Pod Insights Optimist Economy Should We Cherish the Ultra-Wealthy? (a.k.a. ‘The Cornfield’) About this episode A certain kind of wealthy American has been griping out loud lately — about taxes, about progressive cities, about how unappreciated they are for the jobs they create, the stuff they buy, and the tips they hand out. A narrative is coalescing around them too: that the top 10% of earners now do so much of the spending, the U. S. economy relies on them. But an economy that depends so much on the people at the top isn't the healthy one the country deserves — it’s just wearing a nice suit.
Chapters:
00:00:56 Announcements: Q&A episode questions wanted
00:01:18 Retcon: The 86 debate; FDR's full "calamity howling executives" quote 00:05:32 Terms & Conditions: Wealth Effect and Zugzwang
00:09:26 Big Pilcrow: Should we cherish the ultra-wealthy?
00:36:41 Executive Orders: Retire "mummies"; union credits on red carpets 00:39:34 Spiritual Sponsors: Mellow Cello podcast; enormous floral arrangements
Further Reading
Moody's claim that the top 10% of earners now drive nearly half of consumer spending in the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571
The Minneapolis Fed on what the underlying data actually shows.https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2026/have-us-consumers-gone-k-shaped-a-review-of-the-data
Wealthy part-time New Yorkers reacting to a proposed pied-à-terre tax in the Financial Times.https://www.ft.com/content/3283eaab-e9cf-41e6-a028-5a02fb6f4615
The Wall Street Journal on second-home taxes spreading from New York City to other states, including the San Diego homeowner who'd like to be cherished.https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/taxes-on-second-homes-are-springing-up-across-america-93a64448
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy were about as different as two politicians could be. The lanky businessman and the stout old senator, the conservative darling and the liberal icon. But did you know they once teamed up to tackle an elusive challenge? Universal healthcare.
0:18 Speaker 00 In season four of the Big Dig podcast, we tell the story of Romney Care and the odd couple alliance behind it. Find Mitt and Ted wherever you listen.
0:30 Speaker 01 I don't want to read the news. I want Robin to read me her reaction to the news.
0:35 Robin Rauzi? Sometimes in the morning, my poor wife is making coffee and I'm like, but Dad, could you keep this thing?
0:42 Robin Rauzi? She's like, hits the coffee grinder button, you know, just like.
0:45 Speaker 01 Is there a way to shop for loud grinders?
0:47 Robin Rauzi? Exactly.
0:56 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm economist Catherine Ann Edwards.
1:00 Robin Rauzi? I'm editor Robin Rousey.
1:01 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.
1:12 Speaker 01 Well, so today on Optimist Economy, we're only both about 30% sure about what we're talking about, but we're pretty sure it's about rich people.
1:20 Robin Rauzi? It's definitely about rich people. What we're going to say about them is a little bit up in the air.
1:28 Speaker 01 Part of the conversation is that we don't know how to talk about what we talk about them. All right, first announcements.
1:34 Robin Rauzi? First, we've gotten a lot of great questions so far for our next Q and A episode. I think that we will be recording it in two weeks, which means I need your questions in the next week. So if you're hearing this and you've still got a burning question, send it to [email protected] .
1:49 Speaker 01 All right, moving on to retroactive continuity, AKA retcon. We have a retcon that comes via the internets, which is we put a clip of Robin explaining the origin of 86 on TikTok and Instagram.
2:03 Robin Rauzi? Thanks.
2:04 Speaker 01 And apparently there's not a user on that platform, either platform, that agrees with your genesis. And it was like such a wellspring of personal stories of like, I worked in a restaurant. We never 86'd anybody. Things were 86. Like it was very, no one agreed with your assessment. Of 86.
2:21 Robin Rauzi? Thanks.
2:21 Speaker 01 And I was like, y'all, I wouldn't question Robin, but it was, uh...
2:25 Robin Rauzi? You can question me. That's fine. I mean, I don't think that there's a settled case. We also got emails about this. One person said that they had taken a food tour of New York and gone to a bar, a prohibition-era bar called Chumley's in New York City. And it had an entrance that was on 86 Bedford Street, but that wasn't the main entrance. And supposedly, it was the one that got the call saying, "86, you're customers." So during prohibition, people could sneak out this back door.
2:53 Speaker 01 Yes, but I thought that this was kind of beautiful, that it has so many potential origins and also that we'll never have a definitive, "it's this one."
3:01 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, apparently, somebody wrote a magazine article with 18 different origin stories of 86.
3:06 Speaker 01 I, and I, I love that. Like, I just really appreciated people's, like, "I know what 86 comes from," and contributing to the 86 discussion.
3:16 Robin Rauzi? Okay. Also in Redcon?
3:19 Speaker 01 Also in Redcon, last time, I gave a quote about FDR, and I realized that it's actually a truncated quote, where he talks about calamity-howling executives. And it's from a fireside chat. And so I thought I could read the full quote, so I will not be accused of cherry picking the language. So the full quote from the fireside chat is, "Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day who has been turning his employees over to the government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you, using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions,
4:00 Speaker 01 tell you that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry." It's actually much more biting in the full quote of, like, it's not just that they're crying wolf, it's the...
4:13 Robin Rauzi? Pay the postage for his personal opinions.
4:15 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that he's using the company for his personal opinions, or that, like, they're paying people so low that they're on government relief rolls. I mean, it's, hmm.
4:23 Robin Rauzi? Sounds familiar.
4:24 Speaker 01 It does sound familiar, actually.
4:27 Robin Rauzi? I thought of this quote a couple of times, reading the news this week, including reading a Howard Schultz op ed in the Wall Street Journal today about how Washington is being ruined, how entrepreneurs know how to run things. I was like, Howard Schultz, take your money? Stop talking.
4:44 Speaker 01 It does remind me of that now famed billboard of, will the last person to leave Seattle, please turn out the lights? Have you seen this?
4:52 Robin Rauzi? No.
4:53 Speaker 01 A real estate agent took up a monthly billboard lease, and it was on the way to the airport. And it said, well, the last person leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights. Because Seattle's economy in the 70s was not.
5:06 Robin Rauzi? No, it was not good.
5:07 Speaker 01 Was not good. And it was meant to be tongue in cheek, but people got really upset. And so they took it down after a couple of weeks. But I found an interview with a guy relatively recently. He was like, yeah, so that really stuck. I'm feeling like if there are any people with an entrepreneurial spirit in Seattle who want to run out a billboard, you could take out a very similar ad that's something like, will the last billionaire leaving Seattle, please, please turn off the spaced launch pad?
5:40 Speaker 01 Will the last billionaire leaving Seattle, please be sure to pay your work staff, your household support staff. Ooh, take your private jet with you. Ooh, what else could you do? Listeners, I know you can nail this. Optimists will nail, will the last billionaire leaving Seattle, please turn out the blank. I know you're gonna get this.
5:59 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm. Like it, like it. Terms and conditions. I have suggested a term and condition for you, but I don't know if you want to use it.
6:07 Speaker 01 Oh, I, yeah, I can do it.
6:08 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
6:09 Speaker 01 So, wealth effect in economics can have a couple of different meanings based on the context. I think the one that most people are talking about is the idea that you will increase your consumption, which is how much you spend on goods or services or whatever, when you get wealthier. So your income hasn't changed, but because the assets that you hold are more valuable, you will go out and spend more money.
6:34 Robin Rauzi? It's like a behavioral change based on how rich you feel.
6:38 Speaker 01 Yes.
6:38 Robin Rauzi? Based on unrealized gains on things. And it can include the stock market. Home prices are a pretty obvious place it gets measured, it seems like.
6:47 Speaker 01 I mean, it's a really fascinating question, too, of how do people internalize the assets they hold that they haven't converted to cash? This is just like, I'm holding an asset that is illiquid and I'm spending more money because of it.
6:59 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
7:00 Speaker 01 The rule of thumb is $1 of wealth equals 2 cents of consumption in the short term. So like, if I found out tomorrow that my house went up by $10,000, I might spend 200 more.
7:17 Robin Rauzi? But just one time?
7:18 Speaker 01 Well, or in the short term.
7:20 Robin Rauzi? In the short term.
7:21 Speaker 01 In the long term, if I think that I'm worth more money, it could lead to more consumption as I use that to borrow, to invest, or to do other things. So in the 1980s and 90s, you saw a run-up of people who were getting access to the stock market, which has typically been a relatively elite-held asset. So if people in the middle class are able to get assets in the stock market, is their spending different than people who are, you know, say, traditionally holding, does it have the same consumption effect? It doesn't. People tend to know that their value in the stock market could very well go down again, and they don't respond the same way. So it's really just, the wealth effect is not just based on the amount of wealth that you get, but also where that wealth is coming from.
8:02 Robin Rauzi? Uh-huh.
8:03 Speaker 01 People tend to spend housing, they don't necessarily spend the stock market at the same rate.
8:09 Robin Rauzi? Right. Yeah, and housing wealth, I mean, people can tap that with things like home equity lines of credit in a way that, for most of us, would require selling, selling assets and paying capital gains and all sorts of things if you were trying to do that in the stock market.
8:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, in our economy, as we all remember from the GDP episode.
8:29 Robin Rauzi? As we all remember.
8:30 Speaker 01 All remember. Around 2/3 of the US economy is the spending of households. That means a portion of our economy is maintained via people feeling wealthy and spending money. And so is the wealth effect from these assets. What's, your term is weird-looking.
8:50 Robin Rauzi? It is. It's Zugzwang.
8:52 Speaker 01 What?
8:53 Robin Rauzi? And it's German. I'm sure if you're German, it sounds something like Zuzwung. It's a word from chess, actually. It means that you are forced to move, but every move you make is actually going to make things worse for you.
9:05 Speaker 01 Oh, this sounds German.
9:06 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, doesn't it?
9:07 Speaker 01 Now that I've heard the definition, this feels very German.
9:11 Robin Rauzi? But it gets used a lot in daily life. And I read it in an article about the situation that Vladimir Putin is in vis a vis the war in Ukraine. But it also reminded me a little bit of the position that our president finds himself in in Iran. Anyway, it seems like it was a good word, good German word.
9:28 Speaker 01 All right. Well, I feel like this is a little bit of an ominous beginning for our episode of like FDR's calling out executives that got employees on the dole fighting labor law, consumption is being converted from assets like stocks, and in the meantime, we're all backed into a corner and every time we move, it gets worse. We'll be back with the optimism right after this, coming up on the Big Pill Crow.
9:56 Robin Rauzi? All right, we're back.
9:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're back. We're back. We are now 40% sure what we're going to talk about. Let's see if we can make it to 75 by the end. I like those odds. So here's the hook. There are movements across the country, as we've talked about in our tax episode, to somehow raise revenue from high-income, high-net-wealth households. And I was reading a Wall Street Journal article about what is becoming quite popular, which is the second-home higher property tax.
10:26 Robin Rauzi? Right.
10:27 Speaker 01 I think it's New York City. It's the, oh, I'm not going to say this word correctly. Pieda-ter?
10:32 Robin Rauzi? Pieda-ter.
10:33 Speaker 01 Okay, pieda-ter. All right. So Mom Donnie is getting a pieda-ter tax in New York City. And the idea is that if you own a residence that is worth a certain amount of money and you don't live in it, they're going to tax you more for it. They're talking about doing this in San Diego, which has, just to be clear, like a lot of the West Coast, a really big housing affordability problem and a housing shortage problem and a burgeoning homeless population.
10:59 Robin Rauzi? I don't think it's burgeoning. It's just been here a long time.
11:02 Speaker 01 Been there a long time?
11:03 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
11:04 Speaker 01 So this woman says, who owns a second property in San Diego, "Cities should cherish someone like me because they own property and pay taxes, but don't use city services." And I don't know anything about this woman. I'm not trying to pass judgment on her. What I thought it evoked was this entitlement that if you are rich, you do more for the economy and so you are more important.
11:28 Robin Rauzi? Oh, yeah. That's exactly what it did.
11:32 Speaker 01 I don't know her situation. Maybe she's really trying hard to get by, but that is what she's appealing to when she says, "Cities should cherish someone like me because I don't use services but pay taxes." And I thought we could just kind of amble around this point of, "Optimists, should we be grateful to rich people for the economy?"
11:53 Robin Rauzi? Our producer Sophie also shared an article about the same thing from the Financial Times. And I was just looking for it. Let me see if I can.
12:02 Speaker 01 Oh, here's a quote. "Can I afford the tax? Yes. Is it going to deter me? No. But I think it's shameful. I provide a lot of money to people who are blue collar workers, who work for me, servers in restaurants. If we're not there, there are going to be less people being paid."
12:17 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. I mean, the entire piece was built around that. But the one that I was stunned by was further down. It's from Wealth Advisor. And he says, "The progressive movement is the most dangerous thing for the upper-middle-class professional that's ever happened in these big cities. When these people are successful and they become a managing director after working 100 hours a week and they're making real money, these governments are going to crush that person."
12:45 Speaker 01 Where do you think those people came from? You think that? What the hell? What the hell?
12:50 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. So, I mean, I just, everything about that just distilled so much, this idea that if we do something to the super rich, what's really going to hurt is the upper-middle-class professional.
13:03 Speaker 01 Bull**** who's working 100 hours a week.
13:05 Robin Rauzi? Who's working 100 hours a week because that's great. They're not making real money until they're a managing director. But they're going to be crushed by the government.
13:15 Speaker 01 So I just want to talk about where this argument comes from, how it has been seen, and why it is total bull
13:22 Robin Rauzi? I don't know about you, but some of this started to bubble up in my consciousness, like, last year, when this report came out from Moody's Analytics claiming that the top 10% of earners in the United States accounted for nearly 50% of consumer spending. And this got picked up, there are many stories about this, including the one in the Washington Post, including one in the Wall Street Journal, that basically all said the strength of rich people's spending is entirely, it's propping up our economy right now. Like Catherine said, consumer spending is nearly 70% of GDP, and so that would mean, basically, that rich
14:05 Robin Rauzi? people's spending is responsible for a third of our entire nation's GDP, which seems a little scary. I did kind of a deep dive on some of this, and it sounds like a lot of that Moody's Analytics is, let's just say, not widely accepted.
14:23 Speaker 01 No. I mean, one of the best things I read about that was from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that just said, "We're going to review the data." Like, Moody's came out swinging, 10% of Americans drive half of consumption, which means that they are almost a third of our economy. And then, separately, the Bank of America came out with a point where they're like, "Oh, it's not K, it's E. We have an E-shaped economy, and it's not..." Like, if they are driving spending, it's been like this for a while, it's not a part of the recent recovery. The New York Fed has been much more measured, like, "Ah, we don't often see wealth and income in the same data set with consumption, so we can't necessarily attribute this to just some top percent." Their assessment
15:08 Speaker 01 is that the consumption patterns of households by income have not changed
15:12 Robin Rauzi? Right.
15:12 Speaker 01 for a long time.
15:13 Robin Rauzi? Right.
15:14 Speaker 01 So kind of closer to what Bank of America was saying of, like, if this is the case, it's not, like, drastically pulling apart.
15:20 Robin Rauzi? Can you explain a little bit, like, what we mean by consumption? And then you dropped in "K-shaped," or "K..." And I think we should just, like, explain that.
15:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the K, I mean, just think of the shape of a capital K. It was initially, kind of in contemporary times, brought up in the pandemic that we would have a K-shaped recovery, which means that physically the top half takes off and recovers quickly, and the bottom half slides kind of into its own recession. It was then applied to inflation. Inflation is taking off, prices are going up, families are feeling the squeeze, and if you're at the top, you're fine and you're still spending as you normally would. The E shape is meant to point out that they don't have differing fates with some starting point being the pandemic or the starting point being inflation. These are just two very unequal groups that have different kind of experiences in any
16:12 Speaker 01 aspect of our economy, in any economic event. You have one group that's at the top, an elite, and another group that's big and at the bottom and has a different fate because of their household economic security.
16:22 Robin Rauzi? So the E shape, the point is that the visual they're going for is it's a capital E with three bars, where you've essentially divided, in this case, consumers into three wealth groups or three income bands, I'm not quite sure which one, and the top spends this way, the middle class spends this way, low-income people spend this way. And what Bank of America was certainly saying was that those trends, those trend lines are very consistent.
16:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, so to give you a sense here, to be in the top 10% of American households, this is based on income tax data, you need to be, I would say, at about 200K.
17:02 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, maybe even more, right?
17:05 Speaker 01 According to IRS statistics, the income floor to be in the top 10% in 2023, which was their most recent year of data, was 187.
17:13 Robin Rauzi? Oh, okay.
17:14 Speaker 01 So around 200K annual income, does not look at assets. So 200K of income puts you in the top 10%. The top 5% is around 300?
17:25 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
17:27 Speaker 01 The top 1% is around 700,000?
17:32 Speaker 01 And the top 0.1% is closer to 100 million.
17:36 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
17:38 Speaker 01 So kind of the basis of Moody's K-shaped economy was these households that have more than $200,000 a year in income, they spend a third of our economy and we're being maintained on them. What people have tried to point out since then is that above 200,000, up to the people who are pulling down a minimum of $80 million a year, you have some really high variation.
18:01 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
18:01 Speaker 01 And part of that comes from, there are lots of people who make above $200,000, who are sitting on millions in wealth, and people who make $200,000 who do not have as many assets to their name and they have very different consumption. And so what they were trying to point out is that the, the income and wealth, they're not a perfect map.
18:20 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the other things that, that I read suggested that, that analysis, first of all, that it used basically disposable income as a proxy for consumption, but that that was a mistake, that wealthy households save much more and they don't spend it.
18:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, so the, the, I mean, I think the reason why we don't have a great answer to this question is that observing consumption, income and wealth in the same data set is very, very hard. Because wealth gets really complicated when you're really wealthy. And they have all kinds of assets and where are they held and who, you know, do you have a trust? So the, the big surveys that we rely on are the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Consumer Finances. The first two are from the Census Bureau, the last one's from the Fed.
19:11 Robin Rauzi? So these don't all line up, these, these...
19:13 Speaker 01 They don't link.
19:13 Robin Rauzi? They're just differences, yeah.
19:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're different data sets, but it's just, we keep things different for privacy reasons. But yeah, how much households spend relative to what they earn, relative to what they own, is not a straightforward question, and it would vary a lot by going up and down various parts of income and wealth distribution. I mean, one thing that the Minneapolis Fed pointed out is that we have over 1,000 billionaires, and we don't know how they spend their money. I mean, there's not enough of them to be captured in surveys, but they have more money than God, so like, what do they do with it? Collectively, the wealthiest 1,135 billionaires are of a net worth of $5.7 trillion. To give you a sense, our economy is roughly $30 trillion.
19:54 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
19:55 Speaker 01 So, getting back to what could be our theme.
19:57 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
20:01 Robin Rauzi? Pull it back. Great.
20:02 Speaker 01 Pull it back is like when you hear something like you need to cherish me because I am paying taxes, it is pulling on this idea that these wealthy people, that the concentration of wealth is like to our benefit because they're consuming.
20:21 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
20:22 Speaker 01 And that
20:22 Robin Rauzi? It's not blackmail, which is what it always sounds like to me.
20:26 Speaker 01 Or extortion.
20:27 Robin Rauzi? Extortion, yeah.
20:28 Speaker 01 Because they're also our employers. But I think there's this aspect of coming up with a narrative that suits the wealthy and the rich by saying, you know, we do more for the economy. And I don't think that that's new. I think that this is today's version in the gross inequality that we have. Like, I'm carrying the economy is almost what these people are saying. That's the narrative now.
20:51 Robin Rauzi? It's not almost. It's like literally what they're saying.
20:54 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. I mean, so sorry, that Financial Times article is paywalled, but it is hilarious. I mean, at some level, I'm like, I don't like this, but it is also hilarious.
21:03 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, it really is.
21:04 Speaker 01 We've said it before on the show that rich people are going to rich. So I think what I want to do is take this narrative, if we can, seriously.
21:14 Speaker 01 And then say why it's, this is not the case. You do not need to feel beholden or grateful that people have so much money that they're keeping the economy afloat.
21:22 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
21:24 Speaker 01 So I think one thing to do is context. We are at an incredible historical place when it comes to inequality. And the amount of income that the top 1% and the top 10% are taking home. Well, now let me start before that. We have wages that you earn from your job. And you sum all that up, and you have your total wage income. And then we have total household income, and then we have wealth. These are three different like metrics, and they all three have similar but different inequality trends. So when people talk about inequality, they tend to be picking the one
22:05 Robin Rauzi? That most suits their narrative?
22:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, that most suits their narrative. So wealth inequality, worst is in the 1920s. And we'll never pass that because Even with the billionaires now, they did not have middle-class homeownership, which we still kind of have. So the fact that upwards of 60% of Americans own their own home tilts wealth inequality. Even if it's just a dent, it's a significant enough dent that we are not as unequal in terms of wealth as we were then, depending on how you measure it. Then it's income inequality, and where we are now is worse.
22:40 Robin Rauzi? Worse than the 1920s.
22:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then wages, it's hard to tell because consistent wage series before, I mean, even wages before the 1970s are hard to be reliable.
22:50 Robin Rauzi? You mean like the measures of them are hard to?
22:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, like if I were to track the average hourly wage of the American worker, I could probably come up with the average back to the 20s or 30s. But distributions of knowing what the 10th percent and 20th percent, 30th percent, that gets a lot harder. You need to have better data for it. So that's the context. The claim is that, I don't even know if, I mean, do they say this bluntly of like, "I carry the economy, so inequality is okay"? Or do you think it's just like, "I carry the economy", and they don't make a comment on how they're carrying the economy because of inequality?
23:25 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, they make the claim that rich people are carrying the economy. I think they don't care about the other half of that. Either they don't see it, or they don't care. But I also think some of what I respond to, of course, is not necessarily the individual quotes and pieces, but the fact that newspapers are writing about it in this way, too.
23:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:43 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
23:44 Speaker 01 I think the idea that we need to be grateful for the spending power of people with very high incomes, yeah, I mean, that's total bull****. I mean, I think we are reliant on the spending of rich people, and our economy is much worse for it. We have a weaker economy because we have such a concentration of wealth and income.
24:02 Robin Rauzi? I mean, I don't disagree that we have a weaker economy. I mean, I'm not an economist, but I do feel like we're made afraid that rich people will get spooked. And there's something really unpleasant about that. You know, like, rich people could punish us as an economy, as a country, as non-rich people, by pulling back. Like, even if I don't have money in the stock market, I need to worry about the stock market, because what if rich people get spooked? You know, "I'm not going to sell my house. I have to worry about home values, because what if rich people get spooked?".
24:35 Speaker 01 It's like that Twilight Zone episode with like, the little girl who everyone is like, afraid to say, "Do you know this episode?".
24:42 Robin Rauzi? Not yet. Keep talking.
24:44 Speaker 01 All right. Well, this is worth, this is worth a mid-record Google. Maybe it's the little boy? Yeah. Six-year-old Anthony Vermont has godlike mental powers, including mind reading. He has isolated his town of Peekskill, Ohio from the rest of the universe. The people must grow their own food. The people live in fear in Anthony, constantly telling him how everything he does is good since he banishes anyone thinking unhappy thoughts forever to a place that he calls "the cornfield."
25:10 Speaker 01 Having never experienced any form of discipline, he does not understand that his actions are harmful. He is confused when his father tells him that neighbors are reluctant to let their children play with him after he has sent several of his playmates to the cornfield. The end of the episode, his dad is trying to, to instill some discipline and rebukes him, but everybody else is just looking at the kid with smiling and they're saying, "Tomorrow's gonna be a real good day," of like just placating the boy with mental powers who sends people to the cornfield. So, long metaphor, took us a minute to get there, but yes, the wealthy are kind of like that, of like, who's that guy in New York who's like, "I'm gonna leave and I'm a billionaire and I create these jobs." And like Schultz is in the Wall Street Journal and he's like, "I'm a billionaire and I, I make all these jobs and I'm gonna leave."
25:55 Speaker 01 And it's like, I'm going to-
25:56 Robin Rauzi? Schultz has already, Schultz has already lives in Florida, I think, for other reasons, but-
26:00 Speaker 01 Oh.
26:01 Robin Rauzi? Still feels like he needs to, to go back and talk about Washington and Seattle.
26:05 Speaker 01 But they're the little boy from the Twilight episode-
26:08 Robin Rauzi? I know, they're the little-
26:09 Speaker 01 Who's holding, who's holding the town hostage of like, "If you make me upset, I'll send you to the cornfield because I have all the power."
26:14 Robin Rauzi? Exactly. Well, and he talks about, you know, moving hundreds of, of executive jobs from Starbucks, from Seattle to Tennessee.
26:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:22 Robin Rauzi? I mean, not that Tennessee's the cornfield, but yeah, they, they do. They, they threaten all the time that they're gonna move their companies, they're gonna move their headquarters. And, and don't get me wrong, I think that companies actually are headquartered where their CEOs wanna live and they're often, their CEOs make those decisions based on places that wanna placate them in one way or another.
26:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it seems obvious to say, but this does make our economy worse.
26:48 Robin Rauzi? Oh, yeah.
26:49 Speaker 01 And one of the reasons why we wanted to have this like somewhat vague, themeless episode was to pull together a lot of what we had talked about so far this season about, you know, the corporate income tax rate is at record lows and they're taking home profits and it's generating untold wealth amongst a very small set of people. And then at the same time, you've got people who are unincorporated into the financial system and are on a path to be left behind by society because they want to use cash and not have to pay to have money like the rest of us do. You've got people working in salary jobs who are white collar, who are not getting overtime and are working long hours because this is what job, this is the expectation of jobs now.
27:30 Robin Rauzi? This is what jobs have become, yeah.
27:32 Speaker 01 And I, I think that at the end of these, you know, lies some like pretty simple legislation that's not the redistribution of wealth, it's the redistribution of rules.
27:41 Robin Rauzi? What do you mean? You mean like rules need to apply to the rich people?
27:44 Speaker 01 Like, we don't, I don't need Ellison's wealth or Schultz's wealth. I don't need it to make a better economy. I need them to follow a better set of rules and then they wouldn't exist or have the power that they have. I don't see it as like a post hoc of like, let's punish the billionaires that we have. I see it as they are a policy failure. To have that much income and wealth concentrated in so few people means that the rules are not working and that in some ways to me is like optimistic of like, you know, we're not, we're never going to bring Ellison to the table. We don't need to bring him to the table. We just need to change the Fair Labor Standards Act so the middle class has its overtime and like we need to update the Fair Labor Standards Act so we have a minimum wage and have a corporate tax rate again.
28:28 Robin Rauzi? Right.
28:28 Speaker 01 And that the thing about all this legislation that is meant to empower workers is that it disempowers them.
28:34 Robin Rauzi? I know, I was thinking that about, about Howard Schultz. Like, has anybody done more for screwing people's schedule than Starbucks, you know? Has anybody fought unions more strongly than Starbucks?
28:47 Speaker 01 Amazon.
28:49 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, Amazon.
28:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I say this fact checkers out there because collectively they have so many National Labor Relations Board's violations, meaning that it's not just that they're fighting unions, but they're violating what meager labor law we have in order to do so. So that's, that's why I think they, they win. Some of this narrative is making us afraid to touch them. And it kind of goes back to AI in the same way of like you, you have this concentrated wealth and power. And because we're all supposed to be afraid of it, we're afraid to tackle it. And it's, they're telling us that you need to be afraid so that will keep you in your like state of livelihood. But really, they just, they are afraid of legislation that could absolutely tilt power away from them.
29:37 Robin Rauzi? Well, I mean, you certainly see, there have been corporate leaders who can remain unnamed, but who are clearly so afraid of legislation. Look at the donations that they've made. Look at the contributions they've made. Look at the political alliances that they have been very eager to create suddenly in 2025. They're not doing that out of some sort of goodness of their heart. And if they're not doing it because they're poor, they're doing it because they are afraid of legislation.
30:08 Speaker 01 Some calamity howling executive.
30:12 Robin Rauzi? Exactly, exactly.
30:14 Speaker 01 No, but they, I mean, this is why, okay, like the Massachusetts millionaires tax, that is the first one. And so you have to fight that one as hard as humanly possible, right? The, the Petera tax in New York City. If New York City does it, is it going to stop there? If the state of Massachusetts economy doesn't collapse after they have taxed wealthy people, like what's next?
30:36 Robin Rauzi? Well, are they afraid we're going to make them all move to Tennessee, to the cornfields, to, to Iowa? Like, you know, I don't quite understand, like if they don't like it, they threaten to leave. And when we, and when, especially in California, when we go, we'll go, they get even more angry. I don't, I don't want businesses not to be started in California. I mean, it's, it's been one of the strengths of this state that people could come here and start businesses. But when billionaires start flexing, they're like, well, I'm just going to go to Florida. I don't, I feel bad for Florida. I just feel bad. I feel, I know there are normal people who live there and they should not be subject to this like influx of
31:19 Speaker 01 So to bring it back to consumption, right? No, no, no, I'm with you. But to bring it back to consumption, the point that they're trying to make of them leaving and in response to these progressive taxes that are coming up, that's kind of spiritually linked to the narrative that we need to cherish all of them and the economy being at their mercy because of their spending. You're right, our economy is more fragile because we have more eggs in one basket. And that is not an inevitability.
31:51 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
31:52 Speaker 01 And a stronger economy would have less concentrated consumption. I don't know the degree to which it's concentrated because it's really hard to measure, but in some ways, like, I don't need to know to know that it's really skewed and our economy is far too dependent on extremely wealthy people who have the most to spend. I mean, one thing you hear kind of on the ground reporting is that businesses find that they, they basically have to cater to much higher income households who have high price points, very high quality standards, or you have to go like down the family dollar path. Yeah, and make it as like cheap as humanly possible because that's all families can afford. Retail shops and places that serve consumers will tell you that's how they're seeing the bifurcation and they're losing the middle consumer.
32:36 Speaker 01 Makes participating in the economy less fun when it's, you know, now kind of pulling between two poles of you either buy for poor people or you buy for the wealthy people. I think it contributes to the idea of being left behind because we are a consumer economy. So if you feel left behind, it's because, I mean, for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because you can't afford what you want to afford.
32:58 Speaker 01 I think that these wealth taxes and these income taxes and pit of terror taxes are good because they're showing us that rich people aren't untouchable.
33:06 Robin Rauzi? I don't know if they're the solution to the, to the problem writ large.
33:09 Speaker 01 They're not the solution. I don't think that, I think long-term, they're not the solution. The solution is have better labor law and have better tax policy and we don't end up in this situation again. Like, the solution isn't to somehow walk back the wealth that they've accrued. The solution is to make sure we don't produce any more of these [BLEEP]. Sorry, Americans that uphold our spending and create jobs that I don't create. I didn't mean it, sir. Sorry, don't send me to the cornfield. I, I hold them up in my mind as like, um, this is how you know our current economic policy regime is a failure. So the louder they are, I'm like, I get it. We messed up. You exist.
33:50 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, you exist and you think it's okay to say these things.
33:53 Speaker 01 This like savior talk that they have in our economy, I want every optimist to feel comfortable to push back on and say, you make our economy weaker and we are not held hostage by you. And the reason why they're holding us hostage is, is to prevent policy that will actually make a difference. I mean, this wealth tax on second homes, it's not going to make a big difference. We need-
34:15 Robin Rauzi? Our one-time billionaire tax in California is not going to make a big lasting difference.
34:19 Speaker 01 No, what will make a lasting difference is a true investment in a fair economy, right? We need to raise the corporate income tax rate, simplify the personal income tax code. Like, je je up the Fair Labor Standards Act, je je up the National Labor Relations Act. So people can have a decent job and unionize or organize in whatever way they want to. And then just make sure that our safety net system is prepared for job loss. Like, you know, there's like not that much we have to do. It's just like slightly different things. And we start tilting the economy in power our way because it all rests at power. Who has power in our economy? Them. What to do about billionaires, I think, is a both hard and fun question. But what to do to make sure we don't have billionaires again?
35:02 Speaker 01 Billionaires in the sense of the elite class that holds power over us and says that we're indebted to them for having an economy at all. What do we do to make that not happen? That, we know exactly what to do. And they know exactly what to do too, and they fight it hard. In some ways, they're playing their hand. So I-
35:17 Robin Rauzi? You think they're showing their hand?
35:19 Speaker 01 Showing their hand. What did I say?
35:20 Robin Rauzi? Playing their hand. I mean, I think they're also playing their hand, right?
35:23 Speaker 01 I think they're showing their hand in that they know what will actually be a threat to power. Showing their hand while playing their hand and they have cards in both hands.
35:32 Robin Rauzi? And [BLEEP] you, I own the cards.
35:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. I know that I can sound somewhat Pollyanna-ish when it comes to fixing these problems, but we-
35:43 Speaker 01 At the end of the day, generating income for working in middle-class households tilts power so much more than any PETA tax.
35:53 Robin Rauzi? We're way better off if we make things 30% better for 80% of the workers than trying to claw back 30% of the wealth from these 1,100 billionaires.
36:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess that's what I meant of like their admission of how much we owe to them and how powerful and important they are in the economy is kind of like, yes, that's what I've been saying. You just said the thing that I said, but you think it means something different than I mean. And you think it means that I should do whatever you say or else go to the cornfield, but I think it means we need to have a really simple set of solutions to labor and income and tax law. Boom. We're actually, yeah, okay. Optimists, I'm fired up.
36:37 Robin Rauzi? I think the title of this episode is "The Cornfield," right?
36:40 Speaker 01 "The Cornfield," because we'd never want to be found on Google, so we're going to call this episode "The Cornfield." Optimists, still waiting for you guys to chime in about what we're putting on that billboard saying goodbye to the last billionaire leaving Seattle.
36:51 Robin Rauzi? Actually, I think it needs to be reversed. It needs to be when the last billionaire gets to Florida, somebody lock the gate.
36:57 Speaker 01 Robin, you're savage. We'll end there, and we will come back for executive orders and spiritual sponsors.
37:07 Robin Rauzi? I love it when you leave these blank, because it's going to be a surprise. I never know what you're going to say.
37:16 Speaker 01 A lot of the times, it's like coming off the top of my head because I forget to write them down. I was like...
37:21 Robin Rauzi? I don't trust myself to do this stuff off the top of my head anymore.
37:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like I was grateful for something. I don't remember what.
37:28 Robin Rauzi? We actually, when you were reading the quote from FDR's fireside chat, we did get a suggested executive order, which is that people have to stop calling everything a fireside chat, that he'd seen some sort of webinar with Sam Altman where he called it a fireside chat, and he was like, "You, buddy."
37:44 Speaker 01 Get fireside chat out of your mouth, Sam Altman.
37:47 Robin Rauzi? That's right.
37:49 Speaker 01 Okay, we're back to now, after we've fixed big things in the economy. Robin, why don't you kick us off?
37:56 Robin Rauzi? My executive order, this is really for my wife. We walk past the California Science Center where they have a ongoing exhibit of mummies. And every time we walk by these signs, my wife says they should not call them mummies. They can call them mummified humans or preserved human remains. This term, which is, by the way, the discourse even in academia is, it's just a little creepy for what are human people. I went looking for a word to replace it, which was not easy. I came up with sah, which is the Egyptian word for what a person becomes through the ritual of mummification. But there are a lot of museums that have stopped using the term mummies and use either
38:41 Robin Rauzi? mummified people or preserved human remains.
38:45 Speaker 01 This is very specific.
38:46 Robin Rauzi? It's very specific.
38:48 Speaker 01 I appreciate it. My executive order is that when there is a red carpet or blue carpet for an event that really wealthy and rich and famous people go to, they need to name check all the unions that helped put the event together. And there needs to be like proceeding or closing march of the actual staff that made the event work.
39:12 Robin Rauzi? This blue carpet brought to you by IATSE?
39:15 Speaker 01 Yes, blue carpet brought to you by IATSE.
39:19 Speaker 01 I just want to make sure people knows where the, know where the magic comes from. You think about something like the Golden Globes, like it's really, it's really just kind of like a weird prom, were it not for like the magic of certain unions to put together, you know, to put on a show. So I would prefer the workers behind these red carpet events to, I mean, maybe like a share of tickets to go down the red carpet or someone gets to attend or there gets to be like a workers table, you know? I say this executive order, but I'm, I know someone's going to write in and be like, you know, the much more fun party would just be the party with the unions that famous people aren't invited to. And that's probably accurate, but let's have some democratization of the red and blue carpets.
40:03 Robin Rauzi? Mm hmm.
40:03 Speaker 01 All right. Spiritual sponsors.
40:06 Robin Rauzi? My spiritual sponsor this week is the Mellow Cello Podcast by Nick Takanabu Ogawa. And he hasn't put out anything new in 2026, Nick, if you're listening, but he does one hour live improvised YouTube sessions that he then also releases as a podcast. And they, he plays maybe five songs in each of them. They're mostly instrumental with loops and beats. And if I need something that is going to be just sort of mesmerizing, but not too distracting
40:48 Robin Rauzi? to work, to do yoga, to, I listen to, I listen to, his band's called Takanabu, which is his middle name. I listen to Takanabu a lot, but the Mellow Cello Podcast in particular is on repeat in my house.
41:00 Speaker 01 That's awesome. Mellow cello. I'm gonna have to look that up. Okay, well, my spiritual sponsor for the week is stupidly large floral arrangements. Of like, this is, I gotta tell you, like, this ain't easy to move around.
41:17 Robin Rauzi? Ooh. Is that a Mother's Day?
41:20 Speaker 01 I did, I did get this on Mother's Day. Yellow roses.
41:24 Robin Rauzi? Beautiful.
41:25 Speaker 01 One of my favorites. Yeah, yellow roses, Texas. Might have been a prostitute, but that doesn't mean we don't like the flower. Anyway, I just, something about floral arrangements that are just like really big and stunning. It's something I've always noticed in like Jane Austen adaptations, that casually these really wealthy people, aristocrats who are like pining over a guy that they don't know how to express feelings for, will walk by like the most stunning floral arrangements. So yes, big floral arrangements, including big thing of yellow roses.
41:57 Robin Rauzi? Nice.
41:58 Speaker 01 Nice.
42:04 Robin Rauzi? The Optimist Economy podcast is edited by Sophie Lalonde and our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson.
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