On Bailouts, Being "Too Big to Fail," and Little Luxuries

Summary

Summary of "On Bailouts, Being 'Too Big to Fail,' and Little Luxuries" - The Money with Katie Show

Release Date: April 9, 2025
Hosts: Katie Gatti Tossan & Hannah Velez
Show: The Money with Katie Show by Morning Brew

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Introduction to Rich Girl Roundup

In this episode titled "On Bailouts, Being 'Too Big to Fail,' and Little Luxuries," hosts Katie Gatti Tossan and Hannah Velez delve into a comprehensive discussion on economic policies, wealth distribution, and the nuanced interplay between capitalism and social welfare. Central to their conversation is the concept of social wealth funds, the challenges of government bailouts, and how small luxuries fit into broader economic narratives.

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Listener Feedback and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

The episode opens with Katie addressing a listener review from Matt Van S., who advocates for introducing both proponents and critics of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to provide a balanced perspective.

Matt Van S. [02:09]: "Loving the modern monetary theory intro on Money with Katie would be great to hear both sides."

Katie agrees, emphasizing the importance of having experts from both sides to debate such abstract concepts effectively.

Katie Gatti Tossan [02:29]: "That's actually like exactly how I would want to cover a topic like that one... you need wonks on both sides of the table for that one."

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Sovereign Wealth Funds and Social Wealth Funds

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around listener Janice's inquiry into the feasibility of implementing a social wealth fund in the U.S., drawing comparisons with Nordic sovereign wealth funds.

Janice [12:37]: "Would the success of these other sovereign wealth funds rely on the US economy continuing as it does, with low taxes on capital and so on?"

Katie and Hannah explore the sustainability of the current economic model and debate whether shifting ownership structures could foster more equitable corporate behavior, particularly in environmental and labor practices.

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Concerns About "Too Big to Fail"

Listener Kayla raises concerns about the government's ongoing bailouts of large industries deemed "Too Big to Fail," questioning whether a social wealth fund would exacerbate these issues.

Kayla [14:25]: "Is there any evidence that holding an invested wealth fund increases the incentive to support certain businesses and industries beyond what we already see?"

Katie contemplates whether redistributing ownership could mitigate the concentration of economic power and reduce the necessity for future bailouts.

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Universal Basic Income (UBI) vs. Universal Basic Services

Hannah introduces a pertinent question from Kayla regarding the potential drawbacks of Universal Basic Income (UBI) if essential services like healthcare remain privatized.

Kayla [19:26]: "Without moving necessities out of private control, such as health care, it can actually serve as an accelerated wealth transfer from citizens to private companies."

Katie responds by distinguishing between cash transfers and comprehensive supply-side reforms, advocating for Universal Basic Services to ensure that UBI doesn't inadvertently strengthen private monopolies.

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Alaska Permanent Fund as a Case Study

The discussion shifts to Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) as a practical example of a social wealth fund within the U.S. context.

Olivia [23:17]: "Generally, we love the pfd, but if giving it up meant a more robust education or healthcare system, I'd do it."

Katie highlights feedback explaining Alaska's unique position, noting its abundant natural resources and small population, which limit the fund's scalability and applicability to other states.

Katie Gatti Tossan [26:49]: "It gets us thinking differently. And it's kind of like, oh yeah, it's already happening in the U.S."

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Race and Wealth Inequality

Listener Shannon critiques the episode for not adequately addressing the role of racism and racial inequity in wealth distribution within the U.S.

Shannon [70:18]: "The wealth distribution should aim to benefit the most disenfranchised among us..."

Katie and Hannah acknowledge the intersectionality of race and economics, referencing works like Dorothy Brown's The Whiteness of Wealth to inform future discussions on systemic racism in wealth policies.

Katie Gatti Tossan [71:28]: "Shannon, you're spot on and I think we should do a bigger episode about this."

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Fashion, Class, and Economics

An insightful email from listener Amy connects the dots between fashion, class politics, and economic accessibility, emphasizing how aesthetics reinforce class divisions.

Amy [75:08]: "Access to apparel fabric yardage is becoming more challenging... adds more fuel to the cycle of wealth maintaining control of the aesthetics of status."

Katie and Hannah reflect on how the commodification of aesthetics perpetuates class divisions, drawing parallels between fashion and interior design as mechanisms that signal and reinforce social status.

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Aesthetics and Class Politics

Meredith's poetic feedback underscores the powerful role of interior design in class manifestation, likening it to fashion in its capacity to convey identity and political stance.

Meredith [81:35]: "Interior design, like fashion, is a visual language of class. It is art, it is identity, and it is political."

Katie and Hannah discuss the implications of high-end design being accessible only to the wealthy, exploring how aesthetics influence perceptions of class and contribute to economic stratification.

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Conclusion and Future Topics

The episode wraps up with reflections on systemic poverty and the importance of targeted interventions. Listener Debbie critiques Katie's approach, prompting a deeper conversation about effective social programs and the balance between aid and regulation.

Katie and Hannah tease upcoming topics, including a deep dive into tariffs, signaling their commitment to continuously exploring complex economic issues in future episodes.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Katie Gatti Tossan [02:29]: "That's actually like exactly how I would want to cover a topic like that one... you need wonks on both sides of the table for that one."

• Janice [12:37]: "Would the success of these other sovereign wealth funds rely on the US economy continuing as it does, with low taxes on capital and so on?"

• Kayla [14:25]: "Is there any evidence that holding an invested wealth fund increases the incentive to support certain businesses and industries beyond what we already see?"

• Kayla [19:26]: "Without moving necessities out of private control, such as health care, it can actually serve as an accelerated wealth transfer from citizens to private companies."

• Olivia [23:17]: "Generally, we love the pfd, but if giving it up meant a more robust education or healthcare system, I'd do it."

• Shannon [70:18]: "The wealth distribution should aim to benefit the most disenfranchised among us..."

• Amy [75:08]: "Access to apparel fabric yardage is becoming more challenging... adds more fuel to the cycle of wealth maintaining control of the aesthetics of status."

• Meredith [81:35]: "Interior design, like fashion, is a visual language of class. It is art, it is identity, and it is political."

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Key Insights and Conclusions

1. Balanced Perspectives Are Crucial: Addressing complex economic theories like MMT requires input from both proponents and critics to foster a comprehensive understanding.

2. Feasibility of Social Wealth Funds: While models like Alaska's PFD offer valuable insights, their unique conditions limit their direct applicability to broader states without significant adjustments.

3. Imperatives of Regulation: Transitioning to social wealth funds or enhancing UBI necessitates robust regulatory frameworks to prevent unintended wealth transfers to private monopolies.

4. Intersection of Race and Economics: Systemic racism plays a pivotal role in wealth distribution, necessitating targeted policies to address historical inequities and promote genuine economic parity.

5. Aesthetics as Economic Indicators: Fashion and interior design serve as visual representations of class, reinforcing social hierarchies and influencing economic opportunities.

6. Need for Targeted Interventions: Effective social programs should focus on lifting individuals out of poverty without inadvertently entrenching systemic issues, emphasizing mutual benefit and sustainable economic support.

7. Future Discussions: The hosts highlight the importance of continuing to explore underrepresented facets of economic policies, such as the interplay between racism and wealth distribution, and the role of aesthetics in class politics.

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This episode of The Money with Katie Show offers a deep exploration of the intricacies surrounding government bailouts, the potential of social wealth funds, and the subtle yet significant ways in which aesthetics intersect with economic and class structures. Through engaging listener feedback and thoughtful discourse, Katie and Hannah encourage a nuanced understanding of how economic policies can shape and be shaped by cultural and political forces.

Transcript

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card is a no fee credit card that gives you daily cash back every day. That's 3% back at Apple and 2% back on every purchase made with Apple Card using Apple Pay. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 18.24% to 28.49% based on creditworthiness rates as of January 1, 2025. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com I'm starting to think to. More I'm starting to think Generally we.

[Hannah]

Love the pfd, but if it meant giving, if it meant if it oh my God. Generally we love the pfd, but if.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

If a lot of jobs are replaced by artificial is if a lot of jobs are replaced by artificial I will.

[Hannah]

Always need a high quality, great fitting pair of jeans or I will always need a great quality, great pudding. Oh my God. That's hard to say Rich Girl Roundup.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Welcome back to another Rich Girl Roundup on the Money with Katie show, where today we are going to reveal how smart our listeners are who critically engage with this material at a level that makes me a little intellectually uncomfortable, to be honest. I am, of course, Katie Gatti toss in and every few episodes my executive producer Hannah and I discuss all of your feedback, your questions, any new considerations that come up that weren't part of the original episode, and sometimes the mean stuff you send us if it's funny and I'm in a good enough mood. Hannah, are you ready to go?

[Hannah]

I sure am. But before we do, we have some major life changes coming up. So Katie, it is your last week as a California resident. How are you feeling?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Stressed, thanks for asking.

[Hannah]

Oh good. Same. But I also hear that we have a surprise today.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yes, you will have to stay tuned for that. It's probably going to happen about halfway through the episode, but it's a good one.

[Hannah]

Yeah, I can't wait. But first, let's dive into some recent reviews. First, Matt Van S said loving the modern monetary theory intro on Money with Katie would be great to hear both sides. Maybe Stephanie kelton to unpack MMT's case paired with someone like Lynn Alden to question it from a grounded finance angle could make for a balanced eye chat.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Completely agree. That's actually like exactly how I would want to cover a topic like that one because I don't know enough about it to debate it adequately. And it is so abstract that I do think you need wonks on both sides of the table for that one. Someone else, Thor Tyler, brought up government debt in the comments of one of our episodes. So I'm like, maybe this is kind of percolating. They basically said, yeah, we can't talk about social wealth funds until we figured out the deficit. So I think this is exactly what that conversation would kind of work to address.

[Hannah]

Then we heard from Emerald Blue 88 who said, Great info with snark, which I snorted to read. They also asked about your experience as a victim of fraud. We did an episode back in November 2023 on this.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Good stuff.

[Hannah]

I'll include it in the show notes. But you can hear some great voiceover acting from me, which I mean to say is very bad, as well as what went down. So if you're curious about how Katie almost got scammed out of 15.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Not almost did get scammed, was it 15. It was $8,000.

[Hannah]

$8,000. And then we had a one star review titled Pretentious where they wrote, quote, the host speaks about every topic like someone who has spent their entire life in academia and end quote. And I gotta say, give us at least three stars for that.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, dude. Usually the mean reviews kind of hit on some like, niche personal insecurity of mine that then like really bothers me for the next three weeks. But honestly, like this one just kind of made me feel smug because. Because I'm like, this really backfired guy because I have a bachelor's degree from a state school in communications and so I am literally fighting for my fucking life making sense of economic data for this show. You would not believe how often that I feel too dumb to be doing this job. The criticism that I sound too educated. I'm like, tucks hair behind ear. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Hannah]

If you feel dumb, you can only imagine how I feel. Then we had someone who emailed us and said, quote, social wealth fund, wealth inequality. I think it's time we part ways.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

All right, bet. My bet here is that this person is either 70 years old and has a net worth of $10 million and is like, I don't want to hear, or it's like a 23 year old Logan Paul acolyte with $12 and a Bitcoin wallet who is like, no man. My YouTube career is gonna. I'm actually totally gonna be fine. My generation's malaise is not something that I'm gonna have to face. So no in between, I don't know what, what's going on there.

[Hannah]

Well I'm actually 99 sure that it's the former because like all angry men who email us, they included their full government name and work email so they are definitely the 70 year old.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Was it sent from a Galaxy tab?

[Hannah]

It was not. I believe it was sent from a Hotmail account. To end on a to end on a nice note because those are kind of brutal. We got a five star from MBOT who said pretty new here and have listened to a handful of episodes. I love the show and want to be friends. Lol. I have a near obsession with economics and history and your content is top notch. Keep up the great work. Let's go. Thanks Emba. And then a five star from Kristin who said I want to be Katie Gaddy Tossan when I grow up.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Which same oh well thanks for ending us on a high note. Yeah, I needed that. And I know that we said we weren't going to do this in an attempt to like keep the rich girl roundups narrow and focused on a finite number of episodes or writing, but I can't resist sharing this email. So if you will please read this from Sarah okay, it says I was.

[Hannah]

Playing Monopoly Junior with my 8 year old and when she landed on free parking she asked why she couldn't buy free parking or jail. It took everything in me to stop myself from jumping into lecture mode about how when the game was made, things like jails and parking were considered public services and not something one could own, but that now services like that are often privatized so in the real world one could technically own those. Fortunately for her, I just said no. In this game you can't own those spaces. Maybe I'll hold off until she's at least 10 to explain privatization to her.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

When your family game night is derailed by a lecture on private prisons.

[Hannah]

So we will start with the Social Wealth Fund episode Feedback with Matt Bruinick because that definitely generated the most questions right after a quick break.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

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[Hannah]

Katie let's start strong with a one star review that said this episode made them unsubscribe.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

All right, let's fucking go. Yeah baby. Because you know what? The opposite of love is not hate. It is apathy. So if I'm inspiring any sort of reaction in people, I guess that's good.

[Hannah]

They said, quote, just unsubscribed. Just listen to the Social Wealth Fund episode. Really just a show promoting the northern European version of socialism.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Correct.

[Hannah]

They continued to say huge assumptions with logic gaps in second and third order effects. Sounded like two young millennials trying to tell the rest of America they're behaving poorly. It's not so much that I'm mad, just disappointed.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I'm. I'm giggling because I'm like, again, Tuck's hair behind you here.

[Hannah]

Thank you.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Too smart, too young. Thank you. But okay, you gotta love when I think someone says there are logic gaps but then neglects to offer any like, specific complaint like, okay, such as can you please elaborate what was the logic gap? But here's the thing. What I don't understand about that specific pushback on that sort of episode and Matt's policy proposals is that suggesting that there are unexplored second and third order effects that like went unmentioned implies that this is something that has never been tried before. That like, there is no way that we could possibly know what sort of consequences would be wrought by doing something like this. When, as this reviewer pointed out, there is an entire region of the world that has structured their societies this way and we know how it is going for them. I'm assuming the assumption is like, oh, that would hurt the economy. Everyone would just knock off and smoke weed and stop working. Like that's not really what we see in places where they use collectively owned wealth to build stronger social support systems. Like I just looked up Norway in particular. Norway has a higher GDP per capita than the United States. It has an 80% employment rate that is 20 percentage points higher than the US where only 60% of the working age population works. I assume that the use of the word socialism implies that like they have concerns about second and third order effects of, I don't know, employment, production, what have you, wealth generation. But the country in this discussion with the most quote unquote socialism is kind of smoking us in both of those regards. It sounds like they unsubscribed because of this episode, so they probably won't have a chance to follow up and let us know. But I'm like, I'm genuinely curious, what are the effects that you think we are not addressing? Because I would love to actually have a conversation about what those things are.

[Hannah]

Right. Because he clearly said in the episode, this is not a leap into the unknown. We know it's going to happen and it's actually happening in an American state. So I think maybe for them, maybe the question was about the level of scale, but we'll get to that.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, I mean, to be totally clear, it's not to say that this is some panacea, like policy is complicated, every policy has unintended consequences. But I do think that there were a few emails from this episode that raised legitimate concerns or further considerations that I found really interesting. So I do want to talk through those. Here's one from Janice. She said, I found this week's episode especially interesting. I'm starting to think more about the transitions we need to make to prepare for a new economy, with AI and automation increasingly replacing labor and the sovereign wealth fund is an intriguing policy proposal which I, as a Katie sidebar, I actually think is like a really interesting layer to add to this conversation of like, if a lot of jobs are replaced by artificial intelligence, this might become relevant much more quickly in the public domain than like we're currently thinking it will be, she writes. I'm curious whether examples like the Nordic wealth funds would actually translate to success in the us I did a quick search and discovered that a large portion of Nordic fund holdings are actually in US companies, especially tech stocks. Does this mean the success of these other sovereign wealth funds relies on the US economy continuing to operate as it does, with low taxes on capital and so on? Would the US Be able to transition to such a model without sacrificing its successful industries and progress that power this sovereign wealth fund model here and elsewhere?

[Hannah]

They're so smart.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

That's what I said. I was like, guys, you're starting to lap me. I'm getting uncomfortable with this. This is the point in going through my inbox that I was like, all right, I'm in over my head. But I do think that this is really an interesting question because what it immediately made me think of, it was a Part of the conversation we had last year with Grace Blakely where she basically was like, okay, does this mean we're getting 5% average returns instead of 7% returns? Is that worth insert all these other benefits here, like, yeah, it is a valid question. Is the current level of return that we earn on the largest and highest performing US Companies, A necessary and B, actually long term sustainable? That, I think is a question worth asking too, because I think when you're comparing these two paths, there's probably a pretty solid argument to be made that in order to keep allowing all of these companies that are powering the majority of the returns in the stock market to continue operating as they have been, eventually you're going to run out of resources. Like, Earth is not an infinite, it's a finite resource. Yeah, right. But I think to answer this question with a higher degree of satisfaction, we would have to know to what extent low corporate taxes in particular are boosting returns. And my hunch is that the government's relationship to boosting returns is less about low corporate taxation and more about regulatory capture and more about government contracts, more about bailouts, things of that nature. And the reality of the fact that the US Government absorbs a lot of risk on behalf of these companies and enables them to take bigger swings, which is something that Kayla sort of raised in another email.

[Hannah]

Kayla said the US Government is already under pressure to bail out industries that are, quote, too big to fail and has repeatedly done so in the past. Is there any evidence that holding an invested wealth fund increases the incentive to support certain businesses and industries beyond what we already see? Is there a conflict of interest there between regulation and guaranteed returns?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay, so I love that these two kind of fit together like little puzzle pieces. Again, a really good question as far as the element of there any evidence of this to the earlier question? It's my understanding that a lot of, well, the Nordic fund owns a lot of oil, but like does invest in US companies. So I'm not sure that there would be evidence of this in particular of like the US Government if it were to operate a social wealth fund for people in America. If, like you would start to see this. Not sure, but I have been thinking about it and my initial reaction was, yeah, probably you would see that. But then I was like, wait a second though. What is it about our current system that causes this to happen? Our government currently does this, so they're doing it without this incentive structure that Kayla is outlining. And I think the short answer is that the two big to fail companies already dominate the economy and the government is scared of what would happen if that house of cards came crumbling down. Why don't you let a bank fail? Why don't you let an airline fail? Well, largely because it would be theoretically so economically disruptive that an investment in keeping it afloat is like the risk calculus that they're making is like that intervention is worthwhile. That would be my most good faith assessment that I can offer. Like, barring any commentary about corruption or kickbacks or anything of that nature, which I fear are going to become more common under this administration. But the problem with this situation right now is that it ultimately ends up being socialism for the rich in many cases. With the 2008 bailouts being the most obvious example of this. Because who owns the assets that are getting bailed out? Disproportionately rich people. They're the ones that are benefiting because they're the owners. And I think that is the. The core of the issue with a poorly directed bailout. So when I got thinking about it, I was like, okay, like, fleshing this out a couple steps. If that's the core of the problem with a bailout, is that problem solved if everybody owns the thing that's being bailed out? Assuming we are still going to keep doing this version of American capitalism where genuine competition at the giant cap corporation level in the majority of sectors is a bit of a mirage anyway. Well, maybe we actually don't care as much about government bailouts if they are not disproportionately benefiting a very small group of people who are taking on enormous risk, knowing the government's going to save them. I don't know. That is kind of my, like, without having a crystal ball. That is the path that I went down. Inspired by this question, I feel like.

[Hannah]

The math lady meme. This feels over my head now, but I feel like this relates to an observation that Bradley had. And he said one thing that wasn't discussed in the episode is how the public having a stake in corporations could impact the behavior of the companies themselves. In business school, a stakeholder concept of business is presented to us. This is the idea that businesses need to consider other parties, for example, labor, the community. The business operates in the environment in addition to the shareholders. This is a great idea and in the long term should be beneficial to a company. The incentive structure still favors the shareholders, though, and it basically rests on a company's goodwill to enact. So it doesn't. If society at large had a meaningful stake in a corporation, those other stakeholders now are actual shareholders and need to be considered. Perhaps this could help prevent environmental destruction or labor exploitation. I find this to be another compelling argument in favor of the social wealth fund.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting flip side to the coin. Like, okay, we are rightly discussing how will a shifting ownership structure potentially lower returns or otherwise interfere with the assumptions that we can make about the apparatus as it exists today. But I liked this insight, which is basically like, yes, it is going to interfere. And that's like kind of the point. The point is that you want the ownership to be more distributed and you want different decisions to be made. Okay, here's another from Dan. He says, dynamite episode brought me back to when you had recommended Invisible Trillions and we were asking ourselves, okay, well, if not a wealth tax, then what is the best mechanism for capturing and redistributing this wealth? Seems like you've been on a quest to get to the bottom of it, and this episode just may have done it for me. I also feel like this discussion was so much more palatable to the neoliberal brain than a plain old UBI Take. Can't wait for the roundup to hear the feedback. Paradigm shifting stuff.

[Hannah]

Dan the man. Thank you for that.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

And then on the note of ubi, Kayla had one other question that I wanted to discuss. Kayla, ship me whatever coffee you're drinking. Like, holy shit.

[Hannah]

Yeah, she said. In other discussions of universal basic income, folks have mentioned that one downside of UBI is that without moving necessities out of private control, such as health care, it can actually serve as an accelerated wealth transfer from citizens to private companies. Without regulation, this would just increase the price of necessities long term. Have we seen examples of successful UBI wealth fund distributions in areas that do not have socialized healthcare, education, child care, etc.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay, really happy she brought this up. A great example of where you see this, pretty predictably is housing vouchers. So typically what you see is that a voucher amount will be raised, but then the landlords in a given area that typically will like specialize in that type of housing that accepts vouchers, they will just raise rent in lockstep, right?

[Hannah]

That reminds me too of something I read in Jackman recently, where they were discussing universal income and direct cash transfers. So they said, quote, Anton Yeager and Danielle Zamora Vargas, call basic income programs welfare for markets. Because the social and economic order is predicated on maintaining a certain level of consumer confidence, cash transfers are not threatening to the rulers of the age. Instead, they provide the means to shore up demand in a low wage economy. So in essence it's not doing much to address the problem with housing costs being too high or healthcare costs being too expensive.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah. Because it's not to go all like supply side as recline abundance. Because I actually have quite. I think that there are some like valid issues with that approach, but it is kind of that same thing of like, yeah, if you're not increasing the supply of housing, if housing is still a private commodity that people are using to make money, then just giving more people money to pay into that market, it is just kind of a band aid. Right. And I think that this is a worthy corollary because the alternative to universal basic income that we, I think we've discussed this a little bit is universal basic services. Someone described it as the difference between increasing health care access, which tends to be like a liberal talking point, and universal health care, which is more of like a leftist perspective on the problem that says all people should have health care as a right. That's the goal, quote unquote. Increasing access is usually code for we're going to leave production to the private sector and we're going to leave the like existing incentives in place. We're just going to put more government money into it as opposed to with something like universal healthcare. Typically you are fundamentally changing the incentive structures at play. You're not going to have a UnitedHealthcare and their shareholders in a system like that most likely if it's in a perfect world. I think Kayla is accurately describing what can go wrong when that approach is taken. And like what we see go wrong all the time right now. This is why I am personally interested in advocating for full fledged universal basic services. Though I do think to the earlier point about AI, we are going to be having a UBI conversation probably within the next decade.

[Hannah]

Yeah. And so she also asked about success stories in places without universal basic education, health care, et cetera. So would we consider Alaska a success story? I guess I would say I think.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Alaska is like a success story light in the sense that number one, they are obviously an American state without universal healthcare, childcare or higher ed usa. And number two, their existence as an American state that has proven this is possible is extremely valuable, I think. But I do think that as an example of how you would maybe structure it on a larger scale has limited utility for a few reasons. Fortunately we heard from some Alaskans who listened to the show who enumerated some of those reasons for us.

[Hannah]

Didn't you take an Alaskan cruise when you were like 5 years old.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I did that. I've been to Alaska. That's right. I lost my first tooth in Alaska.

[Hannah]

Oh, well, I was gonna say maybe your grandparents took you to the Alaska Fund office for a tour.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

No, But I do remember being, like, really stressed out about was the tooth fairy gonna find me on this boat?

[Hannah]

Did she find you?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

She did. She did. Fortunately, yes.

[Hannah]

Anyway, so we had someone. Olivia, right in. Who said Alaskan resident here. Thanks for cluing, folks into the pfd. There's so much more that could be covered about this and what works and what doesn't. But that's for whole podcast season. Generally, we love the pfd, but if giving it up meant a more robust education or healthcare system, I'd do it. She also mentioned that they do still have to pay taxes on it and it can cause those, like, boom and bust cycles you see in spending, which reminded me a little bit of how tax refunds work sometimes. We're getting a big tax refund is how Americans save and then subsequently spend.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah. I was really grateful for that insight because I think it highlights that capital redistribution is kind of just one piece of the puzzle. Like, I think Brunig would agree with that, by the way. That it is. It's the reason why he approaches this idea for, like, sustained American solidarity and flourishing through the three prongs, the capital, which is what the social wealth fund is meant to work toward. Labor, labor power, labor integrity, labor dignity, and the welfare state. So I feel like we have maybe not done the best job today as we're reading through the feedback of ascertaining where the different comments ladder up to those three things. We've been kind of fluidly moving between them.

[Hannah]

Yeah.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

But it's important to make sure that we're using the right tools for the right problems and like critiquing the tools for the problems they're intended to solve.

[Hannah]

And that this is not the one comprehensive solution for every problem that we have here.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That like, a social wealth fund is not going to, like, replace the need for universal healthcare.

[Hannah]

Right.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay. Then you had Jacqueline who said, proud to be from Alaska. Great episode and guest.

[Hannah]

She's one of our most dedicated listeners, so. Thanks, Jacqueline. Katie, you actually said that you thought the Alaska example had a more limited utility.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yes.

[Hannah]

Why is that?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

So there's actually a comment from Jeffrey B. Who I think explains those limitations well. So I'm just going to read his comment. Jeffrey B. Said, in Alaska, we have one of the most natural resource rich areas whose landmass is 20% of the 48 mainland states. Then factor in they have a population of just 740,000. So that's 1/5 the land and 1-500th of the population. That I think kind of sums it up in that respect. It's not exactly representative. So I think that's true. And to me, the value of using Alaska as an example is that it is American. The value is that it shows that it is already happening here in the United States already. Not that it's super indicative of the specific funding source, not that that's necessarily relevant for the mainland and not that the population level is even applicable. But I think that it gets us thinking differently. And it's kind of like, oh yeah, it's already happening in the U.S. it's not like there's like no precedent for this. Which brings us to our largest piece of feedback that pertained to that specific point land from Claire.

[Hannah]

Okay, so Claire wrote this was definitely an interesting episode, but a large red flag was raised midway through it that had me shout, pump the brakes. So then she pulls the transcript and included the section where Matt said that some of the land is owned by the federal government and it's just, quote, whatever, just random land. And then she goes back to say, steps onto a metaphorical soapbox and turns on microphone. Let's talk about it. Matt's right. On average, about half of the Western US is public lands. Nevada is 80% public. But these lands aren't just desert, as Matt suggests. While we all know our national parks, like Yosemite, Zion and Death Valley, the public lands in the west encompass so much more than those designated parks. There are over 400 national park sites, 560 national wildlife refuges, and 250 million acres of other public lands that encompass wilderness areas, national trails and more. According to the now archived page on the Department of the Interior. Last year alone, the national park sites.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I'm sorry, clown world. That page must have had the word like transition on it or something.

[Hannah]

Women visit the park. Last year alone, the national park sites saw a record 331 million visitors, according to the Alt. National Park Service, a group of rangers dedicated to resistance of the current administration. So here's why this raised a red flag. Trump has already signed an executive order for a sovereign wealth fund that would allow him to liquidate public lands for resource extraction quietly. Bergen's exact quote was that these lands are assets to quote the nation's balance sheet with an estimated worth of $200 trillion. This is combined with other Executive orders that expand timber production and increase mineral production. According to the center for Biological Diversity, many areas that could see expanded resource mining are protected areas with critical ecological systems. One of those is Oak Creek Canyon, a stunning area in northern Arizona that I frequent as an outdoor enthusiast. In short, these executive orders basically give free reign to circumvent environmental review to expedite resource mining. This could wipe out incredibly delicate ecosystems, endanger wildlife, and put indigenous heritage sites at incredible risk risk. So then she gets into some more detail about biodiversity in her area where she lives in Arizona, and she concludes with this it all raises the question of what can be plundered for profit. Much of your podcast is dedicated to inequity and pay, with conversations on fantastic books like Vulture Capitalism, a Banger, the Privatization of Everything. Also a banger. Poverty by America, another banger. Plunder. PE's plan to pillage America on my to be Red List and many more fingers Only the short summation. People should not be a source of profit. I argue that extends to our lands. Where does the tide turn on this to ensure that one source of profit doesn't replace another? As an outdoor advocate and enthusiast, I truly believe that just like people, our public lands deserve better than being a positive line on the balance sheet of America.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, she cooked. Absolutely cooked. Yeah, yeah. I remember when we were recording that as the conversation was actually happening, it was around the same time that Burgum had made those comments. And so it kind of occurred to me, I think you had raised it at the time as well in the edit of Is this going to feel a little like crass in this context? And maybe Bruinig would feel differently about this. But I think my perspective is that the amount of value in large American companies, not land, is where I would think you would start to begin capitalizing a fund like this. Per the Meidner plant analogy made in the episode. Like, I know we talked about land, and I think it kind of raises the question of ownership profit more broadly. And I think profit in general is an inherently capitalist idea. Right? It's surplus value above and beyond that the owner keeps. And so I, I kind of start going into this little ouroboros of public lands mean they're owned by the public. If they're owned by the public, then the public decides what to do with them. Could public lands be reappropriated for public use in a way that's not exploitative? When I hear someone like Doug Burgum say they're worth $200 trillion, we want to capitalize them. I'm like, oh, he's going to sell them to, like, a private equity firm. In my mind, you're talking about public ownership of these things, that the public retains the asset and decides what happens to it. There might be things that the public would collectively choose to do with a piece of land that benefits everybody or is good for the land, too. That is not as easily equated with private property and resource extraction.

[Hannah]

I'm actually thinking. I know many people in our audience have suggested strong towns to us, and their number two principle of, like, what a strong town means is land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered. And so it talks about how land is, you know, a finite resource and that it is the literal foundation of a community success. So it has to be stewarded well and productively by everybody involved in the community. So, yeah, yeah, perfect.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

So one thing that came up with a few listeners was asking us to host what I'm going to call, like, Opposing Viewpoints Conversations. So Tony B. Wrote Great episode. It would be great if you would get another person on the show who doesn't totally agree with the ideas put out in this episode. I think the best podcasts are ones where you get opposing views and then have a civil and respectful debate. Sam S. Wrote in and shared an episode of Freakonomics that came out around the same time that had an economist from the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank. Obviously, Keds is a Democrat and is like, representing more liberal economic perspective who basically takes the opposite side of Keds on all of these issues in the Freakonomics episode. And Sam said it could be interesting to have somebody like that on and basically say, okay, I'm gonna moderate, you two, talk to each other and like, debate these in real time.

[Hannah]

Was that podcast Intelligence Squared that used to do this and then they would vote at the end?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Oh, I don't know. I've never heard of that.

[Hannah]

It was. It was when you were a baby, it was like in the 2010s.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

It's like that, that, like, Jubilee YouTube channel that'll be like, can one woke teen face off with 47 conservative congressmen?

[Hannah]

We have not done debate style material before.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, I think it's because I personally just don't gravitate to that sort of stuff as a listener, which might be why it hasn't naturally happened in the last couple years as we've produced this show. But I will say with respect, because that comment came up with respect to the Social Wealth Fund episode. I wanted to mention Bruinig has gone on shows with that intent before. And one of the more interesting conversations that I've watched with him was him debating the host or like the host had him on because he disagreed with him. So we'll link that in particular in the show notes. It did make for a very interesting conversation. Another version of this idea, though not about this topic that I watched recently that I found really Interesting was a 2022 episode of Lex Friedman, which is like not a show that I really listened to, but he had Richard Wolff on. And Richard Wolff is a Marxist professor and a Marxist economist. And I would assume Lex Friedman thinks of himself as a capitalist based on what I know about him. But they had like a fascinating two and a half hour conversation that I found extremely interesting. And I was like, I like really respect that Friedman platformed Richard Wolff and like gave him an opportunity to talk about these ideas. And what I think you'll find when you listen to it, just like sidebar, between you and me, dear listener, is that a lot of the classic capitalist talking points that he hit him with, it was just like, boom, deconstructed. Boom, deconstructed. It was very satisfying. And Lex had a pretty, I would say, good attitude about it. So anyway, I was reflecting on this question more. I think after I read it, I thought about it for the rest of the day because I was like, why do I feel some resistance to this? Like, why hasn't this been something that we've tried in the past?

[Hannah]

The debate style, you mean?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, yeah. Like, like basically inviting somebody with the explicit intent of being like, this person thinks totally differently than me. And we are going to.

[Hannah]

We could just invite your dad on. Literally.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I actually, yeah, if you. I could just truly start recording, read your group chat. My Thanksgiving dinner, that would probably suffice. But part of the reason that I have historically found this sort of debate style content challenging to make in the financial world is because oftentimes when you go to seek what we might call an opposing viewpoint, we don't just disagree about how to solve a given problem. Often we disagree that something even is a problem that should be solved. There might be some wonk out there who agrees that we need to solve wealth inequality and believes that collectivizing wealth is like a good thing and could poke worthwhile holes in the social wealth fund theory. But largely in the like light oppo research that I did for that episode, in prepping for that interview, the people who tend to have issues with that subject or who have critiqued it publicly often disagree or like, hand wave wealth inequality away as not that big of a deal. One example of this there was, I think, a Vox summary of it by Matt Iglesias, who's like a popular liberal pundit. And I'm sure Matt Iglesias would admit that wealth inequality is a problem. But like, generally speaking, the pundits in that little like, group of popular liberal, you know, reporters are like more or less happy to see capitalism continuing business as usual.

[Hannah]

Right?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I don't think that they would often say that there's that much fundamentally wrong. And so maybe that is worth debating on the merits to begin with. But I guess I've always kind of felt o with the fact that I tend to talk to people who, in my own reading or research, I come across. I'm like, wow, I think they have really interesting ideas and I want to talk to them about those ideas on the air because it feels like all mainstream media is, to varying degrees, very pro status quo. So it's always felt like you're probably constantly hearing the opposite side of the argument. But I am going to keep thinking about this because I do think that it's very important to subject your ideas and your beliefs to rigor. And I think something that I can commit to right now is pushing back more in good faith in the moment, essentially intentionally playing devil's advocate. More in these interviews, I find that.

[Hannah]

Sometimes when I hear from other people, we just disagree on very basic human rights or the empathy of saying I think that healthcare is a universal right that all humans have. It's like, if you disagree at a fundamental level, where's the conversation going to go from there? So I'm curious who's out there? I guess I would invite the readers or listeners of the show to say who is out there that would agree with the basic tenets that we have as a show, but have maybe different strategies or ideas on how to get there.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay, I'm going to push back on that a little bit. I don't think that like, conservative economists lack empathy. I don't think somebody with a conservative worldview doesn't care about other people. I guess I don't think that that's necessarily true. I guess it's more of it comes down to a little bit like those second and third order effects that Keds talked about in her episode, which is there are conservative economists who genuinely believe that if you give people paid sick days, it will put them out of work. They think that they are doing the best thing for those People, by not putting them out of work because they think that paid sick days will. I don't necessarily think that it's that people on the other sides of those issues lack empathy or care for other people.

[Hannah]

Well, I mean, I would push back to say, like, there are all those people who say, don't have kids you can't afford, or like, oh, well, that happened to you. You did it to yourself. And so I do think there is a level of this personal responsibility narrative that we hear a lot in the US Which I feel fundamentally at odds with, because I see the reason that personal responsibility doesn't work out as like a bigger problem indicative of, you know, a lack of social safety net. So I think the problem for me is that we're just fundamentally coming at this from two different ways. And so my question would be, how do we find people who do want to have the argument in good faith, do also care about people and like, agree on some things, but maybe have different ways or proposals on how we get there?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. That makes sense. Finding that fundamental common ground.

[Hannah]

Yeah, yeah, we do have some rapid fire, but this one came from. I don't know how you pronounce this. Is it Scat.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Skyo.

[Hannah]

Sky, they said. Really informative. I'd never heard about this before, so it's very interesting to think about. I'd like to hear some kind of discussion about if it perpetuates some of the negative things we see from capitalism. Maybe now we're all on board to deregulate certain industries because it puts more money into the fund or keep workers wages low because it puts more money into the fund. I don't know if that's an imagined problem or something that's really a concern.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, it's kind of the opposite of the one that was like, well, if everybody owns it now, they're shareholders and like, the companies will behave better. So it's actually kind of funny that two people will listen to the same episode and have opposite concerns about what might happen.

[Hannah]

Yeah, but then my brain breaks because then I think, well, then which will happen.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I think not to be like, it could hardly get worse though, am I right? But it's kind of like, yeah, but if the workers are the ones that own it, then, like, they're definitely not going to be incentivized to lower their own wages. But yeah, no, I think that worth thinking about. Another one. Megan said this episode was so interesting and exciting. A social wealth fund makes so much sense. State investments should benefit the state, not enrich the private owners of the companies. The point that reducing inequality benefits all classes was excellent. And she also said that she just generally loves the like economic policy deep dives. So thank you Megan.

[Hannah]

I know that made your day from Spike, our mvp. They said Another great and informative episode with real solutions. It can feel very hopeless that we can't solve very obvious problems in this country and the main one being income inequality. It's wild that Alaska has been doing this and no one's in an uproar about it, so why can't the rest of the states? It could potentially bring back jobs and manufacturing to places who might not have natural resources. I also really like the breakdown of how tax credits work and what actually caused inflation.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay, so just to tangentially derail us for like 30 seconds, so the point about manufacturing job that made me think of last month's essay that we sent out on the newsletter. So if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, you know what to do. But we got this reflection on that essay from Caroline that loops into some of the bigger conversations that we've been having today, so I wanted to include it. Hannah, if you can read this for us.

[Hannah]

Sure, she said. I enjoyed reading your thought piece for this week. It is interesting to see that some people are concerned about the evening out of genders and higher education. As a zoomer, it's weird to me to see that some people blaming that on women seeking an education. From what I've seen amongst my peers, the main reason less men are pursuing college degrees has nothing to do with women. Because of uncertainty in many previous white collar jobs due to concerns of AI replacement, college no longer appears to be the fast track to wealth it once presented itself to be. It seems like more men are drawn to trades because they offer better job security after factoring the cost of education, better pay and benefits. In the long run, more men are choosing to be plumbers, welders, electricians, etc. Because in the face of AI, those jobs are more appealing. Right now. I guess the people that are arguing, arguing women are ruining higher education for men would probably say men are flocking to those fields because they're male dominated.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Bingo.

[Hannah]

Thank you for being willing to voice your opinions about hot button topics. I always enjoy reading them.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

So I love that she concluded where she did because that is exactly what the full scope of that argument is. We actually I thought about including it in that piece and then didn't, but it's that like the reason that there's such a resurgence of excitement about Trey is a theory is like, yeah, cause there aren't women doing those jobs or there's fewer women. You can either go to college where there's going, you're going to be outnumbered by women, or you can go down this other path that is probably going to be less expensive, that does offer all these very real benefits that she's talking about. But it also happens to be more masculinized and to carry a more masculine perception and therefore is like a safer path. Seems to be a safer path if you are a man, which as Celeste Davis writes in the piece that I quoted in the essay, what's the safest way to exist in this world? If you're a man, you avoid anything feminine. And college is considered feminine or feminized now. So anyway, brief tangent, but thought it was interesting because I do think that that AI is coming up more and more in this feedback. And I do think that in this particular instance, white collar jobs worked by women are going to be just as impacted by AI as white collar jobs worked by men. So you would assume that if that's the reason, you would see fewer people in general going to college, not just fewer men.

[Hannah]

Much to ponder. Well, we got a lot on this one, so I'm just going to wrap it up with one last piece that came in from Akshay. He said this was a great episode and I'm very intrigued by the concept of a sovereign wealth fund. Can it be applied at a micro level versus a national one? I have a diverse but very close group of 200ish friends in a community with very diverse incomes. Also a very close friend group of 200.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I know. I was like, I don't think I could even name 200 people.

[Hannah]

He said, There are 1 to 10% wealthy people and the rest are living paycheck to paycheck. I've been wanting to create a system within so that we can achieve some way for the balances to shift. How could I fund a sovereign wealth fund but for a smaller set?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I think that's so dope. Yeah. And I was like, there's got to be an app for that.

[Hannah]

There is, apparently, yes.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I think it was Jacob who emailed us last summer who told us about an app called Commingle, which works similarly but at like a way larger scale. It's not, in my understanding, designed for like, small groups or communities. Although 200 is not a small group. Like, damn, my friend, you've got a lot of friends. But for anyone curious, we'll link commingle in the show notes. Okay, that was a lot. We are going to talk about your thoughts on our other two episodes after a quick break. What does the future hold for the business world? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Will it be a bull market or a bear market? Will inflation come down or stay up? So many questions until someone produces the Crystal Ball. Over 41,000 businesses are future proofing themselves with NetSuite by Oracle. It's the leading Cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and awesome into a single fluid platform. With real time insights and forecasting, you'll be peering into the future via actionable data. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com richgirl the guide is free to you at netsuite.com richGirl that's netsuite.com richgirl Here's a story my E Commerce listeners in particular will appreciate. A company called Luxury Deluxe Weavers started off with just $200 in investments, a three person team, and a dream to offer high quality textiles at every price point. When they started selling on Walmart Marketplace, a few things happened. They tapped into a new network of customers, gained access to tools for scale, and received comprehensive technical support, all of which helped them grow 4. 45% year over year. Today, Lux Weavers is projected to hit seven figures and is operating out of three warehouses across the country. This company's journey is amazing, but is just one of many success stories from sellers on Walmart Marketplace. Their solutions are clearly designed for growth. So if you've got goods to sell, head over to marketplace.walmart.commwk and see what you can achieve. That's marketplace.walmart.commWK.

[Hannah]

So welcome back. I don't think we've ever gotten so much positive feedback from an episode. So first we can share some exciting news. If you are a fan of Katherine Edwards. She just launched her own podcast called Optimist Economy and her hope is to bring a lot of what she experiences and how she sees economics straight to the audience. And it just went live, I think two weeks ago, so. So definitely check it out.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, given the state of gestures at everything, I think we should plan to bring her back and soon, maybe in a couple weeks to talk about everything that's going on with the tariffs and help us kind of digest what this might mean. So let's start with some rapid fire this time and then we'll shift into the bigger stuff, the questions.

[Hannah]

Okay, so we basically heard from a lot of people fangirling as much as we were. And I let Keds know about all of these kind words and she said she quote, felt affirmed by life. So we'll read a few. A special shout out to John Long who's commented before begging us to have kids on the show. He said, outstanding conversation. Keds always brings it.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay. Another regular listener, Leah, said, beautiful episode. It didn't feel wide ranging as you warned. This deserves a re listen. Beck N wrote, as someone who leans conservative, this was an incredible podcast. I'm always willing to listen to others opinions and expertise. My hope is voices and conversations like this can be elevated above the noise for actual productive conversations. Well done, Beck. You know that is my favorite feedback. So thank you.

[Hannah]

We heard from Clara L. Who said this is one of the best episodes ever. Fantastic explanations, brilliant and thoughtful. And Jessica M. Who wrote, wow, that was inspiring. I feel tingly.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay. And then Jasmine wrote, whoa. This episode connected so many dots. I'm seeing the matrix. I will have to re listen a few times. Times. Please bring her back all the time. So many slam dunks.

[Hannah]

What do you think kids? You want to come join us every week? I think it's Hillen wrote, wow. This has been the pinnacle of my short Money with Katie show journey. I have binged all your episodes over the past six weeks and I want to thank you for softening my quote, ethnic kid who grew up in the hood to stop complaining and work harder if you want to succeed. Because capitalism has worked for me. Sincerely, your financial mista from another sista with which wow, what a binge. So thank you for that.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay. And then Fallon D said this episode was so good and that's saying something because I love all your episodes. Thanks, Fallon. Pretty please make Keds a regular guest. I would listen to you two talk about literally anything. Pasta, boiling techniques, ethical capitalism, unironically wearing white toenail polish.

[Hannah]

I do unironically wear that. Hang on, I'm confused. I don't get it.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Fallon, report back. Hannah wants to know, why is it unironic? I want to know, is white toenail polish cheugy? Are the Zoomers not doing that anymore?

[Hannah]

I guess not. I think black is what's in now.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Oh, is it?

[Hannah]

I don't know. I just always ask for white. I didn't know that it was cheugy. I would just. I thought it looked nice.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

And then we'll end with Jagos who pull quoted what Ked said at the end and definitely bears repeating. The only way to guarantee your voice doesn't matter is to stay silent. Your silence is their victory. Your apathy is their victory. Your cynicism is the ultimate victory for them. So don't give them the satisfaction and certainly don't reward them with your silence.

[Hannah]

There were a couple places to expand further. There was one general theme that came in and it pertained to the section in the episode about poverty. So Rebecca V. Wrote and said looking at these economic policies that target increased consumer spending, thinking about tax cuts as a bad example and targeting payments to families and single mothers is a better example, is there any difference in economic benefit if consumers spend their cut at megacorps versus medium versus local businesses? I was just reflecting and doubting whether spending your stimulus check as a contribution to the profits of Amazon Big Healthcare, Apple, Walmart, as many people probably do, has a generally positive impact on the national economy. This leads into a bigger but less relevant question for me about the real impact of shopping big versus small. Do you ever worry that a small business could just be a middleman between you and the Mega Corp anyway since they would need to get their supplies from a cheaper vendor and at a profit margin? I've been disillusioned with the concept of quote voting for your dollar for obvious reasons. But maybe state or federal economic policy should be doing more to achieve whatever these consumer targeted quote shop small campaigns are going for if it's beneficial on a bigger scale. So we did have a soft debate on an old Rich girl roundup about this topic I think maybe two years ago that will link in the show notes. So to the person who said we don't debate. See, we can do it.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, we just debate each other. We just argue with one another. You said you wanted a subject matter experts, but instead you're going to get two bitches in a closet. Exactly. Except not. Okay, yes. So I think something potentially worth keeping in mind here, here. If we tease these issues apart and we kind of set aside the big picture impact of shopping small for a moment, we focus only on okay, where is a person using their EBT card to spend money? Half of the spending in our economy is driven by something like the top 10% of earners, those who are in the bottom 40% of the income distribution. So if we're talking people that are on SNAP, we're talking like bottom quartile 25%. I'm saying include it like almost the whole bottom half, half bottom 40%. They are responsible for somewhere between 5% to 10% of all money spent in the economy. Very small fraction. So all that to say I think you could probably double the spending power of somebody using SNAP benefits and I don't think where they spend it would materially make really any difference to the overall economic picture. But I guess I hesitate to say that definitively because I think the flip side of that coin is it's like the consumer side of the. It's like the people who work at large corporations and are paid low wages and who are on snap. It's almost like these corporations are like double dipping. Like they might be benefiting from the low wage labor and then also benefiting from the spending of the benefits that the person they're employing is entitled to. Does that make sense?

[Hannah]

I think it's funny that you said they may be double dipping when I feel like that's very clearly what's happening because there's no regulation around.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Like they're benefiting from it twice. Yeah. So I think in that respect it is worth paying attention to. But if we are concerned about will the good that it does for those people be offset by the benefit to the megacorporation? I think keeping in perspective how relatively little money we're talking about in the grand scheme of things and how much more money is being spent, how much, what a large portion of all spending is pretty much attributable to like, I don't know, the top quartile. I don't think you're going to see. Like it's not going to be a needle mover. I guess I would say.

[Hannah]

Yeah. And then sort of relatedly actually, Jenny H. Wrote in and said loved it all. But one aspect got me thinking. Isn't this enabling or entrenching systemic poverty? I understand this is a proven successful intervention, but doesn't this further perpetuate the problem as it doesn't fix the system and further subjugates poor people to the whims of when the government or other people decide it's time to give them a few extra dollars. Am I misunderstanding this?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah. So I'm not sure what this is specifically in reference to when she says isn't this enabling or entrenching systemic poverty? Because we obviously covered a ton of ground in that episode. But I'm going to assume that she's referring broadly to the idea of, of government intervention to alleviate poverty. And first of all, I do think that there's actually a healthy amount of skepticism of government power in this question. Like I probably wouldn't have said that a year ago, but I have been reading a lot of David Graeber he was an anarchist. And so he's kind of constantly being like, you know, it's not really about. You want to like, give power to another institution or, or offload all of your power to somebody else. I think sometimes the calls for the government to change existing programs or do more are conflated with the idea that we want the government to have even more control over our lives, even more power. But what I think is important to say first is what we have now is a system that entrenches poverty. We did a deep dive into this years ago with the authors of a book called Getting Me Cheap, all about. About the benefits Cliff.

[Hannah]

And it was in 2022, I want to say.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, we. It was kind of a. A mashup between Maid, which was a memoir that was made into a very famous Netflix show with a nonfiction book called Getting Me Cheap. So we'll put that in the show notes. But it kind of reminds me a little bit of the meme where someone tweeted a picture of a tent encampment and was like, lol, the housing plan under socialism. And someone quote, tweets it and it's like, dude, this is the current housing plan under capitalism, by the way. So rather than diving into this question alone, though, we figured we would just ask Keds herself.

[Hannah]

Oh, hey.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

So Keds, welcome back to the Rich Girl Roundtable.

[C]

Well, hey y'all, happy to be back.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

We figured with all the love that we owed it to our listeners to bring you back to answer this. So I guess off the bat, I'm curious if you have any thoughts about this question.

[C]

I think what is lost on a lot of people is that there are two ways that the government decides to help people who are in trouble. And their defining feature is explained by whether or not the government finds those people worthy or unworthy. So if you are a worthy person, like a retiree, you will get the gold standard. You will get the best social program in the history of the world. You will get a lifetime inflation adjusted benefit that reflects the amount of money you put into it, AKA Social Security. And if you are married to one of those people, or if you are the dependent child of one of those people, you will also get a good benefit if you're the non married partner of that person. You don't get anything if you're not part of a marital family, it's less for you. And when we think about ending poverty in the United States and truly eradicating it from our system, elderly poverty is the lowest poverty rate amongst anyone in the United States. And even at the height of the Great Recession, as the financial markets were crashing, Social Security was still reducing poverty among the elderly because it's a very high functioning program. So the question of, are we helping people in poverty? Is really about who we're helping and how we value them in our society. We can design amazing social programs when we want to. But if you're a single mom who doesn't want to work or who doesn't want to get married, you know, you're not going to get anything nice, you're not going to get anything adequate, and you're not going to be treated that well. And if you want help for food, I'm going to give you a little voucher for food and then I'm going to make you work to get it. And then I'm going to audit you four times. And every two months you have to tell me that you're working and that you're still in need, and I'm not going to treat you with that much respect. So it's important to know that this idea of the government giving out kind of a handout, that is a choice that is not required when helping poor people. That's just how we help poor people who we don't value in our society.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

So maybe the most good faith interpretation, because I do think that this question was well intentioned. I think it gets to the heart of kids we had talked about in the original episode, which was basically this idea that you're doing this thing that you think is going to help these people, but actually what you're really doing is hurting them. And you just don't realize that you're hurting them because the hurting part is the second or third or order effect. It feels like a cousin to that idea of will it entrench poverty? Will it make poverty a state that people are less likely to get out of themselves if the government makes poverty less painful for them? And my thought when I first read the question was that oftentimes people who live in poverty, if they are met with a very targeted intervention, they are quickly lifted out and then they are on their way and they no longer require help. So there was a very poignant story in the New York Times a couple years ago about a Seattle woman who, because of some medical debt, I think she may have defaulted on medical debt. In the early 2000s, she basically had gone through a series of bad breaks and some bad financial decisions in a pretty complex financial system that effectively meant she could no longer afford rent in Seattle. Battle on her Income. She ended up living in her car and she lives in her car for quite a while. And the intervention that ended up allowing her to regain access to stable housing was about $2,000. It was $2,000 from a church that allowed her to pay a new security deposit. And once she got that little leg up out of that bad situation, she effectively like regained find stability and became, I'm using air quotes, but became self sufficient again. And so I think that if we are more targeted with the intervention or we commit to a path that is actually like good social programs, that somehow it will make people worse off. I think that sometimes stories like that can be illustrative of. In my mind, you're doing this, you're making the program better because it allows people to be in poverty less, not more. It's lifting them out, it's not keeping them in.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I also take her question in good faith. And y'all, I read, I don't even wanna tell you about the hundreds of pages of stuff I've read about how terrible some of these social programs are to the people on it and how it becomes almost like an administrative burden of a full time job just to keep your food stamps when you fall on hard times. It's a good point to remember that most people have a very big misconception of what poverty is in the United States. And you think of poverty as like the entrenched multi generational poverty. I was born poor, my parents were poor, I'll always be poor. And like, how do I break this cyc that is reasonably maybe 2%, maybe 3% of the US population. An additional 32 to 34% will be people who are not poor, experience some type of economic shock, fall into poverty, and for the most part come right back out. And poverty is not a state of the world that describes someone to their core. It is a risk that the bottom third of Americans face of having some type of shock. You know, you miss your rent payment, you miss your car payment, you get in an accident, you lose your, your paycheck is delayed, and it's just, there's cascading consequences as you go down. And the idea of people being entrenched in poverty is whether or not we add to this risk of lower income a lack of well designed and well thought out support so that people who fall down can't get back up. And understanding that is an admission that a lot of people have fallen down. And I think that is really hard for people to get their head around because nobody wants to admit that that could happen to them.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's easier to think of poverty as almost like a disease that someone suffers as opposed to like a virus that someone can catch. And if it's a virus someone can catch, it could happen to you and you would think differently about it. And so I always thought there's a bit of self preservation around the idea of poverty in the US to make sure that like it's them, not me. But to your point that sometimes you just need like a very effective leg up. I mean, that's, that's exactly right. You have a fall, you, you need a lift. And the US doesn't always do that, so. Well, I think she hit on a concern that maybe she didn't express, which is we are adding risk into our economy for people who fall because we don't catch them well, as opposed to, we're risking keeping people in poverty who were there in the first place. And you have to think of were they already at dinner or did they walk in the door and who is affected what by each program. And I will say it's also worth noting that there are a set of people who kind of live in between these two. And this is the set of people who are, are earning low wages and so they're not poor poor because they have jobs, but they earn so little and have such unstable employment that they don't thrive and they're kind of stuck in this low wage trap. And again, that's a policy choice. The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. So I'm with you on the government skepticism.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, I mean there's that element of the question which is to what extent might providing a larger social safety net paper over the lack of, we'll say, labor power. And I think that that's where the targeted intervention comes in. To me, the ideal outcome here is not everyone working at Walmart still makes $7 an hour and the government sends them a much larger check every month. It's that the government does something that says you can't pay people that lift middle. You can't have however many hundreds of billions of dollars in profit and be the company with the largest amount of people receiving benefits. That type of intervention to me is, gets at the heart of that question of, but is this going to just enable a system to stay broken by putting a bigger band aid on it?

[C]

I mean, you want to have a well designed social welfare system, but you have to know what your, the left hand has to know what the right hand is doing and you don't want to give a get out of jail free card for bad employers, that they're allowed to treat their workplace workers terribly, pay them miserably and give them no benefits because the social welfare system will pick up the tab. Or you do think that, and that's a price you're willing to pay, that the federal government and taxpayers are willing to subsidize very low wage, very low quality jobs. Because we'd rather have low wage, low quality jobs as a permanent fixture of our economy and help people on the back end. But we're basically in like the worst timeline and that we don't help people that well, but we don't regulate the labor market that well. And so you end up with the worst of both worlds.

[Hannah]

Well, I think there's also somebody had written in one saying, yeah, but Tesla, they may not be great for Elon Musk's whatever he wants to do on a whim, but people who work at Tesla are paid very well. And so isn't that a good thing? And someone else started in saying like, well, you know, Amazon workers are actually paid fairly decently. And I said, well, but if they're working, conditions that they're under are not. Does that negate the fact that they're paid not minimum wage?

[C]

Take it from someone who works with numbers, it's really easy to fudge statistics. So, like, you know, you include everyone who works in the factory. Factory, including the like 10 engineers that make $400,000 a year with the people on the factory floor and like, yeah, on average they're doing all right.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, they included Musk's total comp in there too. They're like, would you believe how rich everyone who works here is?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, it comes down to a broader question to me about public policy. Like, do you want to take these companies word on what they do, or do you want to establish the floor that you think every worker deserves? That's not on the whim of whatever their CE or board decides is reasonable? I promise you they're well paid and we take care of our staff and they like it here. And so you don't need to regulate me. I mean, banks say the same thing and so do mortgage lenders, and so do credit cards. Take it from us, you don't need to regulate us. We do good things. And like, we want people to succeed.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

And they were like, listen, mortgage backed securities are so stable. You've never seen a more legitimate financial process.

[C]

We can't exist without good workers, so we would never pay them low wages or put them in one of the highest injury warehouses the North America. They're going to say that their intentions are aligned with treating their employees well and treating their workers well and having good working conditions. And on some level that's simply not true. Because if it were true, we wouldn't have low wage workers, we wouldn't have warehouse accidents, we wouldn't have some firms be worse employers and have worse accidents than others. And so I, I think that you can take all these firms with a little bit of a grain of salt, but on some level, I need to hear what you have to say. But I want to set the floor for everyone.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Right, right.

[C]

I say I want to. I mean, like, I unfortunately am just like girl in a closet with a microphone.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, but you're girl in a closet with a microphone who testifies before Congress. I'm actually girl in a closet with a microphone.

[Hannah]

True.

[C]

Well, you know what? This is what this economy needs. We need more girls in closets with microphones telling it like it is and calling out some like big paid male CEOs that are like, we value all our employees. That's why they work well.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

And I was gonna say, if you wanna get like, let's expand the boundaries of the conversation outside the US and what we're doing to the workers that we employ in other parts of the world, because that's where you're gonna see really up stuff. Stuff. Well, kids, I appreciate you joining us again to answer that question and talk through that a little bit more. And I guess we'll see you again pretty soon to talk about tariffs.

[C]

Tariffs.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Hopefully another very wide ranging conversation. So thanks for joining us again.

[Hannah]

Thank you.

[C]

Thanks for having me back. And I look forward to talking all about tariffs.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay, so we also heard from Shannon. This actually came in literally four minutes before we started recording. So Shannon, right under the wire, excellent timing. Who I think raised a really good point. She said this was an engaging and informative discussion. I did think, however, that the episode was surprisingly devoid of discussion on how racism and racial inequity informs wealth distribution and capitalism in the US including the fact that free black labor was the main principle in practice that launched the US economy and helped it achieve its current scale. Scale. To the extent the podcast explores similar issues in the future, I recommend engaging in a more comprehensive discussion that acknowledges, or at least explores how the wealthy use racism as a tool to exacerbate class divisions and wealth inequality in the U.S. moreover, the discussion could explore how any reforms intended to correct for wealth inequality should aim to benefit the most disenfranchised among us to have an any chance of being effective. The Whiteness of Wealth, how the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans and how we can fix it. A 2021 book by Doroth Brown is one of many resources that could inform this discussion.

[Hannah]

Yeah, that's spot on too because I think I talk to a lot of people who say, well my family would have had generational wealth if we weren't enslaved. We've talked about this. Even the way the towns are built are built in ways that are meant to divide class and race. And so I think there's a lot there worthy of exploring. So thank you Shannon for bringing that up.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, I remember reading this book when it first came out out and it was pretty eye openening. So it would be interesting to interview Dorothy Brown.

[Hannah]

Yeah.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

One of the more interesting factoids that I've learned in the last couple of years, I think we talked to Donald Cohen about which is basically like the degradation of public goods in America was basically because of racism, white people did not want to share public goods with black people. And so they thought we want our own stuff that we can privately pay for that we have the power to exclude who we want from using it. And public goods after the Civil Rights act like that was not possible anymore. And I just thought that that was really interesting of like of course, of course that's why we don't have high speed rail.

[Hannah]

Well, Dorothy Brown also is the person who wrote the piece on your home's value is based in racism, I think and so I would love to bring her onto the show.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Was that the really the New York Times?

[Hannah]

I believe it was cross posted there.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah. Deep dive. Okay, so the TLDR is that. Shannon, you're spot on and I think we should do a bigger episode about this.

[Hannah]

Agreed. One last piece of feedback that I think actually feels really pertinent to right now is Lisa who wrote I appreciated the positivity but as a Canadian boring long term rebalanced. But don't worry investor. I'm seriously considering pulling my American home holdings. I have Canadian index funds that hold US markets and I'm worried you guys are not coming back from this and my money will be incinerated. It seems like you are all going the way of Russian and Hungarian economies. I never thought I'd feel this way but I can see the billionaire class will be fine through this. Not sure about the rest of the economy.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah. So I think I'm an optimistic person by nature, tempered by Like a crash course in leftist theory that makes me less optimistic. But I also realize that it's easy to be optimistic when you are personally comfortable and like, your needs are personally met. And I do not overlook the fact that, like, my material existence and just the reality of my life makes it much easier for me to take a longer term view and be like, it'll be fine. We'll figure it out. So I'm actually not gonna weigh in on that element of this yet today. Cause I think that it would still be a little bit early at this point to be making predictions of that nature or like trying to assess whether or not that concern is legitimate based on, on the implications of what just happened, which was two days ago the tariffs were announced. Yesterday the stock market started to crash. So things are changing rapidly. And the one thing that I do think is worth noting, and I want to make sure we reflect back here, is just that, man, it is so crazy how fast things change. Because, oh my gosh, in 2021, the euphoria about US markets was so extreme that even suggesting that people diversify outside of US holdings and like, own companies that are in other countries was like, okay, Boomer, sure, yeah, yeah, I'll diversify internationally, sure. Like, I felt crazy every time we would encourage people to invest in diversified assets that held international stocks.

[Hannah]

I remember getting emails from people being like, well, why wouldn't.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I'm like, okay, well, Nvidia is going to the moon. Don't you know? It does really emphasize though, the value of these companies is only as strong as the regulatory environment they exist within. If the rule of law breaks down in the United States, kind of doesn't really matter what they're doing, because that is like the fundamental assumption that all of that wealth is built on that laws are enforceable, that the SEC has power, that. That any of this matters. So you start chipping away those fundamental assumptions and it doesn't take much for stuff to start to crumble. And I still feel to some extent like it's an unpopular position in US Personal finance advice to talk about owning things outside of the US Stock market. It's just crazy to get messages like this from people in Canada a couple years later and have it be like, genuinely representative, I think, of the century intimate about the direction that this country is heading in. So I guess we'll leave it there for now. But we should come back to this. Yeah.

[Hannah]

So we'll see what happens with that. Let's switch gears and talk about our most recent episode.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yep. Okay. So this was money, fashion and the aesthetics of class politics. And I got one particularly long and like really funny email from a listener about this one, Amy, and I liked this insight because it felt felt like it actually hit on a bunch of the things that we've talked about on this show before. If you want to read that for us, she said.

[Hannah]

I am a relatively new listener. To be honest, I can't even remember how your podcast found its way into my awareness, but you have absolutely been killing it with content that relates to my life. I'm a 40 year old mom of one working remotely as an apparel designer. Today's episode with Barony Kyland was so apropos. I was a designer for Abercrombie from 2008 to 2011 and then in CAPS she writes the stories. Then she says at the same time, one of my college's alums was the head designer for the row. After I got laid off from a F, I moved to a smaller licensed apparel company run by an out of touch Porsche Cayenne driving deadhead.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Hey, sorry, there's nothing wrong with driving a Porsche suv.

[Hannah]

Okay, continue, she said. I also fully admit that in a moment of weakness I got into an online argument with someone about the questionable quality and ethics of Evie's raw milk matrix. Yes, you could not have described my experience working in the world of fashion any more succinctly, something that was not brought up in the episode. That I think also plays into classism in fashion is access to getting a degree in fashion design. A majority of their renowned schools offering fashion education are private and located in expensive cities. I graduated from the University of Cincinnati, one of the few public schools with a well known fashion school school out of state tuition rates basically made it marginally more affordable than the private options for students outside of Ohio. The cost of school ices out most kids who do not come from means it just adds more fuel to the cycle of wealth maintaining control of the aesthetics of status. That's a brilliant line. Then she says Additionally, access to apparel fabric yardage is becoming more challenging. When I was in school we had multiple independent fabric stores within driving distance. Joanne Fabrics killed the competition and now they're closing.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I think they got private equity.

[Hannah]

Oh, who surprised there?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, plundered.

[Hannah]

Isn't that like Walgreens and CVS now too?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yep, yep.

[Hannah]

See what happens. I don't know where students outside of New York and Los Angeles are going to get fabrics for school projects. I think we're going to see larger groups of creatives deconstructing thrifted garments to use the fabric in new ways. A new ground up movement akin to punk. I see maximalist design as a stealth way of trying to appear thrifty while being expressed expensive. It's the same way the industry answered calls for sustainability by greenwashing. It's all cyclical baby. Lastly, fashion design is an incredibly difficult field to be in for wealth accumulation. Sydney Sweeney was a great tie in. Fashion designers also tend to be revered and at the same time seen as a luxury and not a necessity. Industrial design is the hard good counterpart to fashion and is much more lucrative. One theory I have is that fashion ties into domestic roles and historically draws women. There was only one guy in my graduating class in 2008. Industrial design is a traditionally male dominated field and is frequently seen as a more technology based science. Personally, I could do without a technology advanced ergonomic toaster. I will always need a high quality great fitting pair of pants we also.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Got this email from Meredith about this episode which was extremely poetic, so we're going to read it in full. She wrote, Excellent episode. I've been listening since the beginning and as someone who also grew up in the Midwest and went to Catholic school school I just want to say thank you. You both have helped me deconstruct the world around me and offered a lens I didn't know I needed. I've been eagerly waiting for you to explore the topic of art more deeply, especially how it intersects with money and class politics. As an interior designer and a lover of all forms of creative expression, product design, event design, art, fashion, I wanted to share how your conversation resonated with me. Interior design, much like fashion, holds immense power. It shapes the way we feel, behave and connect with our surroundings. It can bring joy, calm, beauty and dignity into our lives. But as your episode so insightfully pointed out, with fashion, that impact is often reserved for those who can afford it. In my experience, the vast majority of people who invest in thoughtful, elevated interiors are the welcome. Many developers and clients still see interior design as superficial or a nice to have, not essential, especially in projects aimed at the average person. But I see design as deeply human. Architectural details, materiality, scale, all of it frames the human experience. Design can signal safety, wellness, identity, and yes, class. There's a stark difference between the detail and care put into a custom luxury home and what you find in affordable housing housing. I've designed both. One feels personal, artful and intentional. The other often feels purely functional, stripped down and cost driven. In fact, I believe modern design is the architectural equivalent of fast fashion Marketed as sleek minimalism, but often driven by cost efficiency and mass production. It's why we're now seeing a resurgence of maximalism. Vintage collecting and detail, rich interiors, visual key that subtly mimic the aesthetics of wealth and quote, authenticity. Think about the popularity of Magnolia Studio, McGee or Chip and Joanna Gaines. All sold at Target. They reflect a high end Midwest middle class aesthetic, A curated comfort that's aspirational yet accessible. Meanwhile, the truly wealthy are collecting one of a kind pieces. Heirloom furniture and designer decor you would never find on a retail shelf. Or hiring these designers for their custom homes. It's the same dynamic you discussed with fashion. A trickle down of taste with the most exclusive styles remaining out of reach. I recently went through a creative transformation planning my wedding. It reminded me again that the more detailed and artful the experience, the more energy and intimacy it holds. And that level of care is often only achievable with financial privilege. Now living in a highly designed apartment in Denver. What's up? Where are you? Email me I feel the impact every day. Better materials, natural light, storage, a thoughtful layout. All of it has noticeably improved my mood. Our last apartment felt dark, cramped and cheap by comparison. But the truth is, access to this kind of beauty and comfort comes at a price. And that is the core tension. I believe everyone deserves to live in spaces that elevate their lives. But not everyone can afford harmony, whether it's in their home, their clothing, or even their makeup. Up. Ultimately, this episode affirmed a belief I've long held. Interior design, like fashion, is a visual language of class. It is art, it is identity, and it is political.

[Hannah]

Can we actually talk about this for a second?

[C]

Absolutely.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Please.

[Hannah]

I actually had reached out to an interior designer the week before this email came in.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Ooh.

[Hannah]

And yeah, it was a very sobering experience because turns out this person that I had reached out to actually would have been my name neighbor. But they ended up selling their house and moving a couple blocks away. When I looked up their house, it was worth over a million dollars and I was like, okay, well we are operating on two different playing fields here. But it reminded me when I was looking through her portfolio the way that vintage designer and I was talking to a friend who's actually a prop set designer on movies. The way that those people will have agents or reps, go to vintage flea markets, go get the thing on behalf of what they want, and then mark up the price as like their work for finding the piece. But then the person who owns the home doesn't have to look for it and so it has been very eye openening to be experiencing this. And at the same time, I think you know this, Katie. Like, I've always wanted a home. The reason I'm buying a home is because I'm so into interior design and aesthetics and I work from home. And so for me, like, having a space that I felt very comfortable was worth its weight in gold. I would spend more money on that than, than a great fitting pair of pants, as the other person wrote. So this email really connected a lot of the dots that I've been thinking about recently. And it was so well put together. I even looked into this person's email to be like, can I hire you? Because you seem to be very astute. But yeah, yeah, what do you think?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

It's so funny because yesterday I was with an older friend and mentor of mine, somebody who is later in her career and has done extremely well for herself. And she just moved into a home that she had custom designed and she had a painter come in and paint the most beautiful interiors. You would not believe the art and the design in this house. I mean, it's just, it was unbelievable. It felt like a boutique hotel, but like, in a very intimate, like, authentic way. The dream gorgeous. And she was telling me about this friend of hers that she hired to do the interior design work, the painting and the art. And she was telling me that this woman is very clear on the fact that her Clientele is the 1%. That's who she works with, because that's who can afford to pay her team to come in and paint extremely intricate designs that almost look like wallpaper because they're just so detailed.

[Hannah]

We're gonna have to get photos for the show, notes for my own stunning.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

And so it was just, it was wild though, because as I was thinking about it, I was like, yeah, I mean, what a hell of a business model. Even the top 1% is still like 3 and a half million people people. So like, if you're working with people where money is no object and they will fly you wherever, I mean, she has gigs all over the country. She's being flown everywhere to work in these people's homes doing the most detail oriented and elaborate design projects for them. So it did feel timely that this was the email that I was reading around the same time that I was having this conversation. Because, yeah, I've never like looked into hiring an interior designer designer in earnest, but from what I could tell, the last times that I'd even glanced at rates, you're talking like 15 or 20,000 just for like the design element, not including any of the stuff that they're buying for you, that's just like for their services. And I was like, oh, holy shit. Like that's wild.

[Hannah]

I should clarify. I was looking at someone who would help with design for a day and because I was looking at this one part of our new home that has like a. A dining nook.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah.

[Hannah]

And she was like, yeah, a full day is a couple rooms, it'll be $1,500. And I was like, do you do half day?

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

See, I think 1500 seems super, super reasonable for sure.

[Hannah]

But she's going to just measure and tell me what the vibes are. But I can also do that myself. So the question is, what is the expertise she's giving me that feels worth it? And so it's just something you have to weigh out for yourself. But yeah, I went to a friend's sibling's home. It's worth like three or four million dollars and the interior is so, so gorgeous. But obviously everything had been custom done. Everything. Also there was also like a binder when you walk in of how everything.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Oh my God.

[Hannah]

Because you're owning such high end stuff that you need to be aware of. So I don't know. I think I had always known that interior design was related to class and art, but it just feels much more relevant.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

It's like been driven home. Yeah.

[Hannah]

Yeah.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Okay, well, you want to do a little rapid fire?

[Hannah]

Sure. So we have Evie Nicole, who wrote such a good episode. The role of aesthetics and politics is not talked about enough. I've also gone down a techno feudalism rabbit hole like you mentioned and would love to hear more, more about that sometime.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah. I also want to just tack on there. The role of aesthetics in politics has been super top of mind for me after the Kirsty gnome, sexy Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, Homeland Security photo shoot, which. Yes, talk about a trip. I've read a really good piece on that that basically included images that were taken before the main picture was taken. And henna, it shows her walking into the room of all the pre prisoners. All their shirts are on, they're all dressed. Which means in order to get the picture of her standing in front of all those people, they told them to take their shirts off. Isn't that insane?

[Hannah]

That's disturbing and dehumanizing and pathetic that that's what you directed people to do.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Right. It just goes to show like there are, there's a lot of intention and a lot of subtext going into the images that are Coming out that there is an intention to communicate a certain eroticization of power. Power. Anyway. Wild.

[Hannah]

Well, one thing I would say on that is Emily in your phone talks about this a lot, about how something that the GOP and the Trump campaign has done really well is leverage social and social reels and the way that they have high production reels and camera and like. So it's all very intentional. You also had written an essay that kind of talked about this a little bit.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, my most recent essay that was kind of a low key, like White Lotus Season 3 synopsis. Because I mostly just wanted to talk about White Lotus. It dabbled in techno feudalism a little bit. We'll, we'll link it in the show notes. But basically it's this idea that like the attention economy is an equal opportunity exploiter of your time. Like you can't really pay for a better. And by that I mean less addictive, less exploitative version of the attention economy as you become wealthy. Fear. Which makes it a tremendously unique element of modern life that I find really interesting.

[Hannah]

Then we had Jess K. Who wrote curious if you came across anything while researching for this episode about how if a woman is dressed, quote, nice, she's more likely to be taken serious by her health care provider. And I feel like that tracks.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, that is an interesting rabbit hole we could go down here with dressing in a way that, let's just be honest, makes you blend in more easily with like respectable upper class white people. Or if you want a more pretentious academic translation, give us that one star locates you in closer proximity to whiteness. Push his glasses up. Yeah. I will say anecdotally, since I have been wearing normal clothes on a daily basis now and like going to. I've had to go to a lot of appointments because we're about to move. So there's like going to the vet, going to my own healthcare providers, like working with movers. There's like a lot of that sort of like tying up loose end stuff that I've been doing over the last couple, couple weeks. And I do feel like people take me more seriously in public when I dress well, from vets to like car technicians. So that could totally be in my head. But I, I did actually independently have that thought of like, I feel like I'm like getting maybe marginally more respect than I like typically do.

[Hannah]

That's how I felt in Paris when I actually dressed nicely. People, they acted like I could have belonged there. And I was like Gemma Pelhenna. But people did Take me more seriously. Then we had Alma who wrote wow, this was a banger of an episode. Gave me so much to think about. Especially the part about the trad wife aesthetic and as Katie put it, quote, making oppression look luxurious.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah dog, nobody, nobody goes into that cage willingly. You gotta do some interior design in that cage, put some beautiful furniture in it. Give him a soft place to lie down. Yeah. Hannah B Wrote, the idea that these small luxuries like the ice cream placate society into not striving for more or feeling angry that rich people will always have way than we ever will really hits home in the current politics we're living in. Losing the ice cream may be what forces change.

[Hannah]

I posted on my insta that that was the one part of the episode I couldn't stop thinking about and so many people messaged me to say that they agree. So whoever posted that TikTok and prompted that thought really cooked, I fear. So we then heard from Rich T who said Katie and Co. I guess I am and Co. Really enjoyed the episode and they're unique. And Katie, Hannah and Veronique really enjoyed the episode. The degree of which presentation and branding play into our acceptance is more than worth review. Thank you.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

And then Debbie Loki flamed me. She said, I always love how thoughtful and inquisitive Katie is throughout her life journey. I can't wait till her 40s when she notices whatever she wants to wear, buy or think is totally fine. I wonder how her writing style will change. What will get her fired up then? But I really appreciated this because I actually just got highlights around my face again and I feel like a traitor to the cause. Thanks, Debbie. I actually can't remember where I read it now, but there was a quote that I had read a while back about how part of the challenge that 2010's popular feminism introduced was that it sort of lost the material class considerations element and instead replaced it with this idea that feminism is something you are and not something you do. So in other words, you can quote, be a good feminist by living out political ideals in your personal life. And I don't know, I think the shortcomings of that mentality when it's not paired with like material change more broadly. But I am going to toss out a book recommendation while we're at it for anyone who's really into feminist theory. It is called Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis. It is one of the most rigorous yet extremely readable books I have have come across in recent memory. I recommended it to my co host of Diabolical lies, Caro. And she texted me. She's like, I'm five pages in and I'm tingling. She was like, this is incredible. So definitely recommend that.

[Hannah]

I love that you said feminist theory. It is rigorous. Points, glasses up, nose.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

I have to. I have to live up to this burn.

[Hannah]

Finally, we got Jax, who wrote Relatedly, one of the biggest takeaways for me in the past year of disorganized progressive politics is the tendency of progressives to punish any minor fault within one another and write each other off. The judgment passing absolutely starts at fashion and surface presentation and can prevent us from forming meaningful connections with each other to get the real work done. Which I feel like is very true. But it also reminds me of how we'll often hear about the working class fighting over crumbs to keep us busy instead of, I don't know, the real change that needs to happen at higher levels. Like we are so focused on nitpicking apart little things that we are losing the forest for the trees.

[Katie Gatti Tossan]

Yeah, just the way that it undermines solidarity. And I don't know, sometimes, sometimes it may be a little too theoretical for its own good. I think we talked about that with Chelsea and Burna at the end of last year. Chelsea went on a little rant about that that I thought was pretty, pretty accurate. But that is all for this edition of Rich Girl Roundup. Hope you enjoyed. We'll see you in two weeks when I'll be a Colorado resident once again. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Hannah Velez and me, Katie Gaditasan, with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew. Content and additional fact checking for this show comes from Scott Wilson.