Pod Insights Optimist Economy The Tax We’re 99.93% Sure That You Will Never Pay About this episode The Estate Tax is one that half of Americans worry about, but that affects only the richest 0.07% after they die. For nearly 25 years, the U. S. has – through loopholes and ballooning exemptions – undercut a tax that could pay for some nice things, like maybe a children’s trust fund. If we chose to just dent more big inheritances, it’d also reduce the concentration of wealth and power. In this episode, economist Kathryn Edwards gets to go way, way back to the Gilded Age and editor Robin Rauzi still loves a tax story, so the topic is a win-win as far as we are concerned.
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Transcript 10,062 words · 3 speakers
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?
0:16 Robin Rauzi? This is a politician's dream.
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.
0:28 Speaker 02 We should do the actual show.
0:32 Robin Rauzi? But we should talk about our actual.
0:33 Speaker 02 The show that we do. What's it called?
0:37 Robin Rauzi? I'm told it's called Optimist Economy. You named it.
0:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, choices were made. Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.
0:55 Robin Rauzi? I'm Robin.
0:56 Speaker 02 On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time. So we need to start, of course, with the announcement that we have a website, optimist economy dot com. You can subscribe to the show there, become a paying subscriber. We love you much for that. You can also go to Buy Me a Coffee, where Optimist Economy takes your donations. And of course, if you like the podcast, tell someone about it.
1:26 Robin Rauzi? Especially if they have a company that they would like to underwrite our show.
1:30 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, sure. So this is also a call to people who have deep pockets or know people who do that, like we especially like your money.
1:37 Robin Rauzi? If you would like to put a little podcast in your will, for instance? No, I'm just kidding. That's for our theme today.
1:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, spoiler alert. We do love reading the reviews. We'll often read them on the show if we have one that in particular tickles us. I am still internalizing Johnny Five, who talked about just how bad we were at this, despite how much he enjoys it. And he will haunt production for many weeks to come.
2:04 Robin Rauzi? Many weeks.
2:05 Speaker 02 So Johnny, let us know how we did on that one. I tried really hard to sound both natural and professional. And I'm realizing those two things are in conflict in my being, so.
2:17 Robin Rauzi? But you did put some stuff on the outline.
2:19 Speaker 02 I did, I did. Starting with our first segment.
2:22 Robin Rauzi? Which we call retcon. Retcon, for our new listeners, we should remind folks, stands for retroactive continuity, and this is where we talk about things that we should have talked about before.
2:32 Speaker 02 Yes, so I have two retcons. The first is really about your shout out to Doris Day parking. I just wanted you to know that it has been immediately adopted by my family, to the point where we were dropping our kids off at camp, and my husband was like, "Oh, a Doris Day spot." Like, it was a seamless, seamless adoption that was also immediate, so amazing. Shout out to your friend. The second retcon is that, in the work requirements episode, I mentioned that I think a lot of the evidence on work requirements is fundamentally uninteresting because it all says the same thing. And an economist is another, like, tap on the shoulder from the PhD friend of like, "Now that you've talked about it publicly, let me tell you..."
3:13 Robin Rauzi? Let me tell you what you should have said.
3:15 Speaker 02 Let me tell you what you should have said. I appreciate all of you. But what she pointed out, which in fairness, I was pretty glib about, that's not normal.
3:24 Robin Rauzi? I'm sorry, what's not normal?
3:26 Speaker 02 That economics evidence and research would find such a singular conclusion with very little variation. It's not normal for evidence to be that much in concert. And to point out how quickly this evidence has been accumulated, you know, even over the last 10 years, we have amassed a volume of papers, books and books worth, that all say the same thing. Work requirements do not increase employment. That's incredible. And so she thought I could be may to the profession, but I should make sure that other people know. It is actually absolutely incredible that the research is so in line on this. And so I take her suggestion. I shouldn't be quite so glib.
4:08 Speaker 02 It's amazing that we can find that so consistently. Work requirements do not increase work. And at some point, they should have increased it by accident. By now, but they haven't. So that tells you a lot about the population we're working with and how terrible the policy is.
4:23 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. So I also had a retcon. This is just to our last episode, which was about unemployment rates for young people. And young people, particularly college graduates, and I was trying to find out how the United States rates stacked up against other countries. Did not find that out because youth unemployment is like age 15 to 24. That was not the group of people I was looking at. But what I did find was a survey that was done earlier this year about recently hired employees and people who lead HR departments. And HR leaders were incredibly critical of the skills that people were getting coming out of college. Seventy-five percent of them said that they thought college educations were not preparing
5:08 Robin Rauzi? people at all for their jobs. And this actually kind of broke my heart. Ninety-four percent of recent graduates, now these were people working in business specifically, ninety-four percent had regrets about their college degree and forty-three percent said they felt doomed to fail because they chose the wrong degree. Anyway, I found that kind of heartbreaking.
5:25 Speaker 02 Where was this survey?
5:27 Robin Rauzi? It was done by Holt Business School. And it was eight hundred recent people hired in the last three years and eight hundred leaders of HR. I mean, you're gonna get, again, this is not all executives, this is HR people, but they were specifically saying that they didn't like hiring people right out of college because it costs so much to train them for their jobs and that they were coming in unprepared.
5:48 Speaker 02 I went to a research seminar recently that was about transfers while in college. And it's worth humanizing that statistic of having, like, I picked the wrong thing in college and I have...
5:59 Robin Rauzi? I mean, don't we all have undergraduate regrets?
6:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, which is to say that, like, that's universal.
6:05 Robin Rauzi? Also, I think it is unreasonable for workplaces to think that everybody's gonna come in knowing the details of how the, I mean, it's a truism that sixty percent of what you need to know to do a job, you learn on the job. That's not gonna be different for new college graduates.
6:22 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
6:23 Robin Rauzi? And if it's, you know, in that case, eighty percent instead of sixty, we shouldn't be surprised by that.
6:27 Speaker 02 What was funny, the research seminar, in the room afterwards, almost every person there, I mean, a collection of truly successful powerhouse economists in great careers doing amazing work, and I mean, all of them were like, oh, God, yeah, I thought about leaving. And two of them were like, oh, I did leave. I went to a different school because the
6:45 Robin Rauzi? I mean, transfer rates are like 30%, right?
6:46 Speaker 02 It's massive. It's very hard to feel right. I think we don't talk enough about how hard it is to feel settled in college. How some people don't fit in, it doesn't fit for them and they have major remorse, career remorse. But I, I always thought of it as in college, you're, you're learning how to be the sponge. You're not taking in water. You're taking multiple classes, you're doing multiple assignments. Some of them are labs. Some of them are, you know, more technical, some of them are more creative. You have languages and you're managing a lot on your own and, you know, well, maybe at a small liberal arts college, they're doing a lot of handholding, but certainly had a massive public school.
7:24 Robin Rauzi? A big university.
7:25 Speaker 02 You're sinking or swimming there, but you know, that's teaching you to be adept at multitasking, to take on a lot of new information. And so you're, you're developing your ability to be a sponge. You don't take on water until you get the job. And so, I don't know, the factor showing up dry is like, well, duh.
7:45 Robin Rauzi? Terms and conditions, second part of our show.
7:47 Speaker 02 Second part of our show, I looked up Scot-free.
7:51 Robin Rauzi? I'm sure that I've been saying Scotch-free for like half my life.
7:55 Speaker 02 Well, this is one of those, like it's a new world. It's a, we, we have a different environment. And I was like, wait, I used it in a column. It was cut from the column. And then I was like, great, this is something offensive about Scottish people. Which considering, considering I'm a healthy and diverse mix of southern and western Irish, I should make sure that I'm not like insulting my cousins. Yeah, so I
8:19 Robin Rauzi? But it's, no, it's, is it related to Scottish people?
8:21 Speaker 02 It's not related to Scottish people at all. It's not Scot, it's not Scot for Scottish or Scotch-free. It's Scot-free because in Middle English, with one T, a Scot was what you called a tax. So they got off without paying the Scot. And so that was Scot-free means tax-free. And that has become today, you know, modern parlance is without getting any punishment.
8:43 Robin Rauzi? Without consequences.
8:44 Speaker 02 Without consequences. You got off Scot-free.
8:46 Robin Rauzi? All right. So as I was saying before we were recording, I just did a long, long drive from Spokane back to Los Angeles and This reminded me of you're looking up cowpens. We looked up Stockholm syndrome because I thought, well, you know, you hear that all the time, Stockholm syndrome, but I don't actually know what happened in Stockholm to create this term. Here's what I'm going to tell you. Everything you know about the phrase Stockholm syndrome and what you think it means as like a shorthand for being like sort of brainwashed by your captors and taking on their causes as your own is completely backwards. So in 1973, there's a bank robbery in Stockholm.
9:27 Robin Rauzi? I'm going to try to keep this short, but the gist of it is the hostages saw pretty quickly that the police were largely incompetent and the political leaders didn't really care about their safety. And instead of negotiating for their release, just said, we're not going to negotiate at all. In some cases, they actually were firing at the bank robbers while the hostages were more or less in the line of fire. And then afterwards, this criminologist who worked for the police basically pathologized their behavior because when they were released, they said, no, we're not testifying against these bank robbers because you guys, the police tried to more or less get us killed. I'll put a link to this story, but it's also, it's been sort of discussed as how backwards this is in psychology circles for some, for some years.
10:11 Speaker 02 That's so fascinating. I don't know if I've ever used Stockholm syndrome, but I certainly won't now.
10:16 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty wild. I mean, I think it's a shorthand that shouldn't mean what it means, I guess. It should mean the opposite.
10:24 Speaker 02 Also possibly relevant to our centerpiece discussion today, which is on the estate tax. I'm very excited to talk about the estate tax, especially because I get to go back to those 1700s and Sophie, don't you dare edit that out. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Robin, get it. No, get on board, Robin, get excited.
10:43 Robin Rauzi? I was, I was prepared for the 1930s.
10:46 Speaker 02 Oh, girl.
10:47 Robin Rauzi? And then maybe even 1916.
10:48 Speaker 02 Sweet honey child. Nope, we got to go way before that.
10:53 Robin Rauzi? Way back. Okay, let's set the table about the estate tax, what it is and why we're talking about it now.
11:00 Speaker 02 In 1797.
11:04 Speaker 02 We are talking about the estate tax is a tax that's levied on property. In order to inherit an estate, the
11:14 Robin Rauzi? Not real estate, not a property.
11:17 Speaker 02 Wealth, basically, in order, in order for wealth to be passed down, the bulk of the wealth, like in, before it gets split up amongst its inheritors, the number of people who get it, wealth is taxed as long as it's big enough and it meets, you know, certain kind of cutoffs in value, then a tax is levied on it. That is the estate tax. We have had it since 1916 in the United States. It came right after we passed the 16th Amendment and passed the graduated income tax. A few years later, we've had the estate tax. So it has been part of our tax code for 109 years. And over the past 25, these big pieces of tax legislation have messed with it. And they've increased the size of the estate.
12:01 Robin Rauzi? That is exempt.
12:02 Speaker 02 That is exempt. So you only pay this tax if, if it's a lot of money. You know, I mean, you have to have a lot of wealth in order to have, to pay the estate tax. That's always been true. But it's, has been raised to such an incredible degree in terms of how big the estate has to be, that very few estates pay it. So in 2001,
12:22 Robin Rauzi? I just also want to say, I think that the estate tax is one of probably the most misunderstood. I think people think that they are subject to it and they think far more people pay an estate tax than ever do. And they confuse it with taxation of gifts between people. And that really, we've talked a little bit about the branding of anti-tax activists.
12:46 Speaker 02 They're so good. Anti-tax people are just, they just are wordsmiths.
12:49 Robin Rauzi? They will call it, can we say it?
12:51 Speaker 02 No, we're not going to say it.
12:52 Robin Rauzi? We're not going to say it. They'll call it something else, not an estate tax.
12:56 Speaker 02 Fine, they call it the death tax.
12:57 Robin Rauzi? And the, the branding of that has just, has stuck and it's Led to a lot of misunderstanding that I think most middle-class people think that they're gonna have to pay an estate tax and you're like, not a chance.
13:10 Speaker 02 In fact, we're in our tax cut era, which started in 2001 with the first big Bush tax cuts. That year, before the tax cuts went into effect, that year, 2.1% of estates were subject to the estate tax.
13:28 Robin Rauzi? So that's, by the way, only 2.1% of the people who, I mean, these are the people who have died.
13:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:32 Robin Rauzi? I guess that the population as a whole.
13:34 Speaker 02 If 10,000 people died in 2001, just over 200 of them would pay this tax. But instead of kind of relying on that as a source of income and revenue, we have drastically cut the estate tax, tinkered with it incredibly, and now 0.07% of estates pay the estate tax. So if 10,000 people die in 2025, seven of them will pay this tax. Virtually no one pays it right now.
14:04 Robin Rauzi? And it's also not paid on, it's a bit like the marginal income tax. If we say it's a million-dollar estate, you don't pay the estate tax on the million dollars. You pay, you pay the estate tax on the wealth above a million dollars. And of course, now it's not a million dollars, it's 14 million dollars.
14:22 Speaker 02 26 if you're married.
14:23 Robin Rauzi? 26 if you're married, 20.
14:25 Speaker 02 It doubles if you're married.
14:27 Robin Rauzi? Right.
14:27 Speaker 02 And you co-deceased.
14:28 Robin Rauzi? I think it's 13.9 million is what the proposed change is.
14:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it's not like, so if I die with, if the estate tax exemption in 2001 was a million dollars, which it was, and I died with $999,000 in wealth, I didn't pay it. If I died with $1,100 in wealth, I paid the estate tax on the 100, in excess of the limit. So it's not as if, if I died with $1,100, then I had to pay taxes on $1,100. Everything below the exemption amount is not taxed, no matter how much you have above it. You only tax above the exemption. So this is a massive misconception that people have that the US taxes death, which it doesn't. It taxes dynastic wealth.
15:15 Speaker 02 And it has been giving dynastic wealth a tax cut, a really incredible tax cut for about 25 years.
15:24 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
15:24 Speaker 02 The estate tax, which was not levied on that many people, and you had to be really wealthy to pay it, is now levied on hardly anyone, and you have to be uber wealthy to pay it, and they're still fighting it tooth and nail.
15:37 Robin Rauzi? And I'm personally also offended by the idea that you are paying it. You are dead.
15:41 Speaker 02 You are dead. Yeah, you are dead.
15:43 Robin Rauzi? You're not paying anything.
15:44 Speaker 02 Your estate.
15:45 Robin Rauzi? This, this idea of it being double taxation, that you saved this money your whole life, and it was taxed when you earned it, and therefore it's being taxed again. First of all, nuts, because, you know, if you've got that much money and you got it in earned income, maybe, but a lot of people got it in, say, other forms of income, or they inherited themselves.
16:06 Speaker 02 I mean, like, if you want to know who pays the estate tax, it's Jeff Bezos' kids. So that is who bears the brunt of the estate tax. It is very wealthy people's children. The people who inherit the estate at death. So we will talk about Bezos Jr. I don't know, I don't actually know if he has kids or how many he has.
16:25 Robin Rauzi? I don't either.
16:25 Speaker 02 We don't need to look it up. I don't need to look it up. But this is really about Bezos Jr. Because the other thing that most people don't realize about the estate tax is that it's not levied when spouses inherit. You have a spousal exemption. So if Bezos, whatever wife he's on, then dies, and the wife inherits everything, she won't pay the estate tax. It's when it goes down a generation. You have a big spousal exemption. Unless part of the estate goes to one of his former spouses, in which case the exemption doesn't apply. So, two things to make clear. One is that we, I desperately need this to be a safe space, because this is very complicated tax law.
17:09 Speaker 02 And it's been made complicated by the exemptions that have gone into the estate tax and the gift tax over time. And so I, I'm going to do my absolute best to say this as honestly and accurately as I know it, but I, I might get something wrong, because part of the way that the estate tax has been reduced over time is by making it so incredibly complicated that families are able to get around via loopholes.
17:36 Speaker 02 So let's go back.
17:37 Robin Rauzi? Let's go back in time.
17:39 Speaker 02 Way, way back. Um, this is to help explain what the estate tax is and to also make sure that it's none of you are left with a notion that this is some type of like modern liberal invention to tax wealthy people. So you die with money. Okay, bags of gold. You have burlap sacks with gold, with dollar signs on the side that is filled with gold coins. Okay. In 1797, in order to raise money for the Navy, because the US is worried about how, we don't need to get into the relationship with France at the time, but um, it's definitely
18:17 Speaker 02 a part of it. So actually, this is all France's fault. But the first version of a tax on assets at death is a stamp tax. And it's, it's kind of like, almost like a title fee that we have today, that in order for the piece of paper to say, this property, which belonged to this person who died, is now going to this person, you had to pay a flat fee for like the literal stamp that went on it to say, yes, in fact, this property is now transferred. And so you can think of it as like a flat per cap fee, that in order to transfer property, including at death, you had to pay for the stamp, the seal of officialdom to make it recorded in law. And um, yeah, that was later repealed when we didn't need to make, when we didn't
19:02 Speaker 02 need to raise as much money for the Navy. But the first version was a, was a fee. The second kind of version of this, you die and you own assets and the state is going to collect money from it, came in 1862 with the Revenue Act. This was, again, to raise money for a war, this time the Civil War. Civil War. And this one was closer to an inheritance tax, which is, you basically tax all the people who inherit the money. So if I die with a million dollars and it goes to one kid, versus if I die with a million dollars and it goes to 15 kids, the inheritance tax is levied on the receiver. We had that during the Civil War, it was later repealed. An inheritance tax is not the same as the estate tax.
19:44 Speaker 02 The inheritance tax taxes the person, the kid who's getting the money. The estate tax taxes the property in totality as one of this is the total amount of property. No matter how many people are going to inherit it, it's going to be taxed as a, as a complete unit. Right. So we had a version of the estate tax during the Spanish-American War in 1898. And then, once the war ended, we repealed it. So it's always a war tax? I mean, that's when we really needed taxes. We needed extra money. And so the estate tax, the inheritance tax, the stamp tax, they were all ways to raise revenue for war. But in the early 1900s, in the progressive era, income taxes and estate taxes were championed
20:27 Speaker 02 by Teddy Roosevelt in order to counter the gross wealth inequality and income inequality that was coming out of the Gilded Age. And so it's fascinating that the estate tax has this history of being, we need to raise some money pretty quickly. But it shifts as you get to the 20th century where it becomes a corrective measure of like we, these people have too much money and it's going to ruin our country that we have these mergers and mergers and accumulation of, you know, what we would call monopolies, what they would call trust. And the wealth is held in one person, that person wields undue influence and power in our democracy. We need to break up that wealth. So we'll do it when they die.
21:12 Speaker 02 And the income tax was part of that. So Teddy Roosevelt was successful in this effort, even though it did not occur during his administration. The 16th Amendment, which creates federal authority for an income tax, is passed in 1909, which is basically his last week, right at the end of his, at the start of the next administration. And it's ratified a few years later in 1913. And in 1913, we passed the first federal income tax. And in 1916, weirdly enough, motivated in part by World War I, we passed the estate tax.
21:45 Speaker 02 And so this idea that we're raising money for acute needs and the like, the extra pool of money needs to come from the very wealthy, as well as let's break up these big dynasties, it was all there, you know, in the first 10 years of the 20th century.
21:59 Robin Rauzi? And these, you know, the Gilded Age, we're talking about the late 1800s to the early 1900s. This is robber baron time, right? This is the Carnegie's and Mellon's and the people with gigantic estates on Long Island and building railroads across the country who had huge, just huge, huge, huge amounts of wealth.
22:21 Speaker 02 Yes. Astor, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Forbes, Frick, Hearst, Morgan, DuPont, like, these are all families that accumulated wealth in the Gilded Age. And Roosevelt just saw this as corrupting democracy because of the power they had. And a lot of social policy in the 1910s to the 1930s was real racist. And it was real misogynistic, and it was real nativist, and it had all these problems. But it did have some through lines that we would champion, like making our economy and our democracy less dependent on a handful of wealthy people. I mean, that was part of, before we had the Federal Reserve,
23:06 Speaker 02 we had JP Morgan, not like the bank, I mean, the guy.
23:12 Speaker 02 I mean, before the Federal Reserve kind of became enshrined with institutional functions and power, people who would handle panics and scares were like, what does Jay say? Is he into it? Cool. Which is not, that's not good.
23:26 Robin Rauzi? Not how you want it.
23:27 Speaker 02 No, it's not how you want to run it. And this sentiment against the concentration of wealth is what led to the first permanent estate tax in 1916, also World War I money.
23:38 Robin Rauzi? Also World War I money, yeah.
23:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. So breaking up wealth and paying for expensive things, we're going to circle back to that. That's actually, the history there gets kind of like really technical and less interesting, starting in 1916, because then the estate tax enters a basic function. You have an exemption level. Estates have to be above a certain level in value in order to be subject to the tax. And then you have a graduated progressive rate for estates above that level that ranges from some percentage to some maximum percentage that is levied for the tax. Much like, you know, we have marginal taxes based on how much income you earn and you move through brackets. Your estate taxable wealth also move through kind of as something like brackets.
24:23 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
24:24 Speaker 02 And between 1916 and 2025, the majority of the action is raising that level, lowering that level, raising that rate, lowering that rate. A whole bunch of stuff related to making the estate tax harmonize with the gift tax so that you wouldn't like-
24:42 Robin Rauzi? Just give away all your money so it's before you die, right? Yeah.
24:47 Speaker 02 Yep, left hand, right hand. I'm gonna give my kids $10 million, but if I wait, I hold on to it till I die, they pay a tax. No, thank you. Eventually, we caught up to them. Making exemptions for spouses, coming up with an exemption for farms and businesses. That's the majority of the action. And then in 2001, we enter this new era of basically gutting the estate tax through several means. One of which is raising the exemption so that for an individual, it's $14 million. Another one is to lower the rates.
25:22 Robin Rauzi? And those all happen over time. They didn't happen in 2001.
25:25 Speaker 02 They happened over time. 2001 was the-
25:28 Robin Rauzi? The beginning of this.
25:29 Speaker 02 It is the craziest legislation because actually in 2001, the estate tax went from $1 million to $3 million over several years. And then in 2010, it was supposed to be completely eradicated. So we, Congress set up basically a massive incentive for people to murder their parents in 2010 because it would have saved you a bunch of money in taxes. And so the joke was like, we're approaching Throw Mama From the Train year. Because we've just incentivized killing people in order to make money off of them. But they corrected it before we actually got to 2010. So that didn't happen. It would have led to a lot of great movies, I think, about the pressure to kill parents in order to inherit money. But yeah, they started messing with it in 2001.
26:11 Speaker 02 And this 2010 gap year, they had to go back and fix. In 2012, they're like, okay, okay, we're fixing this. We're fixing this. Five million dollars, 40% max rate. We're done. And then in 2017, Republicans were like, are we done? Let's make it like three times more than that. And they did.
26:32 Robin Rauzi? I just want to pause one second, which is, we should be clear that that big jump was the highly unpopular 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act that passed in the beginning of the first Trump administration. And it wasn't popular at the time. It is set to expire. And it is essentially being put on permanent life support, potentially through the current budget reconciliation.
26:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, because here's the thing about cutting taxes. It's really expensive, really, really expensive. So what they do is they have 10 years of tax policy that they can dictate. So they cut taxes in the first seven years. And then in the last three, they raise them again. So what we're doing right now, they've done this before. What we're doing right now is we're basically saying the $2 trillion cost of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act was in part a ruse because really it was $2 trillion for the first seven years, paid for by additional revenue in the last three, but we're not gonna
27:30 Robin Rauzi? We're not gonna do those in the last three years.
27:32 Speaker 02 They're fighting to prevent that from happening. They're fighting to prevent the temporary tax cuts that they passed in 2017 from going away. Even like really good estimates of like, well, what happens if the estate tax does go back to $5 million? Are we all gonna have to pay it? No.
27:47 Robin Rauzi? No.
27:48 Speaker 02 Hold on, real quick. This is just a public service announcement. If you think you have enough money to pay the estate tax and you're listening to this show, you need to give us money because you are of the 0.1, like 0.2% wealthiest people in America. And if you're free riding on this show, no, sir. I'm not going to call out any listener, but if you're like, I had to pay the estate tax, brother, you need to pass that on. Because even if the exemption goes back to 5 million, it will be 0.2% of estates that pay it. So we've gone from 10,000 people dying a year
28:29 Speaker 02 and 200 pay it, to 7, to like 20. So if you think you're part of that 20, share the wealth, brother. This show. That's a quick PSA. Also, if I had my druthers, it'd be a lot more than 20.
28:45 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
28:47 Speaker 02 But that is what's being debated now. And that is the kind of, one of the reasons why the estate tax has been so unpredictable. And while you have so many people doing wealth planning and asset management, is that half of Americans are convinced that they'll have to pay it, and that Congress will eventually raise it or lower it. But at least in the latter case, like, they're not wrong. Congress will mess with this tax. Because they've done it so many times. I mean, this tax has not been consistently applied over the past 24 years. The exemption, the amount being paid, has changed so much over the past 20 years. You have all these people convinced that it's going to jump and they'll have to pay it. I think a lot of people think they're wealthier than they are.
29:25 Robin Rauzi? I think a lot of people also make these plans when they're at their peak of wealth, that they have saved throughout their careers. And they're not really thinking about how much wealth they're going to have. The intention of saving that money is that it will support you through your retirement. And that, you know, you don't have to save every dime. But people feel very, very, very strongly about leaving money to their children. And that people make all sorts of choices and sacrifices, and sometimes bad choices about their own care, or their own living circumstances, because they just feel that they need to leave something to their children.
30:05 Speaker 02 You know, it's funny because in the classic debate over the estate tax, that never comes up. I mean, what you hear is, why do we have the estate tax? Well, we need to break up wealth, raise some money, and if possible, encourage charitable bequest. So like, if you give your money away to a charity, it is not taxed at the same rate or level as the estate tax. So giving your money to a kid versus giving your money to a charity. So having an estate tax, like, let's bust up some dynasties. I mean, not bust them, I mean, just like make them slightly less-
30:37 Robin Rauzi? Dent them.
30:37 Speaker 02 Dent them. We are denting some dynasties. So let's dent a dynasty, get some money, and maybe encourage charitable giving of the super wealthy to give their wealth away. Those are the reasons for it. The reasons against it have often been that if you tax leftover wealth and property, I mean, most people have a very simple relationship with wealth and assets. They start with nothing, they accumulate wealth and assets and hit their peak wealth on the day they retire, and they dis-save, is what we call it, but they basically consume all those assets and property until they die. And some people will reach zero before they die, and some people won't.
31:19 Speaker 02 And some of them will end up with excess wealth, of wealth they didn't consume during their lifetime. And for the vast majority of people, it's not that much money. You don't die with as much wealth as you think you're going to die with because you'd probably be living on it a lot longer than you expect.
31:34 Robin Rauzi? Right.
31:34 Speaker 02 So then, that money is inherited and passed down. And the wealth, the estate tax is just a way to interrupt that process for people for whom they're basically generating wealth to such a degree that they know it will be passed down, and they are the richest 1%. Or 0.2% in this case, possibly 2% in the 2001 version of the world. Which I, I've brought this up before of like, you know, okay.
32:04 Speaker 02 I wasn't gonna say it.
32:07 Robin Rauzi? Now you're gonna.
32:08 Speaker 02 I wasn't gonna bring it up. This was actually a lot of what I talked about when I testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, which was in front of Congress, which if you're doing that drinking game, go on ahead and tip it back.
32:23 Speaker 02 But one thing I said in response to a question was, you know, we had estate taxes in 2000 and we still had an economy and we still had wealthy people and we were fine. And this tax is not that disruptive.
32:37 Robin Rauzi? You know, it's funny, I was thinking, as I was reading about the proposals, and also we had recently recorded the work requirements. And you had said in the course of that conversation, you know, if I gave you $300,000, you'd probably work less. And I thought, yeah, if you gave me, you know, half of a $14 million estate, you can be sure I'd work less.
32:58 Speaker 02 Well, that's, so this is what's crazy. This is what's crazy, is that the argument for the estate, for like, of why we shouldn't have an estate tax, is that it would discourage capital accumulation amongst the person who would die.
33:09 Robin Rauzi? Exactly, discourage people.
33:10 Speaker 02 But like, it absolutely discourages capital and labor force amongst the kids. So it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't have a tax that discourages people from creating wealth, even though that wealth will discourage capital and labor for the people who inherit it. We're not talking about them.
33:28 Robin Rauzi? I tend not to ever read the comments on news articles because they just generally make me mad. But I did on the estate tax article, and it was full of all of these misconceptions that we've talked about. And also that assertion, like, the estate tax disincentivizes savings. And I was like, well, first of all, you should be saving because you need to pay for your retirement. Like, but yeah, but how many kids do you have? And how many, how much, how much work do you think they're gonna do after they inherit all this?
33:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, rich, people who inherit money do not accumulate to some level of capital as people who don't. And they don't work as much. I mean, this is probably the greatest coup of the people who are against the estate tax and lobby against it, is that they make it about the person dying, even though the tax is really about these grubby little kids who will inherit it. Like, you know, you, you know, there's a reason why they're not gonna put Bezos Jr. up on a poster board of like, please help him. Like, he can't pay 40% on all value of his estates worth above 26 million. Like, don't let him.
34:28 Speaker 02 Don't let him suffer.
34:30 Robin Rauzi? We should be clear that we don't know anything about Jeff.
34:32 Speaker 02 We don't know anything, we don't know anything about it. But I mean, dynastic wealth in the US exists. And I want to tell you right now, you've never earned a dollar of wage income that has avoided taxes. I promise you, you have never had a job. It doesn't matter if you're self-employed, if you run your own business, if you, you know, work at a cafe, if you work at a law firm, if you've earned money in the labor market, we have taxed it and you've never gotten out of it. But if you accumulate capital to an incredible degree and hand it down to your children, they are really good at getting out of it.
35:05 Robin Rauzi? So here's a question then, even if we were to restore the estate tax, lower the exemption level, it would still hit a very small number of people. Do we have any sense of how much revenue we're leaving on the table? By not having a, even say, you know, not at the 2001 levels, but maybe, you know, if the 2001 levels had been, I don't know, indexed to inflation or something.
35:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:29 Robin Rauzi? Is this, is this a lot of money we're talking about? We're talking?
35:32 Speaker 02 So right now, individual income taxes in the current fiscal year will raise about 1.8 trillion dollars.
35:44 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
35:44 Speaker 02 Okay.
35:45 Robin Rauzi? 1.8 trillion in income taxes.
35:47 Speaker 02 We're going to get about 20 billion from estates. It's 1% of total government revenue.
35:52 Robin Rauzi? And that's at the, and that's at the high, the high exemption level?
35:56 Speaker 02 Yes, that's at the ridiculous exemption level.
35:59 Robin Rauzi? It could be more than 1%. It could be.
36:02 Speaker 02 I think historically it's been like 2 to 3%
36:08 Speaker 02 or bounced around between 1 and 3.
36:10 Robin Rauzi? Enough to pay for a childcare program.
36:12 Speaker 02 Yes, so I, so why do I know anything about the estate tax? Now, I'm not the only person who has thought of this. There are other people who have separately come to this proposal is that over the last 45 years, several policy proposals have emerged that dedicate the estate tax to a specific purpose.
36:30 Robin Rauzi? Like make it more popular by saying?
36:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, basically make it into a trust fund of like the estate tax goes into a trust fund and that trust fund is dedicated to a specific type of spending.
36:40 Robin Rauzi? Sure.
36:41 Speaker 02 The first big proposal was to put it to social security. And the idea was, look, if you die with a ton of assets and wealth, a portion of that is going to go to very old people who have nothing. And the idea was that the estate tax would be directed to. Very poor elderly people as a way to maintain a minimum benefit and help social security.
37:01 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
37:02 Speaker 02 I thought that that was a great idea, but that it should go to children. And so I've, I've proposed before in like columns and on my Substack. And I've talked about this in various interviews, that the estate tax should be put at a level to sufficiently fund a children's trust fund. And that's spending on things like childcare, a child basically cash allowance, which we did have through the expanded child tax credit, but it doesn't have to be an expanded child tax credit. That we would pay for all of this through an estate tax. The problem with that proposal is that you could cover childcare easy.
37:44 Speaker 02 You could cover a child allowance, probably, but you wouldn't be able to put much else in there. And the worry would be that if children had their own trust fund, it wouldn't cover everything, but it would then like put pressure to like cut Medicaid or like cut school spending.
38:00 Robin Rauzi? Pay stubs or yeah.
38:01 Speaker 02 But if it were, if, if, if the estate tax revenue, so $20 billion a year is not enough. But it's also at a ridiculously low level. If it was moved to even 10 times what it is now, which to be clear is still 0.7% of people who die, that would be enough to fund childcare, part of the child allowance. If you put it at like 2%, which is what it was in 2001, you could probably cover most of this. I think the problem with the estate tax is that it's very hard to come to a reasonable number of what it should be.
38:35 Robin Rauzi? Hmm. You mean, what level of the exemption should be or the percentage of, of wealthy Americans who should pay it?
38:42 Speaker 02 Either. So I philosophically, for me, the most defensible position is that the estate tax exemption should be zero and the rate should be 100. Like we should not have any, I like, there is a, there is a really strong part of me. It's not an economist. This is just like pure blood American. I love democracy and I don't like inherited wealth, so we shouldn't have it.
39:06 Speaker 02 Just you, you die with money. Too bad. It goes to poor kids. You've lost. Like I, there's some part of me that's like, this, this makes the most sense and it makes, it adheres the most to what would make a democracy healthy is to not have. Even a degree of inherited wealth, but it's not, not only is that not feasible.
39:25 Robin Rauzi? That's not likely.
39:26 Speaker 02 Not feasible, it's not popular, and on some levels, it's not fair.
39:31 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
39:32 Speaker 02 I mean, if your dad dies at 40, you should be able to inherit your parents' house.
39:38 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
39:38 Speaker 02 Right? Because you're not, you're not the Bezos junior out there in the world, never having to have a job. So I think philosophically, I come to an estate tax that I know isn't feasible or fair, but it does seem to, it appeals to like the very American part of me of like, I don't like rich kids and I don't like that they get ahead. If you want inherited wealth, go become a duke of something in England. I don't care. This is America. We don't have an aristocracy, and if we do, we should tax it out of existence. You can go become a landed gentry and like sandwich or whatever goofy part of England the, the lot of Americans buy into an aristocratic landed gentry line. But that said, that proposal won't work.
40:22 Speaker 02 Just want to get that out of my system.
40:23 Robin Rauzi? Putting, putting that aside.
40:24 Speaker 02 Putting that very reasonable thing aside. Yeah, I mean, I think the estate tax has to be landed on either in terms of, I mean, where an economist would say is like Congress is like five billion. No, 10. No, five. All right, seven. So that's one way to do it. The other way to do it would be to come up with some type of, look at the distribution of wealth upon death and come up with, you know, basically a level that you would like to see covered by the tax, and that will lead you to an exemption level. Like, I think the estate tax is something only the top 5% of estates should pay versus the top 2% versus the top 1%. That's one way is like you pull out the distribution of wealth at
41:06 Speaker 02 death and you, you decide like, this is the number of people I want to hit, and therefore it's a just an exemption level versus. You have a really, really low exemption level with a really graduated tax.
41:21 Robin Rauzi? Which some people, yeah, which some people have suggested.
41:23 Speaker 02 Basically, yeah, like it starts at a million, but at a million, it's like 5%. This is called broadening the base, where you would have like 10% of estates might pay the tax, but the effective rate would be like 3 or 4% because most wealth isn't that high. And so it would, it would hit more estates, but it would hit at a lower rate. And then it would graduate up so that you would have basically fewer fights about this big money cutoff exemption, because once you say 5 million, you basically activated a very powerful constituency. Right, well, make it 10, because I've got 6. You know, like you're basically, you're telegraphing to the 1% of incredibly wealthy,
42:05 Speaker 02 powerful people in the US that there's a tax that applies almost exclusively to them that we are passing. And that one way to like strip them of their political power is to make the tax much, much broader.
42:18 Robin Rauzi? Right.
42:18 Speaker 02 So that you, you know, it's like, look, it's
42:20 Robin Rauzi? But more graduated, yeah.
42:21 Speaker 02 It's like, it's everybody who dies with more than a half a million dollars. Like you need to like, let, like, you're paying a higher rate, but like a bunch of people have to pay this. You need to let this go. So there's, there's, those are two strategies.
42:35 Speaker 02 I mean, honestly, I'd encourage a lot of experimentation in this. Anything would be better than the 0.07% of payers we have now, because I think in some ways we've come back on so many aspects of our economy to the same era that Roosevelt was in. Roosevelt won of we have incredible inequality. We have incredible concentration of business power, market power, and the income and wealth behind it.
43:00 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
43:00 Speaker 02 Not to mention, we need money. And we have to get money. And the only way to do it is through higher taxes. So who do you want to tax more? We had the estate tax at $1 million in 2000, and everybody was okay. We still had the accumulation of capital income, the purchasing of assets, the inheriting of assets. We had labor force participation. We had earnings. Y'all, we were all
43:25 Robin Rauzi? We had businesses we had started.
43:26 Speaker 02 We still had businesses. We had businesses that were inherited. We had farms, like we were fine. So I think we could go back to that level. And if we went back to the 2001 level and we dedicated it to children, I think philosophically that sits better with me because it's basically saying, "Look, you die with a lot of money. Your kids are going to have an incredible advantage, but they're not going to, we're going to like dent just a little bit to give kids who don't have rich parents Yeah. a little bit more of a leg up. I think that that's a good outcome. I completely understand and respect just how scary the economy is for a lot of people. And if you were like, "Look, I need to build extra wealth and I need to make sure I hand something down
44:08 Speaker 02 because the life that I was able to build for myself, my children can't build." Yeah. And if it's going to be a cutthroat world where there aren't pathways to the middle class, where we don't have an easy avenue to success, me and mine are going to be okay. And I will make sure of it and I will guarantee it. And I can see that. And I can also see that for parents, the feeling that you have to buy success for your children feels like a natural reaction to how tenuous it is in your own life. Yeah. And I, I get- And that's where we, and that's where we are. And that's where we are. We are at a moment of both incredible vulnerability amongst people, an incredible concentration of wealth. And I think people identify more with the need to protect
44:49 Speaker 02 and to preserve and to defend whatever wealth we have, which makes them identify more with the payers of the estate tax as opposed to the beneficiaries. But I promise you, Yeah. if you were listening, you are a beneficiary of some wealthy, wealthy people getting a tiny bit of dent on what they inherit, like for your tax purposes. Because the estate tax, the income tax and the federal government are on net progressive. You, you want the federal government to have more money. You do not want Bezos Jr. to have more money. Because you are better off when the government has more money to spend on social programs like Medicaid, like school lunch. Yeah. So- I can't wait for us to get an email from Bezos Jr. If Bezos Jr. gets me an email, I'll be like, "Yo."
45:35 Speaker 02 Hand over some of the cash. I'm sorry you were offended. I can make it up to you in charm, but you need to give us money.
45:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I, I mean, so yes, like the estate tax, the federal government uses the estate tax. Like it's always been just like, well, that's a really easy source of revenue that shouldn't harm that many people that aren't that sympathetic.
45:56 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
45:57 Speaker 02 And it's a way to break up wealth, but I think it has become morphed by the economic insecurity that so many people feel. And they don't see it as the solution that will benefit them. And that says more about the rest of the economy than it does about wealthy people. And y'all, I gotta tell you, it is really good for the economy to have a lot of people trying to aggressively build wealth. And it's not so good to have a lot of people who have it and aren't comfortable.
46:24 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, or who, yeah, who just, or who inherited and are comfortable.
46:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, you want 10,000 people building wealth, not 10,000 people inheriting it.
46:33 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
46:34 Speaker 02 I mean, the idea that the estate tax would somehow discourage wealth creation. This is gonna be a gut check laughable to me, but
46:45 Speaker 02 but the, but inheriting money discouraging wealth creation, yes, that makes sense.
46:50 Robin Rauzi? Hundred percent.
46:50 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. And so even, so this is one of those like, look, every policy has a trade off. There's a cost to everything. So estate tax, we've got masses of wealth. Someone dies. It is possible. And you can, if it's possible, we have 300 million people in this economy and more.
47:08 Robin Rauzi? If this is possible, it'll happen.
47:10 Speaker 02 We have basically the infinite set. So there is someone out there that's like, oh, man, estate tax is going up. Maybe I won't invest in that property. What's the point? He's out there. But then there are also people who are like, well, we're not gonna pay any taxes on dad's house. So like when he dies, we'll basically get everything. So I don't need to take this extra job or I can like borrow my way to different assets because I have the ultimate golden parachute, which is inheriting money from rich people. I'm about to get it. Like that, that will also morph behavior. And then you have the trade off of the government having more or less money from people. So you just, yeah, there could be, there, there are absolutely gonna be bad consequences. Yeah, there's absolutely gonna be bad consequences and I don't care about them.
47:55 Speaker 02 Give me this money and let me invest it in children. In this scenario, I'm the federal government. But like, I'm willing to risk, like, far tip of the distribution morphs to wealth accumulation for the top even 5% wealthy people in the United States. The estate tax messes with how they build wealth. Totally willing to take, totally willing to take it.
48:15 Robin Rauzi? Wait, why would the estate tax morph how the uber wealthy people?
48:19 Speaker 02 So the accusation is basically if you have too high of an estate tax, people won't-
48:23 Robin Rauzi? Oh, they'll stop earning.
48:25 Speaker 02 They won't accumulate as much, they won't accumulate as much wealth.
48:29 Robin Rauzi? Look.
48:29 Speaker 02 That is the argument.
48:31 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, okay. You ever met a rich person who's like, you know, God-
48:35 Speaker 02 I could stop here.
48:37 Robin Rauzi? Just wish that I could not accumulate so much wealth.
48:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, that's the economic argument. The argument that like, I shouldn't give the government my taxes when I die. That doesn't have any economic basis. The government will do much better than your kids will. Yeah, so that's, I mean, I'm bringing up the economic argument for the estate tax, which could morph wealth distribution at the top 5%. Either amongst the, you know, accumulator of wealth, or, you know, either amongst Bezos or Bezos Jr., right? Bezos and Bezos Jr. were going to act and have different levels of wealth and treat it differently if the estate tax is high. And there could be consequences there, like even less wealth produced in the economy. Totally fine with them having a different wealth accumulation pattern if in exchange we get to have universal early childhood, universal cash allowance for children, universal
49:24 Speaker 02 school meals, and we get to put our thumb on the scale for all those other kids who aren't Bezos Jr. I'm totally willing to take every disadvantage that comes from the lack of accumulated wealth at the top 5%. I'll take it to invest in kids, 100%.
49:41 Robin Rauzi? Excellent, excellent. I could talk about taxes all day. I like have, you know, many, many more things that I would bring up, but if we had a four-hour podcast, it would be me talking about this to people about taxes.
49:51 Speaker 02 And for you, for you people out there who need optimism, you should know that I have publicly talked about dedicating the estate tax revenue to a children's trust fund in order to pay for things like childcare. I have had three members of Congress staff reach out to me to talk to them about this.
50:07 Robin Rauzi? So it's, this is not crazy, just, well, it is, it's pie in the sky, but it's not totally crazy.
50:11 Speaker 02 No, it feels like a reach, given how awful economic and social policy has been for the past 25 years. But like, there are people in power who want to do this, and I have talked to them, and I've briefed them. Even amongst the most powerful circles, people like this. They want to do something like this. They want to make a dent in wealth accumulation and inequality. They want to do more for children, and this idea has salience. There's an appetite for the same type of progressive, early 1900s advances that we made to do them again. But they take a long time. Don't lose faith.
50:44 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. All right. Time for the last couple of sections of our show. First up, executive orders.
50:52 Speaker 02 Since Robin is the one that just drove nearly 1,500 miles and had a lot of time to stew about what's wrong with the world and driving, what is your executive order?
51:03 Robin Rauzi? Mine is that we need more rest stops on US 101.
51:08 Robin Rauzi? I'm just going to say, the US 101 goes from basically the Mexican border to the Canadian border. But in California, it is one of the main roads between Los Angeles and San Francisco. That is 420 miles. There are currently two rest stops and one of them's closed. Come on, we can do better.
51:29 Speaker 02 Sorry, I was like, okay, rest stops, got it, Robin. I wasn't rolling my eyes, but like, wow, that's really bad.
51:37 Robin Rauzi? That's really bad.
51:40 Speaker 02 That is really bad. Okay, so this one is not that creative. Maybe my executive order...
51:47 Robin Rauzi? Don't say yourself short.
51:49 Speaker 02 Maybe my executive order would be to create a children's trust fund out of the revenue collected from a more robust estate tax. And that if I could really... It's funny, if there was like, one policy I could do, like just one, I think I would pick estate tax dedicated to children investments. Because we so under-invest in children, and the estate tax has a stupidly large constituency, and it shouldn't have as large of a constituency in advocacy base as it does. And I just want to tilt the power towards kids. So that's, that's, but that's like, that's actually something that Congress would need to do, and it's not as silly as our regular executive orders. So I have a, my backup executive
52:29 Speaker 02 order was that all lawn equipment in the US has to be electric within five years.
52:35 Robin Rauzi? This is, yeah, building on your
52:37 Speaker 02 Building on my, my ban of leaf blowers. I talked to someone about this, and they're like, you know, that's not really fair. And there are electric leaf blowers that are pretty quiet. So no gas powered lawn.
52:47 Robin Rauzi? They are. They still blow crap into my yard from my neighbor's house, but that's okay. It is better. They are quieter.
52:52 Speaker 02 They are quieter. So I would say, um, all lawn equipment needs to be electric or GOAT. That is my executive order.
53:00 Robin Rauzi? Okay. I'm pro GOAT. As it has been so clear in this episode, we do not have any financial sponsors for this show just yet. So what's keeping us going is, um, the nice emails and reviews we get from you and our spiritual sponsors. We actually do have a spiritual sponsor who gave us a donation, Gina in Hudson, New York. Thank you so much for becoming a spiritual sponsor this week. And my personal spiritual sponsor is friends who let you crash at their house, specifically when you're 200 miles from Los Angeles, and there's been no rest area for a long time. No, seriously. To my friends who, who always let us stay with them. Thank you so much. Miss you guys a lot.
53:41 Speaker 02 Amazing. I, I have a cousin spiritual sponsor, which is that my spiritual sponsor are people you know who have pools.
53:50 Robin Rauzi? Also similar, spare bedrooms, pools.
53:54 Speaker 02 So important to develop a diverse friend base that includes the person with the pool. Cause then you don't have to have one. Same with, this is a throwback to a very early spiritual sponsor, people who own a truck.
54:06 Robin Rauzi? Yes.
54:07 Speaker 02 Who will let you use the truck when you move. So you need like, you like, you move to a city, you need to know someone who's a lawyer, you need to know someone who's a doctor, you know, someone with a pool, someone with a truck, somewhere to crash around the outskirts of the city when a road trip is after you dry. But people with a pool, especially in a hot place like Houston.
54:23 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I bet.
54:24 Speaker 02 You are my spiritual sponsor. And I'm, I'm referring specifically to the person's pool who I've gone to a lot, even in my short time here. And I'm actually heading there immediately after we wrap.
54:35 Robin Rauzi? [laughing]
54:36 Speaker 02 And hopefully if she's listening, she knows who she is. Her pool and her children's kindness in sharing their pool with my kids, that is my spiritual sponsor.
54:53 Robin Rauzi? As always, we like to thank Sophie and Andy, without whom we could not, well, we can't barely do anything as it is.
55:05 Speaker 02 We should ask Johnny5 to leave another review. Only this time tell us like how much we need to call out what Andy and Sophie do. We cannot appreciate you enough in all that you do, and we snap them out.
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