the fact that unauthorized immigrants are unlikely to call wage and hour enforcement, either because they don't know or because they're afraid. And these employers are exploiting weakness in our labor law in order to pay people less.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  I mean, it sounds like you're for a higher minimum wage and better labor law enforcement. And in that case, my brother, I'm with you. I'm 100% with you. But I think you probably weren't saying that. You were probably saying that immigrants take our jobs because they work for less pay.

• 22:24Robin Rauzi?

  It's economics.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  It's economics. You would only say it's economics if you knew your sister had a PhD and you were trying to rile her up. Don't ask mom for help. You knew what you were doing.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  So here's a question. Why does New York City have more jobs than Skokie, Illinois? The number of jobs is a function of the size of the place and the industries there. And when you say immigrants take our jobs, you're assuming that there's a fixed number of jobs. But that's like assuming that New York City has more jobs because they were assigned to them as part of some master plan. Jobs aren't assigned. They're not ratioed or rationed or fixed. Jobs are the result of economic activity. So the idea that immigrants take our jobs makes it seem like there's a fixed amount of jobs when there's not. Jobs will always reflect economic activity. Economists think that immigration has two primary effects on a range of economic outcomes.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  One, and this is completely undisputed, even by the most fervent anti-immigrant economists, immigrants make the economy larger. That's not like a matter of opinion, like that is just how the economy works. More people equals bigger economy. It's why New York City has a bigger economy than Skokie. The part that's disputed, hotly disputed, is whether or not immigrants reduce the wages of native-born workers. And it's pretty easy to see how this would occur, right? If you have 50 people who are applying for a job, they're going to be able to pay less than if you only had five, right? Beggars can't be choosers. So the thought is, is that because immigrants add to an applicant pool, they could reduce wages.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  But they don't... 50,000 immigrants didn't move to Skokie. They moved to places like New York City. They tend to follow demand as opposed to dearth. So what year did the US see the highest number of unauthorized immigrants? Historically, this is the biggest year in US history, most number of unauthorized immigrants there have ever been. What year is it?

• 24:25Robin Rauzi?

  Unauthorized immigrants versus, say, asylum seekers?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Just unauthorized.

• 24:32Robin Rauzi?

  Am I really guessing?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  You didn't really guess.

• 24:35Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, 1993.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  2007.

• 24:42Robin Rauzi?

  2007.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  So the year before, the financial crisis, the economic crash, the horrible recession that followed, the number of immigrants dropped each year between 2008 and 2019 because the economy was weak. The most effective strategy the US has ever had for reducing the number of unauthorized immigrants is crashing our economy.

• 25:07Robin Rauzi?

  It's not a good plan.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  The evidence has not found a significant effect of immigrants on native wages. So it should be the case, if there are more people competing for jobs, that it pulls down wages and immigrants pull down the wages of workers who are born here. But in practice, we haven't seen it. And the reason why is because they don't go to depressed labor markets, they go to thriving labor markets where the economy is growing. They add to the growing of the economy by their presence and spending and work, and the economic growth effects outweigh the competition effects.

• 25:38Robin Rauzi?

  You're nicer to your brother than you are to your uncle.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  I know. My brother listens and he'll be like, "Aw, thanks Kay."

• 25:49Robin Rauzi?

  All right. Your grandfather, who's just already had too much wine today. Nobody can afford a house on one income because women entered the workforce. You doubled the labor supply and wages got cut in half. Both parents are working, kids in daycare, and families are falling apart. If women had just stayed home, wouldn't wages go back up?

• 26:11Speaker 03

  No, grandpa, and pass the wine. All right, grandpa, I'm just gonna say this delicately because you've got a temper. So before and after are not the same thing as cause and effect.

• 26:28Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, don't patronize me.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Don't patronize me. So let's take your theory about women as the bane of men's existence in the labor market, and what's wrong with the US economy is that women started working, and consider a couple of facts. So since around 1980, the wages of men who have a college degree or more have shot up. I mean, just skyrocketed, just unprecedented wage growth sustained over long periods of time. The more education and power you have in the labor market, the more you're gonna earn.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  At the same time, the wages of men who didn't have a college degree and who were in blue collar occupations got hit really hard. Inflation in the eighties did not help the situation and you started to have this bifurcation in the economic outcomes of men based on how much education they had. So, there is no version of the world in which that is women's fault. Because women entered both labor markets. The labor market with a college degree and the labor market without a college degree. And in fact, for the college degree holding labor market, women made up an increasingly higher and higher share. And yet, even as women made up a higher share, wages kept going up. So it is more than likely the case that it's not women who are causing the problems. It's something about our economic structures that are causing the problems.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  And women are an easy target because their labor force participation changed over that time period and because, I don't know, we've got like low key misogyny held over for lots of generations and it's just easier to think that we could go backwards in time rather than solve the problems of the future. I mean, it's worth bringing up that not only were women sabotaging men, according to you, with their presence in the labor market, but as they were doing this, they failed to overcome the gender earnings gap. They hold the lowest paying jobs, they make less than men in every, almost every occupation, they make less than men overall, and yet somehow, they're to blame for you not having a good wage.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  No. No. It's the decline of unions, the weakness of labor law, the spiraling expense of critical goods like health insurance and housing. We have wage inequality, we have income inequality, we have wealth inequality. If you need to blame someone, you can blame Congress. Because it is in fact their fault for not pursuing better economic policy and you don't need to blame women. Because the truth of the matter is that women's labor force participation doubled between 1950 and 2000 and every woman who went to work made the economy bigger and every woman who went to work brought home earnings that made their families richer. And she did it while being the primary caregiver, she did it without paid family leave, she did it without paid sick days, and she did it without childcare, and she did it while earning less. Pass the fucking wine.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  And Grandpa, you have green bean casserole in your teeth. I can imagine some like high production version of the Optimist Economy world where you and I are like, in fact, actually eating dinner while we do this. But I think I need to remind our listeners that like, my callbacks of passing the wine are purely proverbial. I am still nine and a half months pregnant and it is the middle of the afternoon.

• 29:35Robin Rauzi?

  You look nine and a half months pregnant.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so next year, we'll have actual wine. But this year, it's just, these are just proverbial shout outs. And Robin is not, in fact, my grandpa.

• 29:48Robin Rauzi?

  Nor your sister, nor your aunt. Okay.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:56Robin Rauzi?

  This is from your sister in law, who I guess is married to your brother, the construction worker. No, your sister in law, who was a college swimmer.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Sister in law who was a college swimmer, okay.

• 30:07Robin Rauzi?

  Trans women should not compete in girls' sports. Male puberty means bigger bones and more muscles, and that does not disappear. Girls train their whole lives, then biological males take their scholarships. How is that fair to women?

• 30:19Speaker 03

  So, I'm gonna start with a sidebar. And I'll get there, I promise. So, here's a sidebar, and I think you have to understand this in order to understand why the conclusion that trans women shouldn't compete in sports is not just a wrong one, but a dangerous one. In the 1950s and 60s, it was incredibly difficult to end a marriage. The way that divorce laws were written at the time, you had to have your partner's permission in most states, so you couldn't leave your husband unless he told the court that you were allowed to leave him. Or you had to prove fault, in most cases, that meant cheating, where you had to have proof that the husband was cheating in order to get out of the marriage, which they weren't

• 31:03Speaker 03

  willing to give, or easy to provide. That changed in the 1970s with the introduction of both unilateral divorce, where you didn't need your partner's permission, and no-fault divorce, where you didn't need to prove that something had gone wrong for the marriage to end, you could just walk away from a marriage. And women, freely, for the first time in history, could leave their husbands. So here's what economists found when they studied what happened to women when they were legally allowed and freely allowed to leave their husbands for the first time. An 8 to 16% decline in female suicide, a 30% decline in domestic violence for both men and women, and a 10% decline in females murdered by their partners.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  When women lack power, when they lack control, they lose physical safety. Now, it's not 1970 anymore, and some things change, but some things don't change. Women's power is a direct proxy for how physically safe they will be able to be. So, in order to prevent trans women from competing in sports, we need to come up with some kind of sex check. Do you think this will fall on the side of giving women more or less power? It's gonna be less. At the youth level, at the college level, at the professional level, women basically need to have some kind of proof of vagina in order to compete. And we are going to create gatekeepers that have the ability to say yes or no, because her word doesn't count anymore.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  All it takes is one accusation for her to be called into question, and now a gatekeeper has to come in and adjudicate. How is that gatekeeper going to do that? And what kind of power will they have over women athletes and false accusations? I mean, I need you to go through in your head right now and just sit with it for 10 sobering seconds, every article or news story you have ever read about the sexual abuse women athletes already face, before any type of trans ban that came with its own counterpart of some kind of vagina check that someone needs to have. You're thinking of the predatory doctor in US gymnastics? You're thinking of the National Women's Soccer League and the pay-for-play grooming coaches that got kicked out in a wave of scandal?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  So, go back to those, how powerful those athletes were.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  And how they were gate-kept even without some type of sex check to be held over them. And then go back to what I said about the women who had the power to leave their husbands. And I'm gonna ask you again, does a trans ban give more power to women athletes or less? Or does it give power to people over them to check their bodies? And if you think anything other than that will happen, you just don't wanna know the truth. You don't wanna think about it in practice. You just wanna say, "It's not fair that they grew up male," and walk away, because your version of fairness is one square foot of real estate. It's one competition, it's one person, and not the tens of millions of girls who are thrown under the power of someone who can just simply say, "I don't think you're a real girl." Prove it. Absolutely fucking not.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  And while we're discussing it, for everybody who has a strong opinion on female athletes and what trans women should be allowed to do, let's do a quick show of hands. Who here has been to a professional women's sporting event? Who has, who's been to multiple, more than one league? Who has watched a women's sporting event on TV? It is remarkable to me how much women athletes are thrown around as if the biggest problem they face isn't the fact that they play in stadiums that they don't own, that they're paid shit for being a professional athlete, that they have terrible TV media deals, that they, they can't get themselves shown on TV to get the type of advertising that would get them pay. They can't do any of that. And all of that is unfair. But the only amount

• 34:40Speaker 03

  of unfairness you care about is that less than quarter of a percent of trans people who compete in sports. Do not delude yourself to say that this is about fairness for women. It bothers, it bothers me to my core. As someone who has like watched and loved women's sports my whole life, of like, the lengths I've had to go to, to watch the most successful national team in soccer's history play a game. Yeah. You had, you had to like go to a bar somewhere across town, or like hack into someone's network and like get a VPN because it's only playing on Fox Sports 17. And like, I'm just sitting here, I'm like, okay, they're the most winningest team in US history and I'm having a really hard time watching them. And then they'll turn around and be like,

• 35:25Speaker 03

  it's not fair for girls. I'm like, the fuck you care about fair? You don't care about fair? You don't care about women's athletes at all. Honestly, we gotta move on. I've been sent to the kids' table and as a palate cleanser, I'm being asked to explain whether or not Ghostbusters are an official part of the police.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  What do you think? If they're not, should they? Yeah, should Ghostbusters be? I mean, do they need to be in the union? I just, I wonder about that. And they have their own vehicle already. So I would say that they don't necessarily need to incorporate. I know, but I hope they have good insurance coverage. They do very dangerous things. But they live in a firehouse. Okay. Oh, that's a really great point. They do reside on public property, so.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  But didn't they buy the firehouse? I always say, I think it's a retired firehouse. Yeah. All right. So it's a quasi-private, private-public endeavor. Cause I mean, the mayor eventually gives them the okay and the resources they need.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  This is a question I got from a five-year-old not that long ago. Are Ghostbusters part of the police? And I was like, alright, I can see why this would be incredibly confusing. So that's our little kid's table snack break. I lost my shit about trans women and now I'm heading back to the adult table.

• 36:44Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. You got another cousin who's a real estate developer. And he says, "Everyone wants to tax the rich, tax the rich, but you know what? The rich already pay for everything. Like, the top 10% pay like 70% of all federal income taxes. 70%. Meanwhile, half the country pays nothing, zero. And we're supposed to squeeze even more out of successful people?"

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Um, alright, cuz we should get our story straight. The top 1% of US tax filers pay 45% of federal income taxes and the top 10% pay 75.9%. So not the 70 you were crying about, but actually a little more.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  So I mean, worth saying as an aside that this is just federal income taxes. The only progressive tax in the United States is the federal income tax. So of course, it's gonna be the one that they pay a disproportionate share of cuz nothing else is progressive. But I think there's a key question that we need to answer here. You are upset that the top 1% and the top 10% pay so much in taxes. So I'm going to put this back to you as you say, "I quote-unquote, wanna squeeze even more out of successful people." Over the past 25 years, have their tax rates gone up or down?

• 38:00Robin Rauzi?

  I don't know.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  No, cuz, you don't know.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  And you should know I'm very popular in my family.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  No, I mean, you're crying about the top 10% of Americans paying more in taxes.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Because their tax rate has gone down this century. And in fact, the top 1% is paying a 2.5 point lower net tax rate than it paid 25 years ago, even as their tax contributions have gone up. Because this isn't a tax story. It's not as if Congress sat down in 2000 and were like, "We are going to get these rich people. We are going to make sure that they pay. We're going to put the whole tax system on them." On the contrary, they have cut their taxes five times. Which is why the biggest tax cuts in rates, the rate that Congress actually sets through the tax system, through all the changes, through the step-up basis, through the marginal tax rate, through the capital gains tax rate, they have, from what's in their power, lowered

• 39:01Speaker 03

  the tax on these people. The reason why these people pay so much money is because they are earning more income. So I don't know how much the top 1% of Americans should pay in taxes. I know we've given them a 2.5 rate cut over the past 25 years, and that today, they earn 25% of all income.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  The top 1% comprises 1.5 million people, and they bring home one out of every $4 in the United States.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  25% of income. What's a fair tax look like when our economy is so unfair? The top 10% of Americans take home more than half of all income. So if you're taking home 55% of all the income earned in the United States, you're getting a tax cut every five years from a piece of legislation, and then you're turning around and crying to me about how you're paying 75.9% of income taxes, I don't care. I don't care! It would be one thing if Congress had spent the past 25 years throwing every tax that you or they had, and increasing your rates to the greatest ability they can, but they've done the opposite, and you're still taking home more.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  I guess my question back to you would be, are you actually telling me that the richest people in the United States need a larger tax break than the five that they have got in this century because their income is going up so much? I wouldn't call that being squeezed. The people who are being squeezed are the people who don't earn the 55% of income that goes to the top 10% of Americans. That's the real squeeze. The tax system is marginal. Income is everything.

• 40:36Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. So you had a lot of brothers in this.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Well, I do. It's funny, I do come from a massive family. I have like a large family on both sides, and so I've definitely had big Thanksgiving dinners, but even this is like a real cast of characters.

• 40:49Robin Rauzi?

  Your day trader brother who thinks that he understands the markets. He says, "We're in a recession already and the government's lying. The BLS is cooking the books. Unemployment is double what they say. Inflation is killing us, but they claim everything is fine. The numbers are rigged to make them look good, and you believe their statistics."

• 41:09Speaker 03

  All right. Well, there's like a lot going on with what you just said. What I'm hearing in here is that the government's lying, the BLS is cooking the books, unemployment is double, and inflation is killing us. It is very hard. It is very hard to live in an economy in which other people thrive and you do not. And yet it is a permanent part of the US economy that there will be unemployed people every month, that there will be laid off people every month. Over a million people will lose their job in a month. We have massive pockets of inequality in layoffs, in unemployment, in where people

• 41:53Speaker 03

  earn good wages, where people have lots of opportunity. And I think you are like most people in which you don't think it's a crisis until it happens to you. Your view of the economy is based on your experience in it, and it is a cold, hard, capitalist world that would say, "You just happen to be part of the casualties this month, but the economy itself is still fine." Even in our worst recession, 10% of people will be unemployed. 15% will be underemployed, which would be, I think, what you mean by unemployment. But that means 85% of people are fine. So our version of a bad economy isn't that 100% of people are doing poorly, but just 15% at a max are doing poorly. That's a cruel world.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  So I understand that that takes a certain degree of empathy and kind of a thick skin to both empathize with people who are suffering when you are fine, and a thick skin to understand that you can be suffering while other people are fine. But what I would put forward is not that you are upset at the BLS, or that you are upset about the unemployment statistic that came out last month, or didn't come out because the government was in shutdown. I think your life is fucking hard. And I think it's been hard for a while. And the US economy for the past 45 years has done a very poor job of making life better for a lot of people. Wages have been stagnating, inequality has been growing, while the price of housing, the price of healthcare, the price of transportation, the price of care in general, it's all rising.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  It gets harder and harder to afford a good life, while the labor market feels more precarious and less remunerative every single year. You want to attack the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the fall of 2025? You should be pissed off at Congress for at least the last 25 sessions. There are policies in the United States that can make a difference for families, that can make a difference for workers, and that's what you should be fighting for. Be mad how you want to be mad, be upset about whatever some aloof economist says is the state of the economy right now, but what you're suffering from is a type of weakness that the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not produce.

• 43:49Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, last one.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  All right, last one.

• 43:52Robin Rauzi?

  This is from your other uncle, who went to trade school and never shuts up about it. Universities are just indoctrination camps. They have safe spaces, and they have trigger warnings, cancel culture, and we give them billions of dollars. For what? For gender studies classes? They're churning out unemployable activists and worthless degrees. You want taxpayer monies? Teach something real. Why are we funding this nonsense?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  So I think if you took off of the table money that colleges and universities receive for very specific research grants that are mainly going to professors and researchers who are studying a question that the government has approved of and funded, and take that off the table, and then take off the table loans that students have to pay back, or grants given directly to students, like a Pell Grant, I'm not quite sure there's that much money left. I don't think you're getting that much money for, relative to how upset you are. The second thing I would say is that it might just be that you don't like young people, and they tend to gather at universities, as opposed to not liking universities.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  You might not like that young people today want safe spaces, have trigger warnings, and don't really want to follow or participate in an activity in which someone gets up and says something that's really offensive to them, and they're like, "All right, well, I'm not going to follow you on Twitter, and I'm not going to watch your TV show." I mean, is your problem really that the fact that they all gather at a place called "college," or that you just don't like young people and the opinions that you don't agree with? I mean, as far as churning out unemployable activists with a worthless degree, sure, some majors might not make sense on the outside, but, you know, one thing we've learned is that kids' degrees aren't really always predictable of their earnings. I was an English major.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  You would have called me a woke indoctrination camp attendee studying something that wasn't real. I mean, I spent a year studying one Russian novel, and I ended up with a PhD in STEM. We're not really good at planning the career trajectories of young people. We have to give them a little bit of space and trust to go out on their own and make their way in the world, and take whatever they've studied, and whatever they've learned, and put it into a career. And I understand that giving people freedom and agency and choices isn't something that you like, because it risks that they disagree with you in the process. But this is America. Kids don't respect you. Welcome to the world of being an older American. Kids have never respected you. I don't know why you need to, you're blaming universities because they're there now, but like,

• 46:30Speaker 03

  man, I did a paper on generational perspectives of economic security. It involved polling and like asking people of different ages the same question and seeing like how they aligned. And a big part of the paper was saying that the idea of a generational divide is total bullshit. Like it was mainly invented by advertisers. But one of the things that we went through and like primary evidence and documents to bring up in the paper was like, all these news articles about the greatest generation before they fought World War II. And how they weren't named the greatest generation until most of them were dead. And it was well into the 1990s. And that when they were in their like twenties, they were like, these are useless children. Who want to flap their day away. They have no career motivation, they don't work hard.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  And how like hating young people is just a thing that old people do.

• 47:19Robin Rauzi?

  But that would have been like during the depression, right?

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:23Robin Rauzi?

  Like when they couldn't get jobs.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  So it was like twenties and into thirties. Like these are just, these flapper kids. And then like, the boomers were all communists. Like they were coming to major colleges like, these are communists who won't fight in Vietnam and they're lazy. And then they like get a 401k and they're like, you know who's actually a lazy communist? The next set of young people.

• 47:44Robin Rauzi?

  The generation Xers, yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's actually, it's actually the Xers.

• 47:48Robin Rauzi?

  They don't want to work and.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's like, this is like part and parcel of being an American. Like I understand they listen to weird music, they wear despicably ugly clothing and they, you know, have their hair a different way. And too bad, they'll grow up.

• 48:05Robin Rauzi?

  It's so true. Amy and I walk around all the time, we're like, the young people, they're just not wearing enough clothing.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  It's like, it's both like not enough clothing and too much at the same time. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know how they pull off their sartorial choices. In a way, I'm both like mad and impressed.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  And jealous. Like, I understand what getting old means. It means I'm alienated when I see someone under 25 and I'm like, wait, what?

• 48:33Speaker 03

  And at the same time, I can say with enough security that the more different they are for me, the better society is because the same thing isn't gonna work all the time. So I hope they're crazy, poorly dressed, listening to terrible music people.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Who are studying some weird type of literature at school. I studied some weird type of literature at school. Man, can you imagine the look on my dad's face when I was taking a course in Russian?

• 49:02Robin Rauzi?

  I took a course in ecofeminism.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Ecofeminism? Oh man, I love it. Well, that Russian course, not only did I take Russian language my senior year, I took a course on like a specific book in Russian literature. And my dad's like, that's how hard college is? You got one book for the whole class?

• 49:19Robin Rauzi?

  We went deep.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was like, we're going deep on this book, Dad. And he was like, okay.

• 49:28Robin Rauzi?

  All right, that's it.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  That's it. I, you know.

• 49:30Robin Rauzi?

  We're at dessert.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  We're at dessert where I get sent back to the kids' table for telling my uncle he's just afraid of young people.

• 49:39Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  So, back to the kids' table where they're making me play Hotel Like a Bluey episode.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Maybe what we've learned this Thanksgiving episode is that I'm not always nice.

• 49:57Robin Rauzi?

  I have had second thoughts about inviting you to my Thanksgiving.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Listen, listen, listen. So of people that I am blood related to, we are, for the most part, either teachers, salesmen, or lawyers. And so if I'm not explaining and I'm not charming, I am going for the jugular in a very calculated way. And I think maybe lawyer Catherine came out.

• 50:20Robin Rauzi?

  I think that that's high school debate Catherine is what I think I heard there.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Oh, man, just like, this is my next shot at nationals.

• 50:28Robin Rauzi?

  That's the jugular part.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, doesn't everybody go back home and then like you immediately revert to being a 15 year old? I guess I am like the know it all debate co-captain. You know, even at the like metaphorical Thanksgiving table.

• 50:41Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, that was our podcast.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  That is our podcast. Yeah. Maybe I came out a little bit harsher. Maybe I'm trying to.

• 50:50Robin Rauzi?

  Passionate.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Passionate.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  We've said before, being optimistic doesn't make you naive or friendly or nice, especially given the number of executive orders that were like, don't talk to us.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  But, but there is a theme here, which all of these questions come back to people feeling like their life is not fair.

• 51:09Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  You know, the way that unfairness manifests for you and what you latch on to is really personal and can be really hurtful to other people. But like, we all have the same problem. This economy sucks sometimes, a lot of the times, and a lot of ways. And the way to move forward is let's make the economy more fair.

• 51:33Robin Rauzi?

  I think that we should tell everybody, we'll be back real for real in January. And we are making plans now. And if you're listening to this and you still haven't filled out our listener survey, it's probably still available.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  We hope you enjoyed it. We wanted to, yeah, happy Thanksgiving. Oh, should we do what I make my family do and say what we're thankful for? Or are you gonna kill me? Everyone in my family, I feel like my family is like so tired of this, and yet I look forward to it every year.

• 51:58Robin Rauzi?

  Sure, sure. What are you thankful for?

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Oh, I was not prepared to go first. Sorry.

• 52:06Robin Rauzi?

  I think that that's the.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Okay, sorry, sorry. What I mean is, I am thankful, truly thankful, and I can say this from our podcast, Optimist Economy, I can say this as the public persona, Keds Economist, that I have on every platform, but I can say that I am truly thankful that sometimes people feel like they have something to say, but I am blessed with having people who want to listen. So I am thankful for everyone who has ever given me even 30 seconds of their time to hear and learn about the economy. Your time is valuable, and I appreciate when you give it to me. Your turn, Robin.

• 52:51Robin Rauzi?

  We should just end there. No, I can't follow that. That's... You know, I'm thankful you asked me to do this show. I never would have done it. Never would have thought of it. I'm thankful that we're still getting along after a year of doing this.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, Robin, I'm gonna cry. That means so much. Y'all, I basically tricked her.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  I was so prepared at the end of the season for Robin to be like, "I'm out."

• 53:17Robin Rauzi?

  That was fun.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  That was fun.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Oh, Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

• 53:23Robin Rauzi?

  Happy Thanksgiving.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Good luck at the dinner table. I hope we have given you some good talking points.

• 53:29Robin Rauzi?

  Fight those drunkles.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  Fight those drunkles.