Pod Insights Optimist Economy A Million Reasons to Raise the Minimum Wage About this episode The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t been raised since the era of flip phones. Competing bills introduced in Congress recently would set it at $15 or $17. Is that high enough, and how can we ensure it doesn’t fall so far behind again? Minimum wage debates are dominated by worry about anticipated harms to some businesses, but ignore the proven positive effects for American workers — like narrowing Black-White wage gaps. And most importantly for our resident economist Kathryn Edwards, she gets to revisit her favorite but flawed piece of legislation, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.
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Transcript 11,042 words · 3 speakers
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0:45 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.
0:48 Robin Rauzi? I'm Robin.
0:49 Speaker 01 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. We have a couple announcements. One is that if you have a fancy podcast consumption platform, we have chapters to the episodes now, and you can skip all this.
1:11 Robin Rauzi? Just go ahead.
1:12 Speaker 01 Good for you.
1:12 Robin Rauzi? Forward, yeah.
1:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, good for you. Get to the meat. I think that's chapter three. Second announcement is that you can find us at optimist economy dot com. You can email us at optimist dot economy at gmail dot com. And we have two ways for you to donate to the show. You can become a paid subscriber to our Substack, or you can become a regular subscriber through Buy Me a Coffee. You can also drop off my favorite form of being paid, which is a burlap sack with a dollar sign on the side that's filled with gold coins, and we can come up with some kind of drop location.
1:43 Robin Rauzi? We'll work that out.
1:46 Speaker 01 In the meantime, Substack and Buy Me a Coffee are probably the best way to go about it.
1:50 Robin Rauzi? Probably the safest way to go about that, yeah. I want to add that we've had two great reviews on Spotify this week that both just tickled us. The first said, "Give these women money so that they can afford their own hotel rooms, pools, and trucks."
2:05 Robin Rauzi? Related to the first request. And second, one said that they would be a paid subscriber to a Robin Talks Taxes spinoff, which I just want to say, there is an audience for anything and everything out there, which also leaves me hopeful for our future on this show.
2:21 Speaker 01 Very hopeful for the future. Speaking of which, I have a fantastic retcon, which is our next segment.
2:26 Robin Rauzi? This is now chapter two.
2:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, chapter two.
2:28 Robin Rauzi? Retcon.
2:29 Speaker 01 First retcon is that I mentioned in the estate tax episode that this idea of taking the estate tax and dedicating it to children is something I had talked to the staff members of Congress about. Well, Representative Sarah Jacobs from San Diego introduced the Legacy Act to Congress, which would in fact raise the estate tax and dedicate a portion of its proceeds to a children's trust fund to help specifically with childcare. So it is a version of what I had said. It is currently a bill in Congress.
3:00 Robin Rauzi? All hope is not lost.
3:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, all hope is not lost. Y'all like, it's, it's an actual thing that's in a real place that has power and it has a backer and this is all great. Now, no, I don't think much will happen with this Congress, but it does mean that change can happen and that these aren't just ideas we're talking about. These are solutions. And when we say solutions, we mean solutions. And that's a big lift.
3:25 Robin Rauzi? Speaking of this Congress, the other thing to retcon is that we recorded that episode before the final vote on the budget reconciliation bill, which is what I'm going to call it. And that bill did pass. The estate tax exemption level is now set at $15 million per individual, $30 million per married couple. And that is for the future indexed to inflation. So it will continue to go up.
3:50 Speaker 01 You don't call it the one big beautiful bill?
3:53 Robin Rauzi? I don't.
3:53 Speaker 01 So I want them to own that they think it's beautiful. So that when it does horrible things, which it will do, sorry, optimist, that we can say like, remember your beautiful bill that cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid? You thought it was a beautiful thing to make 12 million more people uninsured in the US. Like, beautiful is a word that they chose. And I was like, that... It's something I will make you pay for. Yeah. I have an additional retcon about the youth unemployment episode. For listeners, as a reminder, we talked about what youth unemployment means in the context of an economy and what happens to youth unemployment when the economy goes up or down. I mentioned right at the start that the focus on young college graduates and raising
4:35 Speaker 01 alarm bells about their unemployment rate reaching six and a half percent was pretty choice, given that, one, high school graduates always have a higher unemployment rate, and two, even large groups in the population like Black people have a higher unemployment rate. Someone DMs me to say that it was used too much as a throwaway line, just to bring up Black unemployment, and it sounded borderline offensive. So, heard and apologized, it was not meant to be a throwaway. What I should have said and didn't elaborate fully is that all of these articles, all of this attention on the unemployment rate for college graduates, if you don't correctly
5:17 Speaker 01 diagnose a problem, you will never find a solution. And so if you decide that there is one group that is singularly suffering in the US labor market, and it's a bunch of fresh-faced college graduates who have a six and a half unemployment rate, you are missing the bigger picture of how our labor market works and who is actually suffering in it. And when you decide that crisis for one group is normal for another, you've essentially normalized the labor market being poor performing all of the time for a set of people like Black people. Right. And I think that callousness that worse labor market outcomes for Black people is accepted, which we talked about on our very first episode about DEI, is a problem.
6:02 Speaker 01 So I should have said more of that. And in general, that episode got a lot of response. So many young people said I was a terrible economist and that I didn't know what I was talking about. Got a couple of stupids in there, which I get to like add to my little list of the number of people who call me stupid when talking about the economy. And I, yeah, I think young people who had graduated and are having a hard time finding a job, you know, do not want to hear that they aren't special. And do not want to hear that they are actually in a pretty strong position relative to, say, people who don't have a college degree who are their age. And they let me know they thought I was stupid for saying so. The labor market is not always a kind place. But again, if we don't know what the problem is and we pick a victim as opposed to a diagnosis,
6:47 Speaker 01 we'll never get to a better place. Okay. I mean, the number of people were like, I had to take a job in food service with a college degree. I'm still unemployed. And I was like, sister, no, you are not. And it's not fun taking a job that's beneath your skill set, but it is not the same as being unemployed. And there's actually a big movement right now to reclassify the whole US labor market where people who have jobs that they don't like or who pay little are functionally unemployed. And I think what these kids hit on is how disgusting I think that is. Right? That we pursue policies and laws and practices that create a terrible, large, low-wage labor market. And then afterwards, we're like, and you know what? They don't even have a job. Like, I can't, the disrespect with which we treat certain parts of the labor market,
7:32 Speaker 01 you don't see when you do it, but you do it. And when you look at me and say, well, I have a college degree. I shouldn't be working an hourly retail shift. That's beneath me. You are basically saying that the people who work those jobs don't matter and they're beneath you. And that's not what you meant to say, but that's just what you said. That's what you said, yeah. That is exactly what you just said. And I think that's what made me so mad is just the casual disrespect and disregard that we would treat a quarter of workers in the United States. It's offensive to me to have their job. Well, it's offensive to me that their job is so shitty. Okay, I'll take a deep breath and I'll exhale. And let's talk about making those jobs better. Wait, we have to do terms and conditions first. You go ahead.
8:20 Speaker 01 Johnny Five, I am looking at the outline for what it's worth. It's not that it's not there, it's that I'm bad at looking.
8:26 Robin Rauzi? I reread the Johnny Five review and I posted it again yesterday because it's so good. Just reposted it. Keeping us honest, Johnny Five.
8:38 Robin Rauzi? Chapter three, Terms and Conditions. I was trying to remember this word and I didn't have to look far because my mother had sent me this email, you know, one of these, you know, word of day kind of things about the term for the paragraph mark that you see in, sometimes in fancy typography, you can get it by hitting Option 7 on your Mac keyboard. It looks like a backwards P with an extra line on it. It's called a pilcrow. I didn't know there was a word for this. It has a very long, boring history, but it, there's two things that are kind of happening. One is the evolution of the word pilcrow and one is the evolution of the actual symbol. But basically, in the Middle Ages in the texts, they began putting symbols between lines of text or at the beginning of a line
9:23 Robin Rauzi? to indicate this was the beginning of a new idea. And then later, they got fancy and illustrated. They would be sort of in the margins in red ink and with extra decorative marks and such. Anyway, it's called a pilcrow. Gets used by editors, actually, a lot to mark a place where there should be a new paragraph break.
9:41 Speaker 01 I looked up the phrase "once in future," which is from the T.H. White White novel, The Once and Future
9:49 Robin Rauzi? Once and Future King.
9:49 Speaker 01 King. But I was using it to describe a specific policy. And so I was calling it the Once and Future Policy. And I wanted to see where that came from and see who had said it first. Once and Future King is about King Arthur.
10:02 Robin Rauzi? Right.
10:03 Speaker 01 If you've ever watched the animated movie Sword in the Stone, that's about the first third of the book. If you've ever seen the musical Camelot, that's like the middle third of the book. And then the end's real sad, so no one's done that one. Kind of Camelot did. But The Once and Future King is a King Arthur tale. It was released in the 50s. And it is from the Latin, "King Arthur is the King of England once and in the future."
10:27 Speaker 01 It's a really lovely turn of phrase. And I think it applies a lot to the things we talk about in our show about we have these policies that are in some ways relics of the past, but are still necessary for the future. And I just wanted to make sure it wasn't like, I don't know, like something Nazis said, like I just do a quick check that like there was something like really terrible behind it.
10:53 Robin Rauzi? Is this biblical? Is it Nazis?
10:56 Speaker 01 Is this biblical? Is this offensive? Is like this something plantation owner used? Like, let's just do a quick gut check. I think these are really helpful exercise for learning about our history and economy. But it's above board, we get to use it. So I was writing last night about the once in future union, about unionization. And I think it still applies today for the centerpiece topic, which is the once in future minimum wage.
11:20 Robin Rauzi? Minimum wage.
11:21 Speaker 01 Minimum wage.
11:22 Robin Rauzi? So I had suggested we do a minimum, I mean, I know that Catherine is always game to talk about the minimum wage, but I had seen that there had been a bipartisan bill introduced in Congress to lift the federal minimum wage from its current 7.25 an hour to $15 an hour. And it's getting some attention as a real possibility because it was sponsored in part by Josh Hawley, who's a Republican Senator from Missouri. And it's pretty uncommon that a Republican is on board with raising the minimum wage. So there is also another bill in Congress called the Raise the Wage Act, which would incrementally raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour by the year 2030. So those are both bills that have been introduced.
12:06 Robin Rauzi? Current betting is on Hawley's bill. So the other interesting thing, though, that I found out is that 40% of the population in the US is already living in a state where they've lifted the minimum wage to $15 or higher. And so lifting the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is largely going to benefit the states that have never raised the minimum wage at the state level. And they are concentrated largely, of course, in the southeastern United States.
12:32 Speaker 01 I have respect for Holly's bill in that it is a bill that would actually affect his constituents.
12:37 Robin Rauzi? Actually, it won't because Missouri is already going to get a minimum wage bump in January, and there is, at least in the articles I read, some suggestion that he wants to raise the minimum wage everywhere so that Missouri remains competitive in terms of labor costs because...
12:53 Speaker 01 The legislature went around him and voted for a wage increase already?
12:57 Robin Rauzi? Right.
12:57 Speaker 01 Aw shucks, Josh.
12:58 Robin Rauzi? So he doesn't want to be competing with Arkansas and, I don't know, Louisiana and Mississippi for low-cost labor.
13:06 Speaker 01 I've swung back to disrespect.
13:08 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, okay. I thought you might.
13:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Well, the minimum wage, so...
13:16 Robin Rauzi? When do we first get a minimum wage?
13:18 Speaker 01 We first got the minimum wage in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
13:21 Robin Rauzi? Oh, of course.
13:22 Speaker 01 Of course. One of my favorite pieces of legislation, and I also have top five pieces of legislation. And I'm just going to check that it was 1938.
13:30 Robin Rauzi? 38?
13:31 Speaker 01 Yep.
13:31 Robin Rauzi? It's the only piece of legislation I know from being on this show.
13:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, we got the federal minimum wage in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was on the heels of the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, which both came in 35. And the big difference is that in between those years, the Supreme Court flipped and approved FDR's legislation as opposed to...
13:56 Robin Rauzi? Overturned it, overturned it.
13:57 Speaker 01 Overturned it, yeah. And I mean, we're going to get into a lot of history, but for you history buffs, FDR's plan to pack the court was over a minimum wage decision.
14:09 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
14:10 Speaker 01 Kind of. So, so, so basically, as FDR is moving through his agenda in his first term, states are passing minimum wage laws. And the Supreme Court overturns a minimum wage law in a state. Like, it's not a federal minimum wage law. They overturn a state minimum wage law and says, say that it's not allowed. So FDR and his big federal policy agenda is viewed to be quite tenuous. And in between the recess of the Supreme Court, one of the justices, and FDR at this point has announced, like, "I will pack this court. This is ridiculous." Like, your rulings are completely at odds with, you know, the Constitution, with the economy needs and so on. And in between, they rule on one minimum wage case that has got FDR, you know...
14:56 Speaker 01 Mad as hell.
14:56 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm.
14:57 Speaker 01 Very riled up. We need to change the way the Supreme Court is governed. And then when they come back, they rule another minimum wage case and they rule a different way.
15:04 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
15:05 Speaker 01 And the justice always said it was just like, this is what we were going to do.
15:10 Robin Rauzi? Anyway.
15:10 Speaker 01 Like, the cases were actually, were really different. And FDR was like, sure they were.
15:15 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, yeah.
15:16 Speaker 01 Other people have, have, have guessed that it's because the, you know, the election results were so incredibly in favor of FDR that they realized that they were standing in the way of what was going to happen.
15:27 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm.
15:28 Speaker 01 But it all hinged on minimum wage cases. And then once that minimum wage case goes through, FDR has what he needs and he can pass a federal minimum wage, which he does in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
15:37 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm.
15:38 Speaker 01 Which is why it comes three years after Social Security and unions.
15:41 Robin Rauzi? But what's the impetus for the minimum wage at that point in time? I mean, this is, this is the depression and...
15:47 Speaker 01 So this is not agreed upon of the impetus for the minimum wage. And it's certainly a byproduct of the progressive era.
15:57 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm.
15:57 Speaker 01 But the progressive era of a hundred years ago is not like the progressive era of today. And how to say this, maybe like a Band-Aid quickly? Real racist, real nativist, pro-eugenics. Like, a lot of the social reform movement around progressivism was making sure that we had a better economy that had the right morals, the right looking skin. And I mean, if you go through the founding of like the economics profession and the American Economics Association, like, these were like blatant eugenicists.
16:32 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm.
16:33 Speaker 01 But they set a lot of this policy and they influenced a lot of this policy. Not, and they weren't all like this and it wasn't all of them, but like, it was a very unabashed part of progressive policymaking that we needed to make sure that it was the right people who got these benefits. And in some ways, a lot of the very influential progressive reformers were trying to usurp power and supplant the policy wishes of like the union movement.
17:02 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
17:03 Speaker 01 And it was like a lot of intellectuals and they're at universities and they design policy and, you know, they, they're trying to swoop in and make policy to prevent like a groundswell of policy coming up from unions and workers themselves, or, God forbid, immigrants.
17:19 Robin Rauzi? Okay, so why did they, but why a minimum wage?
17:22 Speaker 01 Well, the bad guys, it's just easier to call them the bad guys. The bad guys wanted a minimum wage because if you raise the minimum wage high enough, you wouldn't want to employ women, or immigrants, or black people. And so the minimum wage was like an exclusionary mechanism to keep those people from out of the labor market by making the wage so high, you wouldn't want to hire them.
17:46 Robin Rauzi? Got it. Sorry, I had to make you say it aloud.
17:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, the good version of this story is that people who are vulnerable in the labor market, they don't have power. They can't bargain. If someone's starving, they can't ask for a higher wage because they need whatever you will give them. And that employers exploit that power. And the role of a minimum wage is to establish a floor so that no one is brought to a level of such deep exploitation. Because women, you know, they wouldn't bargain for themselves if they had children at home and no one else to support them. Immigrants who didn't speak the language didn't have an ability to ask for a higher wage. And that these very vulnerable groups didn't have power. And so the minimum wage needed to be established to get power for them.
18:34 Speaker 01 That's the good version.
18:35 Robin Rauzi? Okay, I was gonna say, that sounds very opposite from the other version. Okay.
18:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, the other version is...
18:39 Robin Rauzi? We raise the minimum wage, then we'll only want to employ, you know, clean-cut white men.
18:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:46 Robin Rauzi? Got it.
18:46 Speaker 01 Who are hopefully Nordic.
18:48 Robin Rauzi? Who are hopefully Nordic.
18:50 Speaker 01 And not Italian. So, that version of the minimum wage is allowing wages to go so low, it gives these, like, non-white men the ability to undercut the wages of the WASP-y men. If we have a wage floor, it just wouldn't make sense to hire a woman, or an immigrant. Like, if you have to pay a minimum amount...
19:12 Robin Rauzi? If you have to pay $15 an hour, you might as well hire... Yeah, okay, all right.
19:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, it's not, I mean, like, I don't think this is a question we'll ever know the answer to, but I think it's, it's interesting to me, one, because it's took place so long ago.
19:26 Robin Rauzi? Which is interesting to you, or...
19:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's interesting to me because this is like, this is the minimum wage coming out of the slime. But, that definitely, like...
19:35 Speaker 01 Colors the minimum wage going forward of like, who is it really for and who does it really advantage? Because you still see the same echoes today of this, why did they do this in 1938? On the one hand, you'll have progressives and liberals who are saying like, we need better wages in the labor market. Employers take advantage of people. We have to have a higher wage floor. It's to the detriment of our economy. And the conservative argument is basically, if you raise wages, these people won't have jobs.
20:02 Robin Rauzi? They'll lose jobs, right.
20:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, which in the 30s was like, awesome. But now is not good. But it's still the same mechanism of, are you protecting people through a wage floor? Or are you trying to get them out of the labor market? It's the exact same argument. And it was all there in the 30s.
20:20 Robin Rauzi? That's really interesting. I was just looking at some of this, you know, the summary of some of the research that's been done since 1992, which I'm sure you're going to get to. But it's exactly echoing these things that you're saying. Like, this is the debate about the negative impact on employment of the minimum wage, which I'm also sure we'll get to here very shortly.
20:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:39 Robin Rauzi? So the minimum wage hasn't been increased. When was it last increased?
20:43 Speaker 01 The last law was voted on, and it was a three-year staggered increase. So they voted on it in 2007. And then the increase ended by 2009. So it went up from, I believe it was 515 to 725. And it did it over three summers.
21:01 Robin Rauzi? Got it.
21:02 Speaker 01 So '07, '08, and then '09, it was done.
21:05 Robin Rauzi? So they voted on it in 2007, which is not quite 20 years ago.
21:09 Speaker 01 Oh, y'all, they voted on it before the first iPhone was released.
21:12 Robin Rauzi? Wow, we're on the iPhone 16. I guess that would make sense.
21:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah.
21:18 Robin Rauzi? It counted in generations of iPhones, yeah.
21:21 Speaker 01 We did not have smartphones. That was the world we were in the last time Congress voted to raise the minimum wage.
21:26 Robin Rauzi? And why, and then why do they never go? I mean, that's kind of a long time to never go back at it. It's not like Republicans have controlled Congress that entire time. How come it never got voted on again?
21:37 Speaker 01 I don't have a great answer to the political question. My guess would be that states that had democratic federal leadership, like democratic congressional delegation that would fight for a minimum wage, their states raised the wage aggressively. And Democrats who were in states that are less reliably democratic, like Joe Manchin, it was not a priority. So it just simply didn't have a champion in Congress, because the people who would champion it, people who are from stalwart Democratic states, their own state was taken care of, and they didn't champion it in Congress.
22:12 Robin Rauzi? I mean, isn't there also an argument to be made that what the minimum wage is in California shouldn't necessarily have a bearing on what it's going to be in Mississippi, or Georgia, or, I don't know, Maine?
22:24 Speaker 01 I would say yes and no. States should have the ability to go higher if they would like to, if that suits their economy. But I also don't think it is good economic policy to leave so much of the country behind.
22:38 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. I mean, we've talked about a lot of these policies being a floor,
22:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:41 Robin Rauzi? which states can go above. And maybe it's only now that people feel like the floor really is too low for even...
22:47 Speaker 01 I mean, Florida voted for a $15 an hour minimum wage.
22:51 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
22:51 Speaker 01 Because their cost of living was so high, and it in some ways is reflecting that the minimum wage is less a political issue and more a functional one. And even conservatives in Florida can tell you that I won't make enough money to afford housing in Miami if someone can be hired for $7 an hour.
23:10 Robin Rauzi? Right. So where do you think the minimum wage should be now?
23:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's an open question. I think the way that I answer it is to think of it as what it truly is, a floor, and come to a logical place of what the floor should reflect. So political bargaining is what it'll probably reflect, but it's not, in fact, what it should reflect.
23:34 Robin Rauzi? Fine, no 10, no 7.
23:35 Speaker 01 I'm going to say 14, you're going to say 19, and then we're just going to switch it off here.
23:38 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
23:38 Speaker 01 The markers that you can look at are the historical relationship between the minimum wage and other wage measures in our labor market. So things like the average wage, the median wage, those you can express in hourly terms, and then you can go back and say, all right... When the minimum wage was a thing Congress actually did, it was always at around like X percent of the median. And so then that gives you a basic level of this is what it should be.
24:09 Robin Rauzi? Right. Did you do that? Or have we done that?
24:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've done that before. It's not as instructive as you want it to be because you can basically cherry pick which years of the minimum wage you want to look at. So like probably this century is off the table because this is an era in which the minimum wage is artificially low. So it doesn't really make sense to look at it now. The highest it had ever been in real terms was in 1968. I do want to talk about that.
24:35 Speaker 01 You can kind of just, I think you end up with like the economic version of political bargaining of like, well, I liked that wage and so I picked that one. But you can arrive anywhere between almost like $14 and $21, depending on which measure you pick and why.
24:48 Robin Rauzi? Right, which is a big range.
24:49 Speaker 01 Which is a big range. But what I argued, I put this in a Bloomberg column. What I argued is that you should, you should come up with some type of economic justification for what you choose. And it should at a minimum be this. So you could also look at the relationship between, say, the minimum wage and poverty.
25:09 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I was thinking poverty. I was also thinking, you know, cost of putting a roof over your head. I mean, I think that's one of the things you see again and again is how, you know, there's plenty of places where you could work full time at the minimum wage in that state. And a one bedroom apartment would cost 177% of all the money you could make in a month.
25:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's funny. The, the housing crisis focuses so much on supply. Of like, we need to build more housing. But you will never build enough housing to make it affordable for someone who's working the minimum wage.
25:40 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
25:41 Speaker 01 Ever. It won't exist. Not anymore, not with how low the minimum wage is. So I think that these types of practical concerns are important. And in some ways, I think we're starting from scratch with the minimum wage. And so it's not about like how much bigger it should be from seven, but what is the right number, given our economy today? You know, it's worth noting that before 2007, it had also been a long time since the minimum wage had been increased. And that was a pretty small increase relative to what advocates had wanted. And so we are living in a, almost like a 35-year era of a very, very low minimum wage. If we were to move beyond that, we have ways of coming up with a real economically derived number.
26:22 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
26:23 Speaker 01 I could cherry pick it to be like 21 if you want.
26:24 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, exactly. Did you ever work a minimum wage job? My first job was 435 an hour. It's before it even went up to 515.
26:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, my first job was at 515 an hour. I was a math tutor.
26:38 Robin Rauzi? I was a delivery person for my father's law office. I would deliver documents to the banks and the courthouse on foot, like it was the 18th century.
26:51 Speaker 01 I was a math tutor and my boss gave me a bump to 555 after I had had a good period of performance. And then I later switched, when I went to college, to a Christmas break job where I worked at Foley's, which doesn't exist anymore. And I did inventory. So you basically have like one of those little scanner guns and you scan every single item in the store after the store closes and they see how much theft there's been.
27:17 Robin Rauzi? Good. That's a good job.
27:18 Speaker 01 For a college student who like doesn't have normal hours, working until like 5:00 a.m. on Christmas break wasn't the worst. And that one actually paid decent.
27:28 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I remember when I got a job in college, I made 10 bucks an hour. I was like, I always felt like I was rolling in the dough.
27:34 Speaker 01 It's worth explaining, if it's not clear to listeners, that the minimum wage goes up, it's a purely political question. They set the wage in nominal terms and it doesn't increase based on prices in the economy or spending in the economy or anything like that. It just sits at this nominal level.
27:53 Robin Rauzi? Can you explain what you mean by nominal terms and nominal level?
27:56 Speaker 01 Nominal is the actual dollar amount and not its value over time. So I set the wage at 725 in 2009. If prices have increased 40% since then, then the real value of the minimum wage has decreased 40% since then because it's still this nominal amount. So nominal is the number you see, real is the value you experience.
28:24 Speaker 01 We adjust it using inflation.
28:26 Robin Rauzi? Usually.
28:27 Speaker 01 Usually. The highest value of the minimum wage is on the day it goes into effect. And then immediately, it's like a new car.
28:33 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
28:34 Speaker 01 Drive it off the lot, it's worth less. Same with the minimum wage. We drive that thing off the congressional lot and it's worth less money. And it only goes up when there's enough political will to raise it. It's not on any type of schedule. Now, some state legislatures have set their wage to a schedule where it increases every year based on prices, but not the federal level, which is why it's 725. One comment I get back a ton when I talk about the minimum wage are people who will say, no one works the minimum wage anymore.
29:01 Robin Rauzi? Right, yeah.
29:03 Speaker 01 Which is not true. It's about a million people. Which this just means that you don't think those million people matter. I posted a video on TikTok where I talked about how the minimum wage is a function of power. And a guy responded that like his daughters are in high school and they got a job at like some food restaurant place making fourteen dollars an hour. So like the minimum wage doesn't matter if a teenager can make more. And I was trying to explain to him of like, your daughters are pretty powerful in the labor market compared to like an immigrant. You know, or someone who doesn't speak English, or someone who doesn't have documentation, who needs to find a job. They will not have the power to have fourteen dollars an hour. Your daughters will have more. And he...
29:46 Speaker 01 So that didn't work, actually. The TikTok comments didn't convert him. And I should have known that that was gonna happen, but truly, like, I think the disregard that so many people have for the minimum wage is a function of having a disregard for the people who still earn it.
30:01 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I mean, well, and I guess there are people who are just complete, you know, they're free marketers, top to bottom, and they just think that everything should be negotiated every, by every person on an individual level. They're probably also opposed to unionization or, you know, you can respect that as an intellectual position or not. But I think that the minimum wage also has some benefits or some consistency. In wage pricing has some benefits just to society.
30:31 Speaker 01 The question of the minimum wage to me comes down to a couple of things. One of them is a value statement of how much do you think the least among us should earn in the labor market, knowing that they are in our economy, in our society, and competing with people for jobs? Do you think there should be a floor? And if so, do you think that floor should be meaningful? And then I think the, kind of the negative consequences of the minimum wage are almost framed as like a, like those are the trade offs, but they're not necessarily the cost. The cost of having a low minimum wage is having very poor workers in our economy. The trade offs to having a minimum wage is that we might experience job loss, we might experience some small price increases. I think the reason why it always comes down to how you value the people is that economic
31:16 Speaker 01 evidence has, you know, every single minimum wage increase there has been, has been studied by economists to understand its effects and the price effect and the job effect. It's just not there. It's, or rather, it's there, but it's not large. It's not what the predictions would be.
31:32 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, this is what, this is what I was reading just before we started recording, which was this, this article from 2022. I'm sure you know it better than I do because I just read it. But it was looking at 70 studies done since 1992 on the minimum wage and comparing how they are just sort of popularly summarized, or that the research literature in this area is popularly summarized to say that it has no effect on employment. But of course that there are expected to be negative effects on employment. And the question is, and we talked about this on, you talk about this on the show a lot, there are trade offs. And the question is, what are you willing to trade off?
32:12 Robin Rauzi? And is the trade off that you have millions of people who are working full time who cannot lift themselves out of poverty, who are still living below the poverty line?
32:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, the classic prediction of the minimum wage is that it raises the price of labor above its competitive level and therefore you would want less labor. Ergo, people would lose jobs. They're kind of like two dimensional. I've just got supply, I've got demand, they meet in the middle, I put a little bar above it, and I can tell you how much job loss the minimum wage should predict. But that number has never been found, quote unquote, "in the wild." And there are still these really large predictions that the minimum wage should eliminate jobs, and this is a very sensical prediction. It's this very sensical prediction, but, you know, we've just, we've never seen it in real life to the degree that theory would predict.
33:08 Speaker 01 So we do see evidence of some job loss, and it varies across circumstances, across wages, across industries. It varies enough and it's small enough, it's almost as if the prediction is wrong. So, this is a great example of being right and wrong at the same time. The minimum wage absolutely destroys jobs because it makes them illegal. You can't employ people at this prior wage anymore, it's now against the law. So technically, all those jobs are gone. But they're immediately replaced with a new legal contract, and what we don't see is a ton of layoffs when that occurs. So you keep them, at least in the short run, but, you know, maybe you don't replace people as they quit or get fired as quickly.
33:51 Speaker 01 And in the long run, you kind of reorient your production to use that labor less. So the prediction's right, but it's also wrong at the same time. And I think this is why the minimum wage can be so fraught a conversation and so controversial when it shouldn't be. It makes a bunch of jobs illegal, they're go away, it's a transition to get to that process, but in the long run, we have higher employment and more economic growth, so we don't, it doesn't like leave a scar in our labor market from which we never recover. It's just one part of this like big evolution of the economy moving forward.
34:23 Robin Rauzi? I think that that's really helpful, that distinction, because I think these are terms that economists use that are not how the people, we use them in the vernacular, in everyday language. Like, employment and jobs is kind of synonymous to the most of us.
34:38 Speaker 01 I mean, a job is a job, the way that you mean it, but I think in the context of like predicted job loss for the minimum wage, it's really not the job as you mean it. You mean employment. You think that the number of people who have a job, AKA the number of people who are employed, it's going to go down if I raise the minimum wage. And if it does, it does a little. Like, it does to a fractional degree, but not to a catastrophic degree. We don't see massive layoffs, and it's not 500,000 or a million people who lose their job right away. But I have eliminated jobs from the economy. They've just been immediately replaced by new contracts that meet the legal standards.
35:15 Robin Rauzi? And it's not a linear thing, right? So like, if the minimum wage goes from its current rate to $15 an hour, it will more than double. That does not mean that all those new jobs, that there will only be half as many. It doesn't operate that way.
35:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, because the other, I mean, okay, yeah, we have supply, demand, prices, a wage floor, you know, boom, employment loss, that doesn't happen. But price and demand and supply, that's only one way to view the economy. It's a very powerful intuition. It's why it's taught in 101, is because the idea of supply and demand clearing at a price explains so much of our world. But it's not the only thing that's going on. And if supply and demand are Econ 101, I would say Econ 102 is power. And the power that individual agents have in bargaining and the power that they have in market and non-market situations, we can use economics to express your power
36:11 Speaker 01 in an employment contract, in a marriage, as a player on a soccer team. All of that has power, which we would define by your ability to bargain for the conditions that you want, given your outside options and information. And that is a whole other branch of economics and the other way to view all of these things. And by that kind of lens of thinking about power as opposed to prices. The minimum wage wouldn't necessarily cause job loss or employment declines because the workers who are affected don't have much power and they're being paid below what they're worth because they can't bargain for more. And this goes back to kind of like the original motivation for the minimum wage
36:53 Speaker 01 was to basically remove power from employers to exploit workers who work for them.
37:01 Speaker 01 So even though it took a while for the economics literature to come up with like the same type of framework, it was all there in the economy when the minimum wage was created. Some people just don't have enough power. Sometimes employers have a lot. And I think, you know, based on what we talked about with the union episode, the idea that employers have a lot of power and workers don't is probably pretty salient.
37:21 Robin Rauzi? People express concern about the minimum wage going up because the thought is that it's going to drive prices up, right? It's going to, if you have to pay restaurant servers $15 an hour, food prices in restaurants are going to go up. If you have to pay people who work in factories more, price of goods is going to go up. Is there research on that? Does the minimum wage track with consumer prices?
37:43 Speaker 01 A minimum wage increase can increase the price of goods. You know, the employer would just pass the cost of the minimum wage increase on to consumers, but it's so small, it's hard to see.
37:55 Robin Rauzi? Really? Because you would just think like labor is such a huge part of a company's overhead?
37:59 Speaker 01 A lot more consumers than workers.
38:03 Speaker 01 You know, if I have 100 workers and 5,000 customers, even absorbing the full increase in labor costs just doesn't lead to that high of a price increase. And even the more recent fast food wage increase in California, I mean, it raised prices by a very marginal amount. Again, you know, we talk about so much on this show. It's not that policies are pure good. It's that they have trade offs and you just have to weigh them. The trade off to a higher minimum wage is that there could be declines in employment. We think they're small. There could be price increases. We think they're small. Do you think that's worth having an economy where you and no one you know is competing with someone to make $7?
38:46 Speaker 01 And people who make $7 an hour don't exist in the economy anymore. What are you willing to risk versus what you're willing to gain? I think the other thing to keep in mind is that the kind of the boogeyman of the situation is that if we raise the minimum wage, employers will accelerate automation. And I think it's worth pointing out, one,
39:07 Robin Rauzi? They're gonna do that anyway?
39:08 Speaker 01 They already do it. Yeah, they're gonna do that anyway.
39:10 Robin Rauzi? I know.
39:11 Speaker 01 And you don't need to have some kind of like devil's bargain of like, oh, we'll stay at like 1980 wages for as long as you don't adopt an iPad. Like, that won't work.
39:21 Robin Rauzi? Or you don't put a robot in your warehouse.
39:23 Speaker 01 I think that's part one. And part two, it makes it seem as if the trade off to the experience of customers in an economy is that people and a robot are the same. And it's, it's just, hey, as soon as a person costs more, I'm switching to robot. And that's the minimum wage's fault. And it does not take into account that the actual implementation of technological upgrades for an employer isn't seamless and it doesn't always become cost effective. I went to a McDonald's recently when I was driving home from Dallas and you can no longer call McDonald's fast food. Because it took so long to order on an iPad that was the size of a fridge.
40:08 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
40:09 Speaker 01 There's like four of them. Nobody knows how to work them. Everybody gets their order wrong and nobody was happy. And there wasn't even clear how the lines worked. And I was like, yeah, is the problem here the minimum wage? Which is still $7.25 an hour in Texas? Or is it that firms adopt new technology and maybe it's nice to blame the minimum wage for it?
40:28 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. It's funny, I recently had that feeling about a job totally disappearing, which was parking lot attendance in LA. We get a lot of parking lots, a lot of parking structures, and you would go in and you would get a ticket and you'd come out and you would pay somebody at the other side. And those jobs disappeared in like two years. Everything from, you know, the ability to play with a credit card at the, at the exit to license plate scanners that could just scan you coming in and out, to pretty reliable machines that would take your payments. And all those jobs went away and it had nothing to do with the minimum wage.
41:05 Speaker 01 I, I think there's this assumption of Efficiency on the employer's side, but as a consumer, you know that that's not right. You know that stores can make horrible decisions regarding staffing. There are several grocery stores in DC that are historically referred to as the Soviet Safeway because they never had anything and the lines were so long. Employers make all kinds of staffing decisions all the time that can affect like your price and your experience. And I think the minimum wage, again, very good fall guy for certain choices, but isn't what's moving the needle for a lot of it.
41:43 Robin Rauzi? But the minimum wage you were saying is nominal. It's, can it be, could it be indexed?
41:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
41:50 Robin Rauzi? And should it be?
41:51 Speaker 01 Could and should. Yes, I actually feel this is, this is a real, this is a real niche take because you have to know a lot about indices over historical periods in order for it to make sense. But if you index something to inflation, you would take the dollar amount, say it was $20, and every year you would increase it by the same percentage that prices increased. So if prices increased 3%, the minimum wage goes, or the dollar amount goes up 3%. And it does that every year with inflation. That's what we do with a lot of prices in our economy. The other way to index it would be to index it to earnings. So that if prices go up by 3%, but average wages went up 5%, you raise the minimum wage so that it keeps
42:36 Robin Rauzi? pace- Keeps pace with wages.
42:37 Speaker 01 With wages as opposed to prices. The reason why that matters is that for the most part, wages rise faster than prices.
42:45 Robin Rauzi? If you index it to inflation, it would, it would, it would still erode. But if you index it to wages, it would keep the flow.
42:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, it would keep it at a relevant level. These are really technical issues that can make a huge difference in the long run. So if we were going to do the minimum wage, and I mean do it, we're doing it right.
43:02 Robin Rauzi? Okay, so if we were going to do it right, it would be different than?
43:05 Speaker 01 You would index it to wages and not prices. The calculation that they make to adjust your social security, that's indexed to wages. So again, the government knows how to do this when it wants to. It didn't mess up your social security. It understood how to calculate, you know, the change in wages over time using a wage measure. Does not extend that to the minimum wage. So it knows how to do it. To make clear how much power is at play in the minimum wage, one way we can end this is by kind of putting the minimum wage in context of who is affected by it.
43:38 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
43:39 Speaker 01 So when the minimum wage passed in 1938, it was required in certain sectors,
43:44 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
43:45 Speaker 01 like transportation, finance, manufacturing, wholesale trade. It covered about half of workers at the time.
43:52 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
43:53 Speaker 01 But throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s, when the minimum wage was increased, it was also expanded in coverage.
44:02 Robin Rauzi? New sectors got added.
44:04 Speaker 01 New sectors got added. So one of the last expansions, big expansions to the Fair Labor Standards Act minimum wage coverage, was the 1966 increase. And what was very special about it is that they raised the wage and they also expanded to cover industries that are going to bring in a lot of black workers.
44:25 Robin Rauzi? Uh-huh.
44:25 Speaker 01 And in effect, this is the largest expansion of the minimum wage that black workers have experienced, given the industries that they're in. So a set of researchers, they looked at what was the effect of the 67 increase, and they found that it absolutely raised black wages. But more importantly, it reduced the black-white wage gap.
44:44 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
44:45 Speaker 01 Which, if you consider 1968 in America, this was a phenomenal progress.
44:51 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
44:52 Speaker 01 The minimum wage can be a tool in making the labor market more remunerative for people who don't have the power to have higher wages, which is really similar to the arguments in 38. And when you think about these types of effects, it puts this like, "But we may lose jobs." It puts into a really stark perspective of what people are arguing. The minimum wage right now is always talked about in what it's supposed to do. That's bad. Like, if you raise it, we should lose jobs. If you raise it, we'll see higher prices. But if you go into the economics research and look at what the minimum wage has shown to do, it's done things like raise the wages of people of color, especially relative to white people, because they get clustered into the lowest-paying jobs.
45:36 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
45:37 Speaker 01 You know, if you were to make the minimum wage discussion about women of color are taken advantage of in our labor market, and so we should have a policy to address that called the minimum wage, it's a very different conversation.
45:48 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
45:49 Speaker 01 If you were to say that people are taken advantage of in the labor market by employers, and the minimum wage is a way to redress that, Which is absolutely, I mean, that's the minimum wage. That's its whole history. That's its whole motivation. Then we have to have a conversation about which employers are taking advantage of and what kind of power employers have. So I've always thought that the employment and price predictions were really convenient because it got you out of the much harder conversations of the problems that the minimum wage solves.
46:23 Robin Rauzi? Right. This reminds me, actually, a lot of the conversation we had a couple of months ago about paid sick days. The idea that there are going to be small businesses for whom that there's going to be a burden, but maybe those aren't actually the jobs we want to be sacrificing 20 million people's health and paid sick time to.
46:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, if you raise the minimum wage, I will say this. If you raise the minimum wage, there are going to be some businesses that go out of business. Absolutely. I don't think that I should pretend as if there's no, like, I don't think anyone who's a proponent of the minimum wage should pretend as if there's no consequences. There are probably, and because we have 300 million people.
47:00 Robin Rauzi? Somewhere.
47:01 Speaker 01 Somewhere, there is a business that is so marginally, you know, still in business that if you were to raise the minimum wage, they'd fold. That can happen. So do you want to protect them or the 15 million people who would benefit from a minimum wage increase? And which type of economy do you want to live in? The one where we sacrifice everything for a business that's barely making it? Or the one where we empower workers with larger incomes and hopefully those businesses get to try again? Because it is worth noting that in the United States, you can fail at business and you get to do it again.
47:37 Robin Rauzi? Indeed, you can fail at a lot of things and do it and try it again.
47:39 Speaker 01 You could fail at a lot of things and do it again. That's not to sound callous that if your business failed, that I'm like, see, I don't care. Of course I care. But you also are in the US economy. You get to start again. It's not like you'll be doomed for poverty for the rest of your life, whereas someone who works 7:25 an hour, they will be.
47:57 Robin Rauzi? Do you feel optimistic that we're actually going to get a bump in the minimum wage this year?
48:02 Speaker 01 Yes. It probably won't be as high. I don't know if it'll be this year, but the Republican Party has turned towards populism.
48:09 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
48:10 Speaker 01 And that has a lot of consequences, but having both political parties vested in poor people can really only be for the benefit of our economy. It shouldn't be a niche issue. It should be a broad economic issue. And Holly is someone who has said publicly that Republicans don't serve their primary constituency. So getting a minimum wage of 15 is maybe not what I would pick. But yeah, getting a federal minimum wage of $15, I'm optimistic that they'll go for it because they have yet to enact a public policy that will benefit the people who voted for them. So odds are they got to do at least one.
48:49 Robin Rauzi? They got to do at least one.
48:51 Speaker 01 Minimum wage is kind of a gimme.
48:52 Robin Rauzi? Exactly.
48:53 Speaker 01 It's incredibly popular. People love voting for it. They love voting on it. They love seeing it go up. They think, I mean, there are people, there's like a crazy percentage of people who think the minimum wage should be above 25. So if that means Republicans put it to 15, like, I'll take it.
49:09 Robin Rauzi? All right. Pillcraw.
49:15 Robin Rauzi? Executive orders.
49:17 Speaker 01 Pillcraw executive orders.
49:20 Robin Rauzi? Do you have an executive order?
49:21 Speaker 01 You go first.
49:22 Robin Rauzi? Okay, so you guys have been sending us a lot of executive orders. We've got a little backlog, so I put one on our Substack. And I just want you to know that grocery stores will not be allowed to rearrange the aisles every eight months. That passed with 88% of the vote of optimists everywhere.
49:36 Speaker 01 I don't think they should change. I mean, they're like eight years. They should never be allowed to change. Just make it work.
49:42 Robin Rauzi? It's so frustrating. This is from another one of our listeners who's been a really great supporter. Troy says, "Moving vans need to have one of those sliding signs, kind of like you have in a dishwasher that says clean and dirty, and it needs to say moving in or moving out because that's all you want to know when you walk by and you see them on the street." My personal executive order this week in the Republic of Rousey is, when stores that are permanently closed, take them off the Google Maps and the Apple Maps. Don't leave them there and say they're permanently closed. That's not helping anybody.
50:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, so where does that end?
50:15 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, exactly. I wish you, like... Two cable stores trying to return a modem that they just weren't even there anymore. Those stores, those are my executive orders.
50:25 Speaker 01 Okay, I have kind of a real one that's not just petty. I think firms should be required to disclose turnover cost.
50:34 Robin Rauzi? Oh.
50:35 Speaker 01 How much does it cost you to be such a terrible employer? I think public companies in particular would benefit from this. But I was texting with a journalist about Amazon. And how they, their average wage is huge turnover. The average wage is relatively high, but they had this leaked document a few years ago. That was an internal report that was like, wow, we're burning through so many workers in some metropolitan areas. There will be no one left to hire. We basically will have hired and have lost, you know, the majority of workers who are of a certain age, of a certain education and will have worked for us. And I was like, okay, well, now everybody tell me.
51:11 Robin Rauzi? You want, you want this to be part of their, their like SEC documents that they have to file? It will be, and this would be the cost, this isn't just the turnover.
51:20 Speaker 01 Or just the turnover rate?
51:21 Robin Rauzi? Just the turnover rate, I think would be really instructive.
51:23 Speaker 01 I mean, especially for people who are in the labor market searching for jobs. You should have to say how many people quit your company last year. So this was my, this is my question. I got a debate about this with another labor economist of like, which do you think firms would hate more? Having to disclose the pay of their current employees? Or having to disclose their turnover rates? And like, which one benefits job seekers more? Because this is again, getting to like the both the deep nerdiness of economists, as well as how important power bargaining and information is to the profession? That we got in this like epic dispute of what would be better for workers bargaining for higher starting wages? And assessing a future employer, knowing what they pay or knowing how many people they've lost?
52:05 Robin Rauzi? And you thought how many people they lost?
52:07 Speaker 01 Because it was more indicative of working conditions than pay alone.
52:10 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, for sure.
52:11 Speaker 01 So yeah, like the big fight was that like knowing pay would help with wage gaps. So, you know, women wouldn't be in a disadvantage. Or black people wouldn't be at a disadvantage. They could ask for the right starting wage and that that would be really effective. But then I said it would lead to worse matches because they would be hiding job quality concerns, which would show up in turnover, but not pay. And so then we got into like this kind of like.
52:33 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, especially you have to pay more, but you keep losing people. That's a very, very bad sign.
52:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
52:38 Robin Rauzi? You can do an index, maybe get both of them.
52:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, so honestly, por qué lo nos dos? We could just have pay and turnover disclosed, but I think it was more fun to fight about which would be more useful to workers, what would empower workers more, which piece of information? And like, that is what PhD labor economists argue about at a bar. And we're a real good time, I will say. I think we're fun as hell, but I could get why people would move away from us.
53:06 Robin Rauzi? I don't know, I lean in. One of my friends said that she and her husband have a code when they're like out, and one of them is eavesdropping on an interesting conversation, that they say something to the other one that involves the word lunch, which means, "Stop talking, I'm trying to eavesdrop to this table behind me." So if you just say like, "What are we gonna have for lunch on Saturday?"
53:29 Robin Rauzi? That means I'm listening in on this conversation. I would totally, I would totally lunch your conversation.
53:35 Speaker 01 Oh my God, why is this not the term and condition that we started the show with in whatever pillcrow that was, to lunch something is to, oh my God. You know, because lunch used to be slang for slacking off.
53:48 Robin Rauzi? Oh.
53:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, "Are you lunching?" It's like, "Yeah, I'm lunching." Like, "I'm at, I'm at, I'm at my work, but I'm, I'm lunching right now." This is great. Again, fully endorse. Okay, replace what I said with what Robyn said. Everybody needs to have a code word established at every dinner gathering so that if you needed to eavesdrop, you could.
54:04 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, yeah.
54:05 Speaker 01 Okay, switching from mine to yours, mine wasn't petty enough, but this is just exact amount of petty.
54:13 Robin Rauzi? Okay, final pillcrow, spiritual sponsors.
54:17 Speaker 01 Spiritual sponsors.
54:20 Robin Rauzi? My spiritual sponsor is Girls Weekends, because that's where I get interesting details, like how to come up with a code word like lunching, which is from my friend Emily.
54:28 Speaker 01 That's a better life to know that.
54:29 Robin Rauzi? Every year, my four friends from high school get together, and I just have to endorse the idea of just getting away without your spouses and family and being with people that you can, are not bored with your stories and troubles, and you can bitch about your in-laws or your difficulties with your kids or your job, and, and it's all new to me. Bring it on. It's great. We had a great time.
54:50 Speaker 01 Okay, my, oh, did we have a spiritual, a real spiritual sponsor?
54:54 Robin Rauzi? Paul in Kearney, Nebraska, came in as a spiritual sponsor, and he also said he binged our entire back catalog in two days of tractor work out there in Nebraska, which I just love. I love the image of that. Thank you, Paul. We appreciate it.
55:07 Speaker 01 Thank you so much, Paul. We absolutely appreciate it and need it. My spiritual sponsor is Phyllis Nefler from True Beverly Hills. From what? From the 1980s classic True Beverly Hills. Phyllis Nefler is played by Shelley Long. She's a Beverly Hills housewife whose husband leads her, leaves her because she never does anything or accomplishes anything and her only hobby is shopping. And so she takes over her daughter's Wilderness Girls troupe. And yeah, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of stuff happens. You can imagine what, but it is an absolutely amazing and touching movie. Man, one time when I was in college, I found out that a friend of mine hadn't seen it. And I was like, you haven't seen True Beverly Hills? It's such a good movie. We should go rent it.
55:52 Speaker 01 And there was a rental store, like a really cult classic rental store in Austin called I Love Video. And I Love Video, it wasn't even arranged alphabetically. It was arranged by like auteur's first movie shelf. It was just like the most pretentious arrangement of films. And I called them and I was like, hey, do y'all have True Beverly Hills? And this kid was like, oh, I hope not. Hold on. Comes back and he's like, I do have it actually. And I am pretty disappointed. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I'm going to come in and pick it up. Set it aside for me. Can you set it aside for me? And he was like, no, he's like, no one's going to come in. I'm like, it's a great movie. Someone could come in. And he's like, no, they won't. And when I showed up, I was like, oh, hi.
56:36 Speaker 01 And he's like, you don't have to tell them you're the girl that called about True Beverly Hills. And I was like, yeah, I am. Did he just give it to you so you can keep it? No, he was like, here you go. Just very begrudging. And I was like, okay, well, I can pick up like, I don't know, Fellini's Eight and a Half if that'll make you feel better. But I'm going to watch True Beverly Hills first. If that's all right with you. Anyway, Phyllis Nefler has some amazing lines in this movie. The clothes are insane because it's like 80s wealthy people in California. Is that the character's name? The character's name is Phyllis Nefler. Okay, great. Yeah, sorry. I didn't realize I had to write so much context. But yeah, it's a deeply, deeply silly movie about becoming confident. And she has a lot of great lines.
57:20 Speaker 01 It's very much like, almost like East meets West. Like it's trying to take all these rich girls camping. And they're like, um, there's bugs here. We're not going to stay. Very hilarious, but she is my spiritual sponsor. And one of her big quotes is, in the wilderness of life, one can never be too prepared. Which I really love, particularly in the context in which she says it, when they try to go camping and end up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Have I sold this movie enough?
57:48 Robin Rauzi? Boy, I, you know, we need funny things to watch right now, and I will put it on the list.
57:54 Speaker 01 Really? Okay, it all takes place in LA. I feel like it should also speak to like, it is making fun of rich people in LA.
58:00 Robin Rauzi? And that actually is like a really good subgenre of movies, like LA Story. I actually own LA Story. I bought it, yeah.
58:07 Speaker 01 If you own LA Story, you gotta watch True Beverly Hills. Lots of, there's lots of celebrity cameos. All the girls are hilarious. And actually, if you are a Rilo Kiley music fan, this is one of her, I think this is her first film.
58:21 Robin Rauzi? Great.
58:22 Speaker 01 For those of you who are just gonna watch True Beverly Hills for the first time, you're welcome.
58:32 Speaker 01 We like to end the show by thanking our producers who make this possible, Andy and Sophie. Appreciate you.
58:39 Robin Rauzi? Thank you.
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