Pod Insights Optimist Economy The Case for Going Big on Paid Leave About this episode Paid family and medical leave is a confusing mess: only 27% of private-sector workers get paid leave from their employer. Some others are covered by state programs, but those vary. The rest of us scramble to patch together short-term disability with other paid time off, if we have it. Meanwhile, the United States instead has a federal Family Medical Leave Act that protects unpaid time off. Truth is, sooner or later, nearly everyone needs time away from work to care for a sick spouse, a new baby, a dying parent, or to recover from one’s own illness or injury. And they shouldn’t have to go broke to do it. An idea this popular — supported by about 80% of Americans in polls — shouldn’t be this hard. If paid family and medical leave were added to Social Security, that would give every worker benefits that follow them across jobs and states. The infrastructure already exists. But there’s a lot of heel-dragging in Congress because expanding Social Security can’t be done before dealing with its long-term funding.
Read more:
Paid Leave Works: Evidence from State Programs https://nationalpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/paid-leave-works-evidence-from-state-programs.pdf [National Partnership for Women & Families 2023] — A good primer on paid family and medical leave.
Economic Effects of Offering a Federal Paid Family and Medical Leave Program [Congressional Budget Office https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57631 2021] — CBO analysis of a version of paid leave that was proposed in the Build Back Better Act, but that died in the Senate.
A National Paid Leave Program Would Help Workers, Families [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/a-national-paid-leave-program-would-help-workers-families 2021] — Outline of what would be in a comprehensive program.
New parents aren’t the only people who need paid family leave [Urban Institute https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/new-parents-arent-only-people-who-need-paid-family-leave 2018] — Pretty self-explanatory.
Paid Leave for Illness, Medical Needs, and Disabilities: Issues and Answers [Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/paid-leave-for-illness-medical-needs-and-disabilities-issues-and-answers/2020] — Chapter on how this could be implemented from a joint Brookings-AEI project.
Paid Leave Working Group Request for Information Response https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/Paid_Leave_Working_Group_RFI_Response.pdf [Urban Institute 2024] — Response to Congressional working group’s request for input on paid family leave.
Transcript 10,190 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.
0:06 Speaker 01 But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or-
0:12 Speaker 00 Politics.
0:12 Speaker 01 Country music.
0:13 Speaker 00 Hockey.
0:14 Speaker 01 Sex of bugs.
0:16 Speaker 00 Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.
0:23 Speaker 01 And hopefully, make you see the world anew.
0:24 Speaker 00 Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.
0:28 Speaker 01 Wherever you get your podcasts.
0:30 Robin Rauzi? You have this note in our outline about the 1930s, and I'm shocked that you haven't gotten there.
0:35 Speaker 03 I just thought maybe our listeners needed a break from going back to the 1930s.
0:41 Robin Rauzi? Have you met our listeners?
0:50 Speaker 03 Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.
0:52 Robin Rauzi? I'm Robin.
0:53 Speaker 03 On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.
1:06 Robin Rauzi? At the top of our show, we like to make a few announcements. First, I'm going to say that this episode is brought to you in part by Teresa in Hallawell, Maine, who joined us as a spiritual sponsor.
1:16 Speaker 03 Thank you, Teresa.
1:19 Robin Rauzi? Also, we are going to be recording another Q and A episode in a few weeks, so you can email us at [email protected] . Send us your questions or your concerns about the economy, and we'll, well, Catherine, we'll talk about them.
1:33 Speaker 03 At length, at length.
1:36 Robin Rauzi? At some length. You can call us and leave your question. We're also recording audio reviews of the show. We love the reviews that you guys have left for us on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. And if you would like to do an audio version of that, call us at 202-643-0295.
1:58 Robin Rauzi? God, I hope that number's right, or somebody's gonna be really confused.
2:01 Speaker 03 Oh, sure.
2:02 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. My last announcement is, as of today, we have 410 ratings to our show on Apple Podcasts. I found out that if we hit 595, we will be among the top 1% of podcasts. And optimists, I think we can do it. You don't even have to write a review. All you have to do is click the little five-star thing. So if you would do that for us, that would be excellent. I can't believe that we would be in the top 1% of podcasts. But, you know, when's where we can get it?
2:30 Speaker 03 And I want to make sure it's clear that if we make it to the top 1%, that is how I'm going to refer to us. In the royal we of like, well, it's the top 1%, you know, we should pay more in taxes.
2:41 Robin Rauzi? Exactly.
2:43 Speaker 03 No, all right, well, we have, uh, we have a couple announcements. The first is the show news. I'm burying the lead here, but we are going to take a break for the season. I am burying the lead. In about eight to nine weeks, we will be taking a season one break. We will wrap season one, and we'll take a break and then start season two. And in the meantime, consider everything you've told us about the show and possibly get some new theme music. That's for Robin to decide on the season break, because I will be on maternity leave. I'm pregnant.
3:17 Speaker 03 We have to stop recording for me, you know, to bring another little optimist in the world.
3:22 Robin Rauzi? Exactly.
3:22 Speaker 03 Oh, I should do the belly show. Hold on.
3:24 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
3:26 Speaker 03 Look at this, big old belly.
3:28 Robin Rauzi? It's shocking that you have hidden it so well for so long.
3:31 Speaker 03 I don't know why I did that.
3:35 Robin Rauzi? Did you just make yourself nauseated?
3:36 Speaker 03 I'm sorry. I'm pregnant at 40. Everything hurts.
3:41 Robin Rauzi? Oh.
3:44 Robin Rauzi? So there will be a little break for some maternity leave. And we'll be back probably in January.
3:53 Speaker 03 Yes, and that's why we're going to talk about paid family medical leave today.
3:58 Robin Rauzi? Because somebody needs it.
3:59 Speaker 03 Because I need it and I'm not gonna get it. Because I don't have an employer.
4:04 Robin Rauzi? And you live in Texas.
4:05 Speaker 03 And I live in Texas, so it felt right to wait, to hold on to the pregnancy announcement until we do a show about it. Just to give you all a sense of timeline, you might find this fun. We recorded our first episode, I think like within days of me finding out I was pregnant.
4:20 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
4:20 Speaker 03 So this, this, this first season is really like, it's gonna carry me.
4:25 Robin Rauzi? It's like, wait, we can record, but I, wait, I'm really nauseated.
4:29 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
4:29 Robin Rauzi? We can record, but I have a doctor's appointment.
4:31 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. We, the first couple ones, I'm like, well, I'm in the doctor all the time. And then I feel sick. And kudos to Andy for one time pointing out that most people don't prep for an audio recording by slamming down some saltines.
4:46 Speaker 03 That's what you want when you're recording a podcast, is that nice salty dry mouth.
4:52 Robin Rauzi? Crunchy sound in the microphone.
4:54 Speaker 03 Oh, man, there, and I, and if you can't, if you haven't been able to tell, that's because Andy and Sophie are so good at like every like pee break I've had to take, or when I've stood up and you could see the belly, or, or like the two or three episodes where every time Robin was talking, I was leaned back, just eating crackers because I felt so nauseous.
5:13 Robin Rauzi? Nauseated.
5:14 Speaker 03 God damn it, Robin.
5:16 Robin Rauzi? Sorry.
5:17 Speaker 03 Is it nauseated?
5:18 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. People use it wrong all the time. It's one of, it's like lie and lay, it makes me crazy.
5:22 Speaker 03 Well, let's wait till the third one to really dial that in.
5:28 Speaker 03 It was also fun recording the fertility episode, because I'm like, I really wanted to tell everybody that like, I'm pulling fertility above replacement in my household.
5:36 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, yeah. Making up for some useless lesbians in LA.
5:43 Speaker 03 On net, we're nearly at replacement, but, uh, yeah, this is kid, this is baby number three, and I didn't get to talk about the fertility episode.
5:53 Speaker 03 So we're gonna talk about. Babies, but also paid family leave. After we get through the next two segments, retcon and terms and conditions. So do you have a retcon?
6:05 Robin Rauzi? You know what? I don't even like my retcon. I'm gonna like skip retcon. Do you have a retcon?
6:10 Speaker 03 I don't have a retcon.
6:11 Robin Rauzi? Oh, my God, we're gonna do a retcon free episode.
6:13 Speaker 03 A retcon? Well, our announcement was 30 minutes long.
6:16 Robin Rauzi? It's probably for the best.
6:18 Speaker 03 I have a term and condition.
6:19 Robin Rauzi? OK, terms and conditions.
6:21 Speaker 03 My term and condition is gaffe, G A F F, often used in the phrase stand the gaffe, which means like the heat, the pressure, the hardship. And it was used by a now famous owner of a Brooklyn laundromat, Joseph Topaldo, whose challenge of the New York State minimum wage law was held up by the Supreme Court in a truly abominable decision that led to FDR's court packing scheme. Someone asked me what happened to Topaldo. You know, after he wins in the Supreme Court, he gets to pay subminimum or, you know, no minimum wage to his workers. Apparently, he gave an interview. He thought this would be amazing for him
7:04 Speaker 03 because he's like the flag bearer of personal liberty in the United States. And he said in an interview, after the court decision, business looked good for a while because I was able to undercharge my competitors on what I saved in labor cost.
7:21 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
7:21 Speaker 03 That's just very, that's who was his whole thing. But then business fell off. Customers didn't want to be associated with him. His business folded. And he said, I'm broke now. I couldn't stand the gaffe.
7:33 Robin Rauzi? Interesting.
7:36 Speaker 03 He actually got caught because he faked his payroll records to make it look like he paid them minimum wage, but actually didn't. And at the same time, he was running some kind of kickback scheme where the women had to give their wages. That were paid to them over anyway. So this guy was a criminal.
7:52 Robin Rauzi? Sounds like a on a couple of levels there.
7:54 Speaker 03 He was a multi-level criminal and the Supreme Court freed him from bondage because he was waiting the decision in jail. And they're like, you're right. This all goes back to the minimum wage that protects women and children. They're wrong. You're right. Criminal enterprise runner of a laundromat. And he quote unquote, couldn't stand the gaffe. I quite like this phrase, stand the gaffe. Let's bring it back. When I read it and kind of went through this decision, I couldn't help but think that it's a really good way to express social media comments. That is truly the gaffe of trying to.
8:28 Robin Rauzi? That you have to stand if you're going to be in the, if you're going to be in the game.
8:31 Speaker 03 So stand the gaffe for me has now become dealing with like hateful and ignorant comments on social media.
8:38 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
8:39 Speaker 03 That was my term.
8:39 Robin Rauzi? That's good. My term, thank you to the connections game and from the New York Times, is contranyms. And I knew that these words existed, but I didn't know that there was a term for them. So contranyms are words that are their own opposites. Right? So for instance, left. Left can mean I left, I departed, or I was left behind, meaning I have remained. I think that's probably the best example. But anyway, I didn't know that contranyms was the term for that.
9:09 Speaker 03 That's a good one.
9:10 Robin Rauzi? Word situation. Yeah, I thought that was.
9:12 Speaker 03 Left and left.
9:13 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. It's time for the big pill crow.
9:15 Speaker 03 The big pill crow. In this case, the big belly pill crow.
9:19 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, exactly.
9:20 Speaker 03 Now that I'm bracket, I can bring it, I can work it into like the show like 10 or 12 times.
9:26 Robin Rauzi? How many episodes we have left?
9:27 Speaker 03 Oh, my God, count the days. We are talking about paid family leave.
9:32 Robin Rauzi? We are.
9:33 Speaker 03 Which is also short for paid family in medical leave. Important distinction.
9:37 Robin Rauzi? I'm glad you made that.
9:39 Speaker 03 The idea of paid leave is that you are paid by either your employer or the state or the federal government while you are taking kind of qualified caregiving activities away from work.
9:53 Robin Rauzi? So it's not medical leave like you're sick. It's medical leave like you're gonna take care of your newborn or elderly parent or spouse.
10:02 Speaker 03 You know, you could be sick and you need to take time out and that is covered by the program. And then someone else is sick and you need to take care of them and that is also covered by the program.
10:10 Robin Rauzi? So it is self too.
10:11 Speaker 03 It's self too. The unpaid version that we have, the FMLA, the Family Medical Leave Act. It's one piece of legislation that covers both you getting sick and someone else getting sick. I mean, really what it is, is that some people get job protection when they're on FMLA, which is the unpaid federal version. And then there are paid versions that some states require. And then there are the voluntary provision of leave that your employer can provide. So last episode, when we talked about school lunch, I was like, I think there's a real conservative argument here.
10:41 Robin Rauzi? You did.
10:42 Speaker 03 We like, I think this appeals.
10:44 Robin Rauzi? Level of the playground.
10:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, let's do this. This one is like, I want to pitch the most liberal policy, the most liberal form of pay. I think paid leave is coming on the federal level. And I'm like, this is my chance to convince people to go for like the most outrageously liberal version of it. And that is why.
11:01 Robin Rauzi? And by liberal, you mean sort of generous?
11:04 Speaker 03 At the very least, yeah.
11:06 Robin Rauzi? Says the pregnant lady.
11:07 Speaker 03 Says the pregnant lady, like, we are going crazy with leave. And I think my, my goal is like, we're gonna ask for 100 so we can get 95. Like, we're going way, way, way beyond. So that is the point of this show is I'm gonna try to convince everyone listening that not just that we need paid family medical leave, which is, which polls really highly, polls, I think, north of 90%. Most people say, we absolutely need this. But how liberal do they want to go? Tune in to find out.
11:37 Speaker 03 So in making my like big liberal case, I want to explain a couple of things. One is that right now, current state of the world is really confusing because what we want out of a social program that's federal would be called paid family medical leave. What exists in its absence has a bunch of different names. So on the employer level.
12:01 Speaker 03 We know that just 27% of workers.
12:05 Robin Rauzi? We know because the BLS told us.
12:07 Speaker 03 But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 27% of private sector workers have paid family leave. However.
12:16 Robin Rauzi? And that's offered by?
12:18 Speaker 03 By their employer.
12:19 Robin Rauzi? And not just because it's in the state that they're in?
12:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, offered by the employer.
12:22 Robin Rauzi? Privately offered, okay.
12:23 Speaker 03 So it's around 1 in 4. And, you know, weirdly enough, because it's more of a high-wage worker benefit, there's some evidence that men are more likely to have paid family leave than women.
12:34 Robin Rauzi? Have access to it, not necessarily take it.
12:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, doesn't necessarily take it, but have access to it through their job. It's so easy to offer paid family leave to like a tech company that has like, you know, that one woman.
12:45 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. And a bunch of 27-year-olds whose parents are only 50.
12:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, or offer it at a law firm where like, everybody knows if they take it, they'll never work again. Or, you know, like, it's an easy thing to offer. But if you have been through like pregnancy and delivery, you probably didn't take paid family leave. You probably got short-term disability insurance. And about half of workers in the US, maybe a little bit under, have access to a short-term disability insurance policy through their employer, especially if they have a large employer. And delivering moms do meet short-term disability status. And I want to say, oh yeah, there's schedules of like, how much disability leave you get after labor and delivery are like,
13:33 Speaker 03 feels like a man wrote this.
13:35 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
13:35 Speaker 03 I think it's four weeks for vaginal birth and six weeks for a C-section. It's not a lot, but that is where a lot of actually taking paid leave comes from. It comes from a short-term disability insurance policy that your employer has that they might plus up.
13:52 Robin Rauzi? Right.
13:53 Speaker 03 So that means that people who are uncovered by that short-term disability insurance policy are people who don't deliver babies, dads, or any adopting couple.
14:03 Robin Rauzi? Because it's not a medical, their problems are medical.
14:05 Speaker 03 So that's confusing in understanding the current landscape that you've got like half of workers that are-
14:09 Robin Rauzi? I feel better about being confused.
14:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, half of workers are covered by a short-term disability insurance. That's not that generous, but will at least cover a delivering mom, but no other parent. And then a fourth of workers might have enumerated and specific paid family leave. And then there's workers who have sick days and vacations and unspecified PTO that they can roll in together. So the amount of time that people actually spend with a newborn, which tends to be like the banner case for paid family and medical leave, can really vary. But for the most part, the access is far from universal and at best half. The other part that's hard to understand is that in an actual universal paid family and medical leave system, newborns would not be the dominant claim. We think of it as a baby policy.
14:55 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, yeah, we think of it as maternity leave or parental leave. Yeah, but it's not.
15:00 Speaker 03 Now, it depends on how, obviously, how the coverage is structured, but it tends to be medical leave is the most common claim. You get sick, you get in a car accident, you have a heart attack, you break your leg, medical leave is what ends up being covered, kind of most commonly.
15:15 Robin Rauzi? Interesting.
15:16 Speaker 03 And then depending on how the program is structured, which varies across states, it's going to be caring for a partner or parent that takes up as many claims as caring for a newborn.
15:26 Robin Rauzi? Right. And do you have to take this time as a block? Or again, this probably varies from place to place.
15:31 Speaker 03 Varies from place to place.
15:32 Robin Rauzi? Like, yeah. And if it's for you, you probably, there are also probably rules like you need to use all your sick days before you go on to either short-term disability. I think in California, we call it short-term disability.
15:44 Speaker 03 Uh, it depends on the place. I mean, some places, the short-term disability insurance policy doesn't kick in until like day eight.
15:49 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
15:50 Speaker 03 So like if you gave birth on a Tuesday, the following Wednesday, your short-term disability would kick in and you have to use sick days or vacation before that. Or your employer might say, we'll just cover it. It depends on like the policy that your employer holds and the policy that they make around that policy. So I think this is very confusing, right? Like, what it actually means, that's confusing. What it looks like now-
16:11 Robin Rauzi? The terms are weird, yeah.
16:12 Speaker 03 Totally confusing in terms of the policy landscape. The other thing that makes it confusing is that we have a set of states that have passed paid family leave. They have different rules and most of them have expanded their program over time. So they started really conservatively, like they didn't want to start a program that would go bankrupt within a year. So as you go through the evidence around paid family leave being generated by states, that can also really vary because the states themselves have been changing their program.
16:40 Robin Rauzi? Right, right. So yeah, what California was accomplishing in 2006 is very different than 2018.
16:47 Speaker 03 Yeah. You know, most states start out just really modest, like they don't, they just, they don't want to like overwhelm people, overwhelm businesses, run out of money or anything like that. And then as they get essentially more confident and more resources, they start to expand. I should, I should stress to our optimists out there, this is actually a really easy policy to do and very simple to understand. So the confusing things about the current state of the world are just to give you some context, which I think you should feel free to ignore because here's what's going to happen. We're going to add paid family and medical leave to social security, which means it will cover every single worker in the United States, whether they're self-employed or not. We already have the administrative and tax structure to collect that and we have all
17:30 Speaker 03 the data for, you know, how much people will get back. The benefits won't vary across states. It will follow you from employer to employer, no matter where you go.
17:39 Robin Rauzi? And state to state.
17:40 Speaker 03 And state to states. You'll never lose your benefits. And at the same time, this means that caregiving can be added to your social security retirement benefits. So if you say, take six months out of work because you had to care for a dying spouse, a really popular social security policy is to basically credit your social security retirement account with the caregiving you provided.
18:04 Robin Rauzi? Oh, as, yeah, as unpaid work, but that gets credited.
18:08 Speaker 03 Unpaid work. So like I had a paid family leave claim and I didn't contribute for the 12 weeks I was on paid family leave. Social Security will credit my retirement account because I was caregiving for someone in the economy and that should count as work. So social security, the agency itself is like quite neutral in all policies. But in terms of like if social security were to have a personality, it wants this. Like it wants to administer paid family leave and medical leave to put them into one system and to have harmony between the interruptions to work that are small and the overall contribution to your retirement. What's also nice about paid family and medical leave going through social security is that you already have a thousand field offices.
18:51 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
18:52 Speaker 03 Geographically distributed throughout the country. They obviously need more money and they need, we need to, they need more money and people and not to be fired and gutted.
19:01 Robin Rauzi? Just saying.
19:02 Speaker 03 Just saying. But you have like a means of administration that's already locally distributed.
19:08 Robin Rauzi? Right. You know, we think of social security being only a retirement program, but it's, it's more than that.
19:14 Speaker 03 It's a disability and survivors program as well. So aside from all that confusing stuff that I wanted to lead with, just to make sure people stayed on the line.
19:20 Robin Rauzi? I know, this is like, it's like a test. Are you still with us?
19:24 Speaker 03 Are you still with us? After the web of ways that workers in the US tried to piece it all together? Well, then let me reward you with this nugget. It's common, it's going to be universal, it'll be in social security and they'll never be able to touch it again. So that's something to look forward to. So right now, social security has old age survivors and disability insurance. OASD, it is going to be FOASD, family, old age survivors and disability insurance.
19:47 Robin Rauzi? Well, that's good. We're going to get a much better.
19:49 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. FOASD.
19:51 Robin Rauzi? FOASD out of this.
19:53 Speaker 03 Yeah. And there's legislation that has been introduced in several sessions of Congress to add paid family and medical leave to social security.
20:02 Robin Rauzi? Oh, so you're not just, you're not just.
20:04 Speaker 03 Speculating, no.
20:06 Robin Rauzi? Being an optimist and speculating and saying, this is definitely how it's going to work out. People have proposed this.
20:11 Speaker 03 People have proposed this. This is quite popular. It's incredibly efficient and it's probably the cheapest way for businesses to have it. Cause the alternative would be for someone to say, I'm just going to require that you have to provide 12 weeks of paid leave for every employee you have. That would be a really high cost for business.
20:31 Robin Rauzi? And they would have to go buy a private policy if the state didn't provide one, yeah.
20:34 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. And so this is, this is saying like, look, listen, business, like, you can plus it up if you want to, but you're going to give us a marginal tax contribution and Social Security will deal with this.
20:44 Robin Rauzi? Nice.
20:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's going to come and it's going to be great. And it'll be simple.
20:48 Robin Rauzi? Is it up there with like, on the timeline of, you know, universal school meals?
20:54 Speaker 03 Oh, neck and neck. I think the, the big delay that's going to come from paid family leave is that Congress is too cowardly to fix Social Security before the trust fund runs out. That is the real problem.
21:06 Robin Rauzi? Right.
21:06 Speaker 03 And I think, I've written about this before in, in Bloomberg columns, that the reason why we don't have paid family leave is because Congress is afraid of Social Security. And that is the, like, clear-
21:17 Robin Rauzi? Oh, so it's like a tail wag in the dog there, yeah.
21:20 Speaker 03 As we talked about in the Social Security episode, like, they just don't have the guts or the willpower to do it before the money runs out, so they're going to wait till the very last minute. And if they added paid family leave, people would say, well, you're, you're expanding Social Security without having addressed its long-term shortfalls. So they really do have to-
21:36 Robin Rauzi? Which would not be untrue.
21:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, would not be untrue. I mean, what's interesting about paid family leave, every state that has it has worked through their own social insurance system. On the state level, you have unemployment insurance, which runs very similarly to Social Security. It's a payroll tax contribution. It doesn't cover self-employed workers, but it covers all payroll employment. And states have built off of that social insurance program, basically the exact same thing we would do at the federal level, but just for payroll employees in their state. And what's interesting about it is that almost every program started with like, let's keep that tax low, let's keep that benefit, like, you can have five weeks.
22:17 Speaker 03 And now, then, then of course, like, they raised a ton of money and they, the program went very differently than they thought. Businesses were much happier with it than they thought they would be. And now they're expanding the program. So all the proof is there that this will be successful federally and will cover every gig worker and self-employed worker.
22:35 Robin Rauzi? And what kind of tax rates are you talking about, like?
22:37 Speaker 03 So California's paid family leave program is part of the state disability insurance tax, which is 1.2%.
22:45 Robin Rauzi? So that 1.2% is actually covering both of those things?
22:48 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. And all wages are subject, so there's no cap. It's a unlimited 1.2% payroll tax. Which I think on the federal level, that would probably be similar. I would bet it would be like 1%. Now, the real question is, do you have, on state level programs, workers don't pay it. It's billed onto their unemployment insurance tax, which almost no state has a worker pay. So on the state level, all of the programs are employer-paid. There's no wage contribution on the employee side like you get for social security. I think the big question that a lot of advocates have is, if you have a federal program, should you make workers contribute too?
23:26 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
23:26 Speaker 03 And I would say, yes.
23:28 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
23:28 Speaker 03 They should, because evidence shows that when workers see the payroll contribution on their paycheck, they'll apply for it more. It's like a program-
23:37 Robin Rauzi? They're like, "I'm paying for this, I might as well use it."
23:38 Speaker 03 Yes, and so it builds a program participation in, that you're more likely to take it if you see that you've paid for it. So it's like an awareness and ownership.
23:46 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm. When you take that kind of leave, is it always consecutive? Or is it, can it be, "I'm gonna work part-time for 12 weeks"?
23:54 Speaker 03 It depends on the state. Most states don't make you take it consecutively.
23:57 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm. And you were saying that people most often use it to take care of themselves?
24:04 Speaker 03 Yes.
24:04 Robin Rauzi? Or to take time off when they are recovering, I assume, from a physical, you know, "I needed a new knee."
24:10 Speaker 03 If we wanted to make the program really liberal, we would have medical leave applied to mental health issues as well.
24:14 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
24:15 Speaker 03 And I'm saying liberal here in like, the best, truest sense. Lots of uses, lots of instances. Like, you say you're pregnant with your second child, and you also are an avid recreational soccer player, and you know you shouldn't play another game.
24:31 Robin Rauzi? And yet you do.
24:32 Speaker 03 And yet you do. And you're playing savage, because there's no subs, and you're really tired, and you should walk off the field, but you don't, because you have a problem with how competitive you are, and how much you get out of playing soccer. And you tear your ACL at like the age of 37, playing rec soccer. It's embarrassing how many people have to carry you off the field and out of the stadium so that you can go get a x-ray. You know, part of your medical leave in that scenario is that you have to go to physical therapy.
25:07 Robin Rauzi? Right.
25:08 Speaker 03 Three times a week for two hours a day afterwards and you use your, you know, medical leave claim to cover that time. Medical leave is a version of short-term disability insurance. It's just called medical leave and it typically kicks in after a certain amount of time. If you have an illness or incident that's longer than seven days.
25:28 Robin Rauzi? Right.
25:29 Speaker 03 You use sick days for the first seven and then on the eighth day, medical leave, AKA short-term disability insurance kicks in. So had I been able to, spoiler, it's me. Had I been able to repair my ACL when I tore it, I would have gotten like sick days to cover the surgery and the aftermath. But then by like day eight, when I needed to stay at home and then go into therapy, that's when the short-term disability insurance would have picked up.
25:53 Robin Rauzi? You weren't able to repair your?
25:55 Speaker 03 You can't actually have ACL repair surgery when you are pregnant.
26:01 Robin Rauzi? Oh.
26:02 Speaker 03 I got in there and they're like, is there any chance that you could be pregnant? And I was like, hi.
26:05 Robin Rauzi? 100%.
26:05 Speaker 03 I was like, it's a pretty, it's a pretty high chance. I'd peg it in like the 90s. And they were like, oh, okay. Well, let's talk about mobility adaptation. And I was like, what? What's funny is that you can have the surgery, you just can't take anything anti-inflammatory.
26:21 Robin Rauzi? Oh.
26:21 Speaker 03 There's no Advil.
26:22 Robin Rauzi? It's just gonna be very painful.
26:23 Speaker 03 I spent the first like three weeks of that pregnancy on the couch with my leg elevated and ice on it because I tore my ACL and I couldn't take Advil. And it was 100% my own fault.
26:35 Robin Rauzi? So we think of this as being something that a lot of women who've just had children would, would use, but that in fact it's often used to take care of yourself, but then also to take care of spouses and.
26:48 Speaker 03 Or siblings.
26:48 Robin Rauzi? Or siblings.
26:49 Speaker 03 Or children.
26:50 Robin Rauzi? Or aging parents.
26:52 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
26:53 Robin Rauzi? Which, you know, we have a lot of and we're gonna have more of.
26:56 Speaker 03 Yes, this is like. You get the call from your parents that, you know, they've been going to the doctor because something hasn't been right and they've got, they probably have six to eight weeks with some type of terminal cancer. Like, you leave and you go on family leave. You go home and you spend time with them and you, that time is covered.
27:17 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
27:18 Speaker 03 This is one of the ways I want to make it as liberal as possible. Like, I think it should be the case in the United States that if you find out that you're dying and you only have so long to live, your kids can come. They might not come for other reasons, but work should not be an impediment to your kids coming and spending time with you at the end of your life. I think this is, I've always thought it's not short-sighted, but almost cruel, that we don't talk about paid family and medical leave from the point of view of the dying.
27:49 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
27:49 Speaker 03 This is about their last eight weeks, last 12 weeks. Like, what do they deserve?
27:57 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
27:57 Speaker 03 Sorry, the labor market can't spare your children. So now they have to choose between keeping their job and income or spending time with their dying mother. That's just the choice.
28:07 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, like, that's a terrible, horrible choice.
28:09 Speaker 03 No, it's a horrible, it's a horrible choice. And people who have had family members get sick, like, it's, how great are you at work, anyway?
28:16 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, that's kind of what I wonder.
28:18 Speaker 03 And I hate to make this policy about productivity loss of the grieving, but maybe that's what it would take to make the case on that side. But I've always wanted people who benefit from this on the elderly side to be more vocal of like, let my kids come home. Make this easier. And we don't really hear that argument being made.
28:40 Robin Rauzi? Hmm. Yeah.
28:42 Speaker 03 These would make for amazing movies, too. Of like, your mom knows that you have paid family leave. She's like, I'm dying and you have to come home. And like, and now you're, you and your siblings are back in your childhood home as your mom's dying. I'm like, I'm just like seeing Oscars like flying.
28:58 Robin Rauzi? Falling out of the sky.
28:59 Speaker 03 I was just like, Oscar, Oscar. I mean, come on, y'all. These movies will write themselves.
29:08 Robin Rauzi? They will write themselves.
29:09 Speaker 03 For me, it's a policy change that could usher in a cultural change around how death and dying occurs in the United States. Yeah, that's my first aspect of liberal paid leave.
29:21 Robin Rauzi? Liberal paid leave is, yeah, go be with your dying parents.
29:24 Speaker 03 Yep.
29:25 Robin Rauzi? Okay. And what else is in your super liberal? I'm guessing there's something about babies.
29:31 Speaker 03 All right. So you have a woman that is pregnant.
29:35 Robin Rauzi? Yep.
29:36 Speaker 03 That is going to give birth to a tiny little baby. There's like several scenarios of family types that that woman exists in, and each scenario could have potentially a different number of paid family leave claims.
29:48 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
29:49 Speaker 03 Okay. So let's say that the woman is a single mom and she's on her own. She's going to get paid family leave for herself.
29:56 Robin Rauzi? Yep.
29:57 Speaker 03 And nobody else, because she doesn't have a partner. Or she's partnered, she has the baby, her partner stays home.
30:04 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
30:05 Speaker 03 So compared to the single mom that got one claim on paid family leave, the partnered mom has two claims, right? The mom and the partner.
30:14 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
30:15 Speaker 03 Okay, well, now, let's say that she's a surrogate, or she's giving the baby up for adoption to another couple. Now, you've got three claims, because now the delivering mom is going to get medical leave for herself, and then the two parents now have family leave and they get the claim. So depending on the family type, the kid basically takes either one or up to three people into the paid family leave system.
30:38 Robin Rauzi? Okay. Where are you going with this?
30:41 Speaker 03 One of the consequences of this non-system that we have now, that's the patchwork of private short-term disability insurance, and sometimes paid leave from the employer, and sometimes paid leave in a small number of states, is that we have backed into a system in which delivering moms are short-changed on leave.
31:04 Speaker 03 Because their short-term disability insurance pays for them to be at home while they're recovering from delivery. But that kind of gives employers this like, well, and now I don't have to pay for anyone else to take care of the baby because she's already home. And so they're getting this like two-for-one off of delivering moms where her disability insurance window is also treated as the newborn caregiving window. And y'all, they need to pay for both. And while we're at it, she deserves a caregiver too. Like, it's really not fair that like, no one takes care of her. Yeah. I've had two kids on paid family leave through an employer, and in no instance did it ever come up that I deserved a caregiver.
31:48 Speaker 03 That's actually a really interesting point. Yeah. I mean, especially when you consider the advice that is given and like the warnings given to women after delivery. So like, try this on for size. Don't lift anything? No, no, no. You're gonna lose a lot of blood. You need to call a doctor or an ambulance if you lose more than a golf ball size of blood. Now, you tell me if you can figure out if a lot of blood comes out, if you know it's a golf ball size. Like, how do you, I'm like, do you take it and you like, shape it? Like, no, you don't. You just, you're like, wow, that's, okay, so what happened to me, what happened to me after my first kid was that my husband didn't have hardly any leave. And I was home alone.
32:31 Speaker 03 The kid was in the crib, asleep, and I was taking a bath in the middle of the day. And I looked down, and the water's red. Ah, God. And I'm like, sitting there thinking, so like, let's just think of the volume of the tub relative to a golf ball size of blood. Like, what are we doing here? Like, what, like, so I didn't have my phone near me. I'm home alone. The baby starts crying, and I, I get this like, very deep sense of like, if I stand up and pass out, like, would I hit my head on something? And this is the scenario planning I'm going through on one side, whereas on the other side, I'm thinking, how diluted would a golf ball be in this water?
33:11 Speaker 03 And I'm just like, I'm really struggling with this. And then I make, I make the heroic decision that I'm not going to stand up and step out of the tub. I'm going to slide out of it like a pond monster. And an army crawl to the baby's room just to see if they're okay. And I remember thinking, no legislator in this country has said, you Catherine, who brought life into this world, who had reconstructive stitches afterwards and has been told, watch out for that golf ball coming at you. No one thinks you deserve a caregiver.
33:52 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. Yeah.
33:54 Speaker 03 For the record, my husband hates this story and he hates it because he wasn't there and he didn't have leave for what? He's not an ER doctor. There weren't lives on the line. He just had to be at a desk an hour away, I don't know, answering emails in a meeting for something that we don't even remember anymore. And so he hates this story. And the next time I had a kid, when my husband's employer said that he didn't have paid leave, he quit and got a job that would give it to him. And he did really well. He overshot it. He got like 10 more weeks of leave than I did on the second kid. So we've had a couple of scenarios with this and it is, it is much easier to recover from
34:38 Speaker 03 childbirth when you have someone at home with you.
34:41 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think that that is a more, you know, why do we think that somebody needs a caregiver after they've had a knee replacement and not after they've had a baby?
34:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, it was, for God's sakes. It was ridiculous. And I, I mean, my second birth went really, I mean, it was, it was, it was very different. It went really well. I had much less stitches. I have so many labor and delivery stories about that first labor and delivery that I don't say because I don't want to like do my part to bring down the fertility rate.
35:14 Speaker 03 But what this would mean is that the paid family medical leave system you want is that when you have a newborn kid, the delivering mom gets medical leave and a caregiver, and the baby gets a caregiver. Which means, for people who have pieced this together, this means you could get your mom or sister on paid leave when you have a kid, not just your partner. Right. No, I'm not saying that partners aren't useful. I'm just saying that like, it's a lot to take care of. Like, how's this for another, like, really frightening statistic? They don't give the depression screen to women who have just delivered, because almost every woman would screen positive for depression. Yeah. So you've got medically recovering depressed people with newborns.
35:59 Speaker 03 What could go wrong? What could go wrong? And they don't have a caregiver, and so you want two people on this. This is man to man. Yeah. We are not doing zone. We are doing man to man. We're not doing zone. The mom gets somebody, the baby gets somebody, the husband and the grandma, like, they'll figure it out. But, yeah, this would basically mean that, like, you have a mom or a sister. Or a brother. Or a brother that would be able to take some amount of paid leave to help with the kid and the mom. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is my push for, like, the liberalist paid leave. It's not like, do we get 10 weeks versus 12 weeks, or do we get, like, higher benefits or lower benefits?
36:40 Speaker 03 It's liberal in the sense that the dying parent gets to have all of her kids take a paid leave claim and come home. And the newborn baby, like, the mom gets a caregiver, the mom gets leave, and the baby gets a caregiver, and if it's a surrogate situation, then she'll get another caregiver. And it's, you know, at least three people for each kid. I think this is what liberalness meets to me in the paid leave conversation is... Is not some length of time in the extra week. It's the person and who gets care and what care means.
37:15 Robin Rauzi? Well, you know, and it would be reasonably cheap to implement since we don't, we're not having any babies, apparently.
37:21 Speaker 03 I mean, this is the cheapest time to do it for sure.
37:23 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, do it now and build up that baby trust fund.
37:26 Speaker 03 Build up that baby trust fund, yeah. And I think it would, I don't know if this would make a dent in the maternal mortality rate, but I do think it would probably make it a lot easier for families who are going through, like the first, especially the first kid. I mean, it's a really tough time. And if you had a hard delivery, it's not, that tough time is.
37:43 Robin Rauzi? It's tough.
37:44 Speaker 03 And then let me say, still a heartless economist, even underneath these mom overalls.
37:50 Robin Rauzi? The mom, the mom overalls.
37:51 Speaker 03 The mom, the mom pregnancy.
37:53 Robin Rauzi? Mom-er-alls.
37:54 Speaker 03 The mom-er-alls. Okay, so my asterisk on the big liberal leave is it's not expensive.
38:03 Robin Rauzi? What?
38:04 Speaker 03 It's really not that expensive.
38:05 Robin Rauzi? Okay, like how, I mean, how expensive?
38:08 Speaker 03 So, yeah, you, you have a social insurance program with a trust fund. Let's say you took like 0.75 paid by the employer, 0.75 paid by the employee. You start off with a program that's, you know, no more than eight weeks.
38:25 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm. And then you just kind of, and then you can sort of see over time, like what, what the usage is, what the demand is.
38:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, you, I think, I worry that in the US you'd have to make it a little higher because of the elderly population.
38:39 Robin Rauzi? The tax would be a little higher.
38:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, or you would have to structure it so that like, the amount of leave you can take for like partner versus parent versus newborn, you might want to structure that to like, kind of just hedge a little bit at the front end that your more common claim will probably be a dying parent for the next two decades.
39:02 Speaker 03 But, no, this is like imminently affordable. And we know that because every state that has a trust fund, which is funded the exact same way, just, but just on the employer's side, pegged at around 1%, those trust funds are healthy. They can afford it.
39:18 Speaker 03 And there's, I would say the new thing is that we're starting to get some very good data that men are taking leave.
39:24 Robin Rauzi? Oh, yeah? Parental stuff or for other things?
39:26 Speaker 03 I think just in terms of total claims, it comes down to 20 to 40% of claimants are men. Now, probably a lot of that is coming from the medical side, but this is not necessarily a women's program.
39:38 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm. Yeah. We assume that the women are going to be the caretakers and the women are going to need it for childbirth and maternity leave, but...
39:45 Speaker 03 But to be fair, like, you know, if you had a caregiving situation and we have a 20% wage disparity in the United States, that tends to be larger between married men and women who have children, like, who does it make sense to drop out of the workforce? The low-paid one? Or the less-paid one? So I think some of that is just, we can't know how the legacy will be projected forward. The legacy is that women earn less and that they're the caregivers, but we've also, like, never really opened it up to men the way that a universal program would allow. I do know a lot of economists listen to our show, so I will say something controversial in terms of my big liberal leave policy, which is that it actually does not matter to me if men take it.
40:30 Speaker 03 There are people who are like, you have to have, like, mandatory leave, or like, the woman gets more leave if the husband takes it too, and like, this leads to parity in the workforce. And there's, there's this, like, very vocal arm of the paid family leave movement that are like, how to make sure men take it.
40:48 Speaker 03 I know, it just doesn't matter. It doesn't, like...
40:50 Robin Rauzi? Oh, so you're saying you don't care if they don't take it?
40:52 Speaker 03 I don't care if they don't take it.
40:53 Robin Rauzi? Oh, okay. Yeah.
40:54 Speaker 03 I think it matters to a lot of people that you, like, somehow design the program so that men are basically like...
41:00 Robin Rauzi? That encourages men to take it.
41:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, encourages or incentivized, and that's not one, I just, that one, I'm like, I, you just gotta give people a choice, they might not choose this, like, I don't care. That one gets, like, too, too, um, too controlling for me of like, what if, what if the guy's a dick? And like the wife doesn't want him at home and like, you know, like he wants to see his kids.
41:25 Robin Rauzi? You had a baby, stop working.
41:27 Speaker 03 There's great evidence that if you incentivize paternity leave in particular, that you can do a lot for like household bargaining, or men will do more chores, or you know, women will earn more in the longer run. And I'm like, I don't know, that's too much policing of a marriage for my taste.
41:43 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
41:44 Speaker 03 I don't like it.
41:45 Robin Rauzi? I would also like you to be able to use this to take care of your in-laws.
41:49 Speaker 03 Yeah. I think the in-laws one is, is if it would be a failure of design if that's not covered because, you know, what if like my husband's mom is sick and it's easier for me to take leave than him? Is it not allowed? Like, should you just put a cap? Like, you get two claims and maybe it's like a kid and a partner, maybe it's both of your kids' partners? Like, I, I think that with the two examples I gave of childbirth and death are a way of saying that like, we should not focus on a strict definition of what is family.
42:21 Robin Rauzi? So many people I know, so many gay friends I know who are, you know, operate as family to one another, who are chosen family, or you need them all.
42:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, there should be some kind of system that, that, that comes from the preference of the person who needs the caregiving, of who they get to pick. And does it, I mean, how do you convince like a Republican lawmaker that like a gay woman should be able to pick her best friend to be there for her illness?
42:49 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
42:50 Speaker 03 Or that maybe like a trans person who has lost contact with their entire family also still deserves to have someone take care of them if they get sick?
42:58 Robin Rauzi? Right.
42:58 Speaker 03 Even if no one in their family speaks to them anymore? Like, these are the questions that we need to fight for, and we should be out in front fighting for them now. Like, we, Congress does not get to say who my family is.
43:09 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
43:10 Speaker 03 I think that this is something that Americans would agree with in their own life.
43:13 Robin Rauzi? I, I think you're right. Yeah. And I think that we, I feel like we're in this shift of our culture to understanding that we're not, we talk a lot about how kind of independent or, and individualistic Americans are, but the truth is that we need to be embracing the future of where we actually, what we do is we take care of one another. And I see that in a million ways on all sides of the political spectrum. I see it in the Cajun Navy going to Houston, and I see it in, in my peers taking care of their parents and a recognition that that's also who we are. And in part because the government isn't doing it for us.
43:53 Speaker 03 We don't have long-term care insurance.
43:54 Robin Rauzi? Because we don't have any.
43:55 Speaker 03 We need people. And this, to me, is the fight. It's not for paid family leave, we're gonna get it. I think the real fight is putting the paid family leave conversation in the context of that word "family." So that is my big liberal leave. It's liberal in the truest sense of the word. Liberal that people who are dying, people who need medical care, little babies, we shouldn't be stingy with the number of caregivers that they get. And that, at the same time, we shouldn't be dogmatic about who gets to be a caregiver. It should be liberal. It should be up to the person. And that, I don't really love the idea of people in Congress sitting down and being like,
44:39 Speaker 03 you know, okay, so we've got one, the baby gets one caregiver for 10 weeks, and it can only be a blood relation, and it has to be this, and like, that's it. Like, I, no, no. We are doing this big liberal leave. I say who my family is, we're not gonna be tight-fisted with the caregivers. Big liberal leave.
45:01 Robin Rauzi? Big liberal leave. Great.
45:03 Speaker 03 Okay. Are you on board?
45:05 Robin Rauzi? I'm on board.
45:06 Speaker 03 Okay.
45:08 Robin Rauzi? The next section of our podcast episode is called "Executive Orders," where we announce how we would run the world.
45:16 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
45:17 Robin Rauzi? I think you get to go first.
45:18 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. My executive order, I've been sitting on this one for a minute, is that there's going to be a list of things that you're not allowed to say to a pregnant woman, and that just becomes law. So I don't need to be the only one that defines what's in this list. I think we can crowdsource this. Women who have been pregnant or have given births, you know, we all get to contribute to what, the things we don't want said to us while pregnant. And then it's just a, it's just a lifetime, you would never get to say it again. It's funnily enough, I was gonna start with, "You can't touch pregnant women," but then I'm like, "Actually, you just shouldn't touch anybody."
45:51 Robin Rauzi? Fair.
45:52 Speaker 03 So I don't need to, I don't need to waste the authority I have here on saying, "You're not allowed to touch my belly when I'm pregnant."
46:00 Robin Rauzi? Just.
46:01 Speaker 03 Because you're not, you shouldn't be allowed to touch me anyway.
46:03 Robin Rauzi? Full stop.
46:04 Speaker 03 Full stop. So, yeah, I think the one that I get a lot, that I really, really struggle with, is, "Oh, you look ready to pop."
46:13 Speaker 03 And I'm not gonna lie, that's actually not how it works. So I hope I don't pop, because that would be really alarming.
46:21 Speaker 03 I don't pop so much as empty. So like, I'm not really thrilled when people are like, I don't want it to pop. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The visual there is all wrong. So that would be, that would be one I'd
46:35 Robin Rauzi? I like it.
46:35 Speaker 03 Add to the list. And then there's lots of like,
46:38 Robin Rauzi? Don't share your horrible labor story, I think would be on the list.
46:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, don't walk up to me and share your horrible labor story. That would be one. Uh, oh yeah, this is a good one. You're not allowed to walk up to a pregnant woman and ask her if she's changed her mind on abortion.
46:54 Speaker 03 Sorry, Robyn, look at your face.
46:59 Speaker 03 I'm getting in the studio chat, I'm getting in like Robyn's face of like, no one would actually do that. And I'm like, oh, really? No one would walk up to me on the DC metro, clearly visiting while I'm on my way to work, and come up to me and say like, and now you know what those abortion activists get wrong. And I'm just like, looking like, I don't know. That was tough. I actually had two horrific strangers walking up to me on the metro while pregnant stories that I'm like,
47:30 Speaker 03 y'all, this ain't right. One of them is like quite sad, which is a woman who had just had a miscarriage, came up to me. That one was quite extended. She like straight up just sat next to me and put my hand, her hand on my belly as I was reading a book and started talking to me about her pregnancy loss. And then same pregnancy, but like two weeks later, on the metro on the way to work, and this like, family came up like right next to the Smithsonian stop and they were like, the mom was like, now you know, that's what they get wrong with abortion. And I was like, what are you do, what are we, hold on, sorry, what is your objective here?
48:07 Speaker 03 Those would be like two things I would put into my executive order of things you aren't allowed to say.
48:11 Robin Rauzi? I'm sure other people would have a, yeah.
48:13 Speaker 03 Oh yeah, listeners, we want to hear from you. Things that you're not allowed to say to a pregnant woman, let us know. I would say those two are like, on the list, but, but definitely you look ready to pop. Uh-uh, I ain't a balloon, I'm a lady.
48:30 Robin Rauzi? My executive order is, I'm suddenly fearing that I have used this before, so you have to tell me if I did. My executive order is if you can order a service online 24/7, you need to be able to cancel it online 24/7.
48:46 Speaker 03 Isn't LA Fitness being sued for this right now?
48:49 Robin Rauzi? I don't know if they are good.
48:52 Speaker 03 I'm almost positive that they are being sued, but they'll be coming under the FTC because it's so hard to cancel your gym membership.
48:59 Robin Rauzi? My particular complaint is internet service providers, right? Where it's suddenly, and cable is of course notorious for this. You know, you can sign up online and get your service all set up, and then you try to cancel it and suddenly you've got to have a three-hour phone conversation that can only happen between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM Central Time. It's infuriating. So anyway, that's my, yeah, that's my executive order.
49:25 Speaker 03 Who'd be better?
49:26 Robin Rauzi? When we moved out of Spokane to LA, I tried to cancel our cable subscription and they called me after I canceled it to say that I could take it with me when I was moving. I was like, "You don't actually do business where I'm moving." And they still wanted to talk to me. I was like, "Stop talking to me. You are not actually in business where I am moving."
49:46 Speaker 03 This is actually a good cue, I think. I mean, don't talk to Robin and I. I mean, just really.
49:51 Robin Rauzi? Don't call us.
49:52 Speaker 03 Don't call us?
49:53 Robin Rauzi? Except call us and leave a review at that number we left earlier.
49:56 Speaker 03 That's okay.
49:57 Robin Rauzi? But you don't have to talk to us. And again, that number is 202-643-0295.
50:04 Speaker 03 Who is your spiritual sponsor for the week?
50:06 Robin Rauzi? My spiritual sponsor is my friend Susan, who retired after 34 years at the Los Angeles Times.
50:13 Speaker 03 Oh.
50:13 Robin Rauzi? And you know how you talked about your economics professor? She's the reason I got into opinion journalism. I think that she might have edited your first op-ed.
50:24 Speaker 03 Really? That's Susan?
50:26 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
50:28 Speaker 03 She's made careers, people.
50:29 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. So anyway, it's her first week of being retired. I messaged her Monday and said, "How's it going?" And she said, I keep feeling like there's a deadline I'm missing.
50:41 Speaker 03 Man, some people are no good at retirement and some people are like, I'm gonna be amazing at it.
50:45 Robin Rauzi? She's gonna be fine. She's gonna be fine.
50:46 Speaker 03 She's gonna be great. She's gonna be great. Wow. Oh, man. Oh, y'all, like, the only reason why any of y'all know me or I have a column at Bloomberg in a public persona is because right at the start of the pandemic, when I was still on maternity leave, I got drawn into a chat of like, does anybody know, like, what are your predictions for what this pandemic is gonna do? And I said, a bunch of people are gonna be unemployed and find out just how terrible a program unemployment insurance is. Robin was like, you should write that down. I put it together into what has to be one of the most wooden, not great Wikipedia entries that Robin, with her genius, put into like, got down to like 750 well-written words.
51:30 Speaker 03 And it ran in the LA Times, I mean, within like, two days. And it ran on the Sunday, and that was the Sunday before the shutdowns. My phone never stopped ringing. My life didn't go back to where it was before because then the pandemic was declared. People did apply for unemployment insurance. What I said in the op-ed was, was right. And I think I spent three hours of every day for the first six months of the pandemic on the phone with journalists.
51:58 Robin Rauzi? And here we are.
51:59 Speaker 03 And here we are. Robin's still paying for that.
52:03 Speaker 03 I'm like, well, you have to come with me because it's all on you anyway. Bye.
52:08 Speaker 03 All right, my spiritual sponsor for the week is, with the caveat that you are not supposed to go up and talk to me about it, it is actually the baby moving around in your belly. It is quite a special, unique feeling. I don't, I've never thought of it as kicks. Like, I definitely feel this one, like, that's a barrel roll. This is not like a little tap on the belly. Like, this, this one's exploring the space. But it is an irreplaceable, indescribable feeling to feel something inside you moving.
52:41 Speaker 03 There's like a real warm glow to that of like, well, I'm bringing life into the world. But then there's also the like.
52:48 Robin Rauzi? Alien movie.
52:49 Speaker 03 This ain't right. There's an aspect of like, you know, I'm a little uncomfortable. But for all the moms out there who have put their hand on their stomach and like felt something and it's been this really warm moment versus all the moms that are like, I don't know if I like that something's moving inside my body. I'm with you on both fronts because I feel it both directions, but it is still my spiritual sponsor because it is just, I know for a fact, nothing will ever come close to the like seeing, seeing the kid and feeling the kid moving around in there.
53:22 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
53:23 Speaker 03 Don't talk to me about it.
53:25 Robin Rauzi? Great. Don't touch and don't touch me.
53:27 Speaker 03 Don't touch me. Don't talk to me. Give the show money. We are done here.
53:32 Robin Rauzi? Oh, right. Oh, right. Thank you, guys, for listening. As always, we really appreciate the time that you spend with us and also the financial contributions that you make to keep us going, at least until Catherine goes on her maternity leave in some weeks.
53:51 Speaker 03 In some weeks. You know what, though? We should, at some point, ask people, like, what do they want to hear? Or not just for questions and answers, but like, what do you want to see for season two?
54:01 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. What do you want to see for season two?
54:02 Speaker 03 Follow-up episodes?
54:04 Robin Rauzi? That's right. We're gonna have a little time to think about it.
54:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:07 Robin Rauzi? We have had people say that they've been introduced to the show and then they've gone back to listen to the beginning and they feel like they've just been let in on all the jokes. So I sometimes feel bad for the people who have joined us recently, who we should put together a starter kit, Optimus Starter Kit. Listen to these couple of episodes, you'll get the gist. Anyway, we do, we two still, we still take your contributions on Substack, Buy Me a Coffee, Patreon, also just on PayPal. Also, as we have said before, bags of gold, totally welcome.
54:41 Speaker 03 Burlap sacks with dollar signs on the side. Delivered.
54:45 Robin Rauzi? Totally fine. Totally fine.
54:48 Speaker 03 We have to end our show by snapping out Andy and Sophie.
54:51 Robin Rauzi? Are they still there?
54:52 Speaker 03 Who knows?
54:55 Robin Rauzi? Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Sophie.
Previous Aren’t Free School Meals a Conservative's Dream Policy? Next The Cash-for-Kids Study: Misread and Misrepresented Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated