Why Economist Kathryn Edwards is Optimistic About America’s Future

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Why Economist Kathryn Edwards is Optimistic About America’s Future"

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Money with Katie Show
• Host/Author: Morning Brew
• Episode: Why Economist Kathryn Edwards is Optimistic About America’s Future
• Release Date: March 26, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Money with Katie Show, host Katie Gattytossen engages in an in-depth conversation with economist Katherine Edwards, also known as "Keds," to explore the current economic landscape of the United States. Edwards, a Bloomberg columnist and economic policy consultant, provides insightful analysis on capitalism, tax policies, labor protections, and the future of America’s economy. Throughout the discussion, Edwards maintains an optimistic outlook despite acknowledging significant challenges.

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Capitalism and Inequality ([06:55] - [08:47])

Katie opens the discussion by delving into the nature of capitalism and its inherent relationship with income inequality. Edwards explains that capitalism has historically been the most effective economic system for generating wealth and income. However, this prosperity comes with the "catch" of increasing inequality.

Katherine Edwards ([08:22]): "Capitalism creates income and wealth. That moves us from we're all poor to we're all mostly not. But it has a catch. And the catch is inequality."

She differentiates between a market economy and a capitalist economy by highlighting the role of firms in scaling production and creating wealth, while simultaneously noting that capitalism does not inherently ensure fair distribution of this wealth.

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Role of Unions and Worker Protections ([08:47] - [10:51])

Edwards emphasizes the critical role that unions and worker protections play in mitigating inequality within a capitalist framework. She references historical data showing that union participation significantly reduced income inequality from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Katherine Edwards ([11:59]): "The only thing that has successfully reduced income and wealth inequality in states is the power of unions."

Edwards argues that weakening of these protections and the decline of union power have contributed to the rising disparity seen today, attributing much of the current inequality to workers being "left unprotected."

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Tax Cuts: Ineffectiveness and Bias Towards the Rich ([42:10] - [58:51])

A substantial portion of the conversation focuses on tax cuts, their efficacy, and who truly benefits from them. Edwards critiques the repeated implementation of large-scale tax cuts, totaling approximately $7 trillion over the past two decades, arguing that they have little to no positive impact on essential services like childcare and have failed to address social issues.

Katherine Edwards ([42:11]): "What does a tax cut do? It gives everybody in the US a little bit of extra money. ... But there are two problems with it. One, most of the time people immediately spend it on debt."

She further contends that tax cuts predominantly benefit the wealthy, as they receive the largest absolute returns, yet these benefits are minimal in terms of actual economic improvement for the average person.

Katherine Edwards ([47:21]): "Whatever problem you have, they don't have the answer. ... But it does not mean that our best days are behind us."

Edwards highlights the partisan divide surrounding tax policy, noting the Republican Party’s unwavering commitment to tax cuts despite mounting evidence of their inefficacy and financial burden on the federal budget.

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Recession Fears and Economic Resilience ([54:25] - [63:58])

Addressing concerns about potential recessions, Edwards offers reassurance by explaining the nature of economic downturns. She describes recessions as periods of concentrated pain primarily affecting those who lose their jobs, while the majority of the labor force remains employed.

Katherine Edwards ([63:32]): "Recessions are scary and markets go down, firms pull back. ... But even that bad situation does not mean for everybody, doom."

Edwards emphasizes the resilience of the U.S. economy and the opportunities that can arise during downturns, such as the emergence of new businesses and innovation driven by necessity.

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Paid Sick Days: Economic Benefits ([19:15] - [23:09])

One of the standout topics is the implementation of paid sick days and their profound impact on both workers and the broader economy. Edwards argues that providing paid sick leave not only supports individual employees but also benefits employers and the economy by reducing job turnover and maintaining workforce participation.

Katherine Edwards ([23:09]): "What we know about providing sick days is that it helps people retain their job because it's not just that they're not paid for sick days, they can be fired for taking one."

She references studies demonstrating that paid sick leave leads to increased earnings and labor force participation, particularly benefiting women who often bear the responsibility of childcare.

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Education and the Future of Universities ([33:01] - [42:04])

Edwards critiques the current state of higher education, predicting significant financial challenges for universities in the coming decade. She attributes these issues to declining birth rates and increasing disenchantment with the cost and value of traditional college degrees.

Katherine Edwards ([38:07]): "We're about to put work requirements on Medicaid. The earned income tax credit is a massive work requirement."

Edwards warns that without innovative changes, many colleges and universities may face closure, emphasizing the need for policy interventions to support and adapt educational institutions to evolving demographic realities.

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Critique of Milton Friedman ([30:51] - [34:42])

Edwards offers a nuanced critique of Milton Friedman, arguing that his ideas are often oversimplified and misrepresented. While acknowledging Friedman's contributions to economic thought, she points out that he advocated for targeted government interventions rather than absolute free markets.

Katherine Edwards ([31:17]): "He was also someone that said markets aren't always good. ... he was someone who was for a type of policy intervention that was left a smaller government footprint."

She contends that Friedman’s proposals, such as the negative income tax, were attempts to balance market efficiency with social welfare, a balance that is frequently overlooked in modern economic policies attributed to his legacy.

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Empowerment Rhetoric vs. Economic Policies ([73:07] - [82:36])

The discussion shifts to the limitations of empowerment rhetoric, particularly regarding women and poverty. Edwards criticizes the societal tendency to place the onus of overcoming economic hardships on individuals rather than addressing systemic policy failures.

Katherine Edwards ([75:40]): "The women argument for me is the failure of social. Of economic institutions to create a fair economy for women."

She highlights how policies often target personal improvement rather than providing structural support, thereby perpetuating economic disparities and making family life a "privilege" for the economically advantaged.

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Poverty and Policy Failures ([75:40] - [80:50])

Edwards delves into the root causes of poverty, emphasizing that economic insecurity and lack of protective policies are primary contributors. She debunks the myth that poverty is solely a result of individual failings, instead pointing to inadequate economic structures and insufficient government support.

Katherine Edwards ([80:50]): "The problem is them, not our economy. We're dealing out economic risk and insecurity to an incredible degree, and we don't do enough to protect people from it."

Edwards calls for comprehensive policy reforms to address the systemic issues that lead to high poverty risk, rather than relying on narratives that blame individuals for their economic situations.

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Call to Action and Civic Engagement ([82:36] - [84:17])

In the concluding segments, Edwards urges listeners to remain engaged and proactive in advocating for meaningful economic policies. She warns against the dangers of apathy, emphasizing that public voice and action are crucial in combating systemic economic injustices.

Katherine Edwards ([84:17]): "Your silence is their victory. Your apathy is their victory. Your cynicism is the ultimate victory for them. So just don't give them the satisfaction."

Edwards encourages individuals to communicate with their representatives, participate in civic activities, and support policies that promote economic fairness and worker protections.

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Conclusion

Throughout this episode, Katherine Edwards provides a thorough analysis of America's economic challenges and offers a roadmap for fostering a more equitable society. Her optimistic perspective is grounded in evidence-based solutions, emphasizing the need for policy interventions that protect workers, support families, and address systemic inequalities. Katie Gattytossen effectively steers the conversation, ensuring that complex economic concepts are accessible and relevant to listeners.

Notable Quotes:

• Katherine Edwards ([08:22]): "Capitalism creates income and wealth. That moves us from we're all poor to we're all mostly not. But it has a catch. And the catch is inequality."

• Katherine Edwards ([23:09]): "What we know about providing sick days is that it helps people retain their job because it's not just that they're not paid for sick days, they can be fired for taking one."

• Katherine Edwards ([42:11]): "What does a tax cut do? It gives everybody in the US a little bit of extra money... But there are two problems with it. One, most of the time people immediately spend it on debt."

• Katherine Edwards ([80:50]): "The problem is them, not our economy. We're dealing out economic risk and insecurity to an incredible degree, and we don't do enough to protect people from it."

• Katherine Edwards ([84:17]): "Your silence is their victory. Your apathy is their victory. Your cynicism is the ultimate victory for them. So just don't give them the satisfaction."

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Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a vital resource for understanding the intricate dynamics of the U.S. economy and the policies that shape it. Katherine Edwards' expertise provides listeners with a clear perspective on why current economic policies may be falling short and what can be done to create a more equitable and prosperous future for all Americans.

Transcript

[Katie Gattytossen]

Hey, Fidelity.

[Katherine Edwards]

How can I remember to invest every month? With the Fidelity app, you can choose.

[Katie Gattytossen]

A schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs. Huh. That sounds easier than I thought.

[Katherine Edwards]

You got this? Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?

[Katie Gattytossen]

You will find them where you left them. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, llc.

[Katherine Edwards]

Member nyse sipc.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Can we live in precedent at times again, please?

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, I would die for some precedented times. But you know what? The precedent that we're coming out of, I'm tired of it. It's been hard living through some really tough economies. We've been in an economic fever dream for the past five years. But, like, I am ready for that unprecedented that goes my way. The unprecedented. Every worker has paid sick days. Every worker has paid family leave. Every worker has a reasonable shift in schedule and the right to request one. Every kid has meals a day at school. I am ready for that unprecedented time, and I will fight with every word that I have to get there.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Today we are speaking to a woman who knows a thing or two about standing on business. Here she is addressing Congress, speaking on behalf of regular people who are tired of being told that tax cuts are going to solve all of our problems.

[Katherine Edwards]

You know, you reach the point where.

[Katie Gattytossen]

You say we can't do everything.

[Katherine Edwards]

So the fair question is, where's the.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Money going to come from, doc?

[Katherine Edwards]

The majority of federal revenue comes from taxes. So if you need more money, you'll have to raise taxes. I'll remind you, sir, that we have had two massive trillion dollar tax cuts in the past 20 years. And they have done nothing to make child care more affordable. They have done nothing to help the casualty and property insurance that you are talking about today. They have not been invested in children. We have not seen that. I mean, the 2001 tax cuts have now had 22 years to prove that they could solve the social issues that you and your fellow senators say that are a priority. And I don't think we could point to evidence to say that they have worked. I would love for you to give taught child care 20 years. I would love for you to say, let's take two decades of Runway, invest it in young children, and see what kind of return that I could get. But we've never given children or the childcare sector as much Runway as we've given taxes. And I'll remind you that the estate tax exemption right now is $13 million. Well, let me say thank you for the honest answer.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Folks. I'm Katie Gattytossan. And I am in love. That was Katherine Edwards, also known as Keds economist. And today she joins us here on the Money with Katie show to help us make sense of our current economic moment. Will the tax bill pass? Are we going into a recession? Are we already in a recession? Why does it feel like we keep having to talk about recessions every year? What's the most obvious highest return economic policy that we should be instituting nationwide that nobody's really talking about? This might be one of the most fun and widest ranging conversations that we have ever had on this show. Katherine got her PhD in economics almost 10 years ago and she currently works as a columnist for Bloomberg and an economic policy consultant for the US government. Which gives me frankly, a tremendous amount of relief because her expertise and her research chops are clear in her writing. But she has a way of communicating these ideas to people like me who barely passed Econ 101. And in my defense, okay, Econ 101 was like a very trickle down economics sympathetic course. So I like to think that I was just maybe a little bit ahead of my time. She used to work for the Rand Corporation, which is a very well respected and influential think tank known for rigorous and evidence based analysis. And one major theme in her work is the difference between policies that are good for you as a person and good economic policies, which is a distinction that I think we're sorely missing in the US this is a conversation about the economy, yes, but maybe a better way to define economics is the study of power and how power imbalances shape our lives, culture and country. Who has power in the modern economic system and how did they get it? How do we think about things like individual freedom and personal choice in a life dictated by the bounds of our disposable income? And why is the US government so obsessed with tax cuts? All that and more in this conversation with Katherine Edwards, right after a quick break. When you're looking to buy your dream home, should you sell your current digs and use the equity or should you rent your space and utilize the rental income? That's the situation that Kris and Dan found themselves in and after working with Domain Money, they learned their best option was to sell their home. It even set up Kris to pursue their dream consulting business and not rely on a W2 job anymore, which we love to see. Whatever big life events you have coming up, whether that's the dream home, planning for kids or an upcoming wedding, working with a certified financial planner can ensure you are making the right decisions I started working with an incredible flat fee CFP Katie Song @ the beginning of this year and you can hire her too. Get started by booking a free strategy session with Domain Money. You can then select Katie or anybody else on her team of CFPs as she's trained herself and your advisor will create a step by step financial plan to help you achieve your goals. And you only pay a one time flat fee. Check out Domain Money and start building your financial plan [e-mail] domain money that's moneywithkatie.com domain money I'm a real client of Domain Money via Money with Katie. I receive compensation and have an incentive to promote Domain Money. These stories are based loosely on real scenarios of actual clients of Domain Money. We have changed some facts and circumstances. For privacy reasons. Similar outcomes are not guaranteed. See important disclosures at DMNMNY co X. Okay Keds, may I call you kids? Is that cool?

[Katherine Edwards]

Of course.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Okay, well, welcome to the Money with Katie show. I would like to start with a softball question which is Capitalism. What's it all about?

[Katherine Edwards]

What's it all about, Alfie?

[Katie Gattytossen]

What's it all about? I would love to engage your wonkish side for a moment, which is that there are two ways that we know to measure income inequality. You can look at the before intervention numbers. So these are like if left completely untouched by government taxation or any sort of redistributive policy, what would our economy look like? What would our world look like? Then you have the after intervention numbers which represent the way that things shake out after the government intervenes. And you've written in the past that you see the core of this problem as the fact that we are actually producing too much inequality and that that is not an inevitable outcome, that is a choice. And so often we debate about how much and how the government should be intervening to like, okay, well this is really bad, so this is how we should tax this group or this is what this group should get. But I thought your point actually reframed this question really nicely, which is why does the system that we have produce outcomes that require so much intervent intention to fix in the first place? If it is a choice, what are the choices that we are making that is creating this reality?

[Katherine Edwards]

Well, we live in a capitalist economy. And the reason why we live in a capitalist economy is because it is the economy that has proven throughout the history of time to produce the most income and wealth for the people who live in it. So if you look at the world before capitalism, which is really the world before the industrial revolution, we're all poor and we die pretty quickly.

[Katie Gattytossen]

This is like feudalism, slavery.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, this is like really up to the 1800s, we had self sufficient farming, we had limited markets where people sold their wares. But when you think of capitalism in kind of the historical context, what it really is is the introduction of the firm that you would have someone who specializes in a production, that they can produce it at larger volumes than just say one guy alone in his shop making shoes. Right. You're gonna go from someone makes shoes in their kind of small studio that they sell at a market to a firm that employs people to produce shoes. And that, that's the difference between a market economy and a capitalist economy, is how production is utilized by a firm. So what we found, or what has been proven true in history, is that capitalism creates income and wealth. That moves us from we're all poor to we're all mostly not. But it has a catch. And the catch is inequality. It does not distribute income, does not distribute wealth that equally or that fairly through an economy, even though it's very good at creating it. And so the, the role of government systems in a capitalist economy is to basically rein it in so that it isn't left to its truly unfair devices. When we talk about how to do that on the production side, before the government steps in with the tax system, we're talking about things like regulating workplace safety, regulating how much paid and how long you can work. And when we're regulating things like how easy is it for you to unionize? Can you band together with your coworkers to demand better wages? Is that protected? How well do we protect that? So much of the worker protections that would give workers the power to wrestle that income and wealth from the owners of capital has eroded over the 20th and 21st century. So what we're suffering from now isn't necessarily capitalism run amok so much as it is workers left unprotected. And on our own. We're not really a match for the ownership class.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Hmm. Workers left unprotected. Okay, this is interesting. Are you familiar with Grace Blakely? She is in the uk, She's a journalist, but she also, you know, is very, very well versed in the economy. And she wrote a book called Vulture Capitalism, which essentially argued that it's, it's not just that government intervention is failing, but that it is intervening on behalf of the ownership class now. It is consolidating their power and effectively fueling it with the legitimacy of the state and the power of the state. So kind of the classic example here would be 2008. You know, we get this kind of grand socialist intervention, but it's socialism on behalf of the bankers. And like, hopefully it's all going to trickle down to everyone else. And we know exactly how that plays out. So that would be my only, I guess, addition or question there is is do you agree with that characterization? And do you think that then, like, redirecting the power of the state toward labor power is a remedy for it?

[Katherine Edwards]

It's certainly a remedy because economic research and evidence will tell you it is. The only thing that has successfully reduced income and wealth inequality in states is the power of unions. So a group of economists based out of and led by an economist at Princeton used historical data on union participation, which peaked really in the 15 years after the National Labor Relations act and accelerated during the unionization of war production during World War II. That when you have unions, you see income inequality. I mean, not just decrease. It knows to dive. This was what we call the golden middle of the 20th century. From around 1940 to 1980, you saw the bottom of income earners in the United States take home more and more and more of the pie. And around 1980, that went the other direction to the point where we've retrenched to have greater inequality than we did before the National Liberations Act. I mean, we're kind of living in the 1928, not a great time to be associated with ERA. That's the type of inequality that we have now. For my part, I don't know how malicious this turn was. I think that there were really good, if misguided, motivations around wanting to make sure that job producers remained in the US the idea that businesses, if they were faced with too much regulation, wouldn't produce as much in the US Wouldn't have as many jobs here. And they were correcting for what they saw as a different problem. And I think that it's less. A lot of evil men sitting around a table a la like the stone cutters of the Simpsons, where they're like taking that toast and they're like gentlemen to evil, right? It's like. It's not like. It's not. I don't think it's that. I mean, there's surely malicious people out there. But I think a lot of policymakers and a lot of people who created this vulture system were overcorrecting for what they saw as a risk to our whole system, which is that firms didn't have the freedom to operate. They had a lot of regulations they were facing. I mean, I think now we can kind of look back and be like, wow, was that overblown? I mean, did you react to at a hundred to maybe a problem that was at a 3? And we're all suffering for it, but I don't. I think that they weren't as maliciously motivated and that you shouldn't lose faith in humanity over what has progressed. We make mistakes as a country and as an economy, and it matters that we learn from them. What did we learn from the 20th century? Empowering workers and having strong unions lets us wrestle some income and wealth for the bottom. Disempowering them and putting too much power and control at the hands of the top leads to gross income inequality and not enough government intervention on the bottom's behalf. So we don't need to do that again. I mean, you can choose to do that again, but I prefer we didn't. Right. So we just have to move forward with this knowledge. I'm going to say it's not a good look. She makes a point. It's not a good look. But if you believe that we want to do better for our economy, the solutions are there.

[Katie Gattytossen]

What I'm hearing when you're saying this is like there wasn't some grand conspiracy ushered in by Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan tapping their fingers together, going, yes, yes, we're going to make all the CEOs very rich and everyone else very poor. And it's going to be very fun for us. I appreciate kind of the optimism you bring to this of like, the answer is we, we know what the end. We kind of did it before, but that's where I would say, and I'm very happy that people like you are policy advisors and are actually like, in a position of leadership and influence that gives me great relief and helps me sleep at night. I think that what I would counter with from my conspiratorial pessimism doomer side of things is like, it concerns me that it does not feel we've learned this lesson very well.

[Katherine Edwards]

I think one of the things that we're all in right now is in the moment of cataclysmic change. And we can see that every day when we read the news. And I think that the election of Donald Trump was in some way the anger about what has happened to the economy. The real wages of US workers for the bottom 60% have been for all intents and purposes, flat for almost 50 years. I mean, we're suffering from an economy that has not seen a very Good labor market, very high wage growth. We've had three brutal recessions this century, and that catches up to people. And I felt like the electorate in 2024, in some ways, I was just so grateful to see that they were finally mad about this, that the economy and the lack of vitality and success in the economy was the issue. I am not making it, and I need to see some change. I try to keep the momentum and the perspective forward. Looking to say, look, we've been told unequivocally what the problem is. The electorate has said, this is the priority now. All right? The guy they picked, not exactly a man of the people or the working class, but that means that the solution is yet to come and that the more he destroys, the more we have to build. But we can build it. So I try to keep that level of optimism.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah, that's fair. I think that there's also the side of this that's like, had the country taken a different path, it is more than likely we would have just gotten more of the same.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, it could be. I mean, change is hard.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Change is hard.

[Katherine Edwards]

And inflation, from a historical perspective, inflation breaks people's basic budgets, and it pushes a lot of people over the edge. Where you're standing on a cliff and inflation is the strong wind at your back that can push you over, and it reorganizes our economy in some way because it takes people who maybe had things in their economic life that were not working, that they were stretched thin, and it just kicks them right over the edge, and it makes them demand something different and something more. And we saw this happen in the late 70s, which that inflation was much worse than what we went through. And it ushered in this era where people essentially blamed the big government regulation for a lot of their woes. And they wanted to see government out and markets in, and they wanted. We deregulated every industry we could think of and then some. And when we ran out, we just kept going. If we're gonna pivot in a. In a correction, historians would probably say this is about the time when it happens.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Wow. Oh, I just got chills.

[Katherine Edwards]

Oh, good.

[Katie Gattytossen]

We're living in a historical moment. I know.

[Katherine Edwards]

I'm like, oh, my God, aren't we.

[Katie Gattytossen]

So tired of it, though? Can we live in precedent at times again, please?

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, I would die for some precedent at times. But you know what? You know what? The precedent that we're coming out of, I'm tired of it. Like, yeah, it's been hard living through some really tough economies. We've been in an economic fever dream for the past five years. But like I am ready for that unprecedented, that goes my way. The unprecedented. Every worker has paid sick days. Every worker has paid family leave. Every worker has a reasonable shift in schedule and the right to request one. Every kid has two meals a day at school. Every kid has childcare and after school and summer and we start taking the privilege out of childhood and putting the fairness back in. Like I am ready for that unprecedented time and I will fight with every word that I have to get there.

[Katie Gattytossen]

You've left me speechless. I want to talk about sick days for a second then. Oh yeah, because something that you, something that you said recently actually gave me a lot of hope, which was how could America's economic future not be brighter if we don't even have paid sick days yet? And you meant this is such a basic, basic table stakes good economic policy that we do not have. And if we don't even have the basics yet, how could we possibly say that our best days are behind us? And so a little bit of background. One in five private sector workers do not have any paid sick time. But the numbers jump up dramatically to almost one in two if we're talking about part time workers and we're talking about people in the bottom 25% of the income distribution. So I'm curious like if I am someone who has paid sick time already and I'm like, yeah, but I'm good. Why, why should I still care about this? Why does this still affect me?

[Katherine Edwards]

It makes the economy bigger. What I would tell people is sometimes you just are moved by the people who would benefit from it. Like universal school lunch. Like kids don't go hungry at school. Be sympathetic enough towards children that you want them to have not do worse in school because they're hungry. So you know that's about the kids. But maybe you like low key hate part time, low paid workers like leisure and hospitality, customer service, retail sector, they don't have that much education, they're working dead end jobs and maybe you truly just don't care about them. That's fine. You don't have to care about people for the economic policy to be right. And what we know about providing sick days is that it helps people retain their job because it's not just that they're not paid for sick days, they can be fired for taking one. So what happens is that you have people who work in these really precarious jobs where something happens like they get sick or more likely their kid gets sick. They can't show up to work and then they lose their job and then they have to find another one. And that period of time that they spend out, that hurts the economy to have people not maintain their jobs, to not maintain their labor force participation. The economy wants all its little worker bots working all of the time. One study of mandated paid sick leave in sick days looked in particular at the benefits to women who didn't have a college degree. Women are very vulnerable to not having sick days because they're the caretakers of children. And while humans get sick every once in a while, children are sick literally all the time. I mean, the CDC says it's normal for a kid to have five to 12 colds a year. They're always sick and they can be sent home. But what they found was that when you had the right to paid sick days and you could accumulate paid sick time, women of this kind of particular category, they earned $2,000 more a year. They didn't take $2,000 worth of sick days. They were able to maintain stable employment. That resulted in $2,000 more in earnings and their labor force participation was higher. It is a simple equation that our economy is a function of the number of people actually working in it. Or kind of as a parallel, like the other side of the coin is our economy is a direct function of how much households have to spend. So when you fire people for being sick, you limit their work and their income. And those are both bad things to do in an economy. So give them sick days. And what I'll point out is $2,000 a year is the size of the child tax credit. So you're putting a lot of weight on your tax paying shoulders because you're letting employers getting away with not paying money that these workers deserve. So if you think we shouldn't have to reward people through the tax system, I'm with you, man. I think employers should have paid them that in the first place. I mean, it's a, it's not a small amount of money that's at stake for certain people.

[Katie Gattytossen]

So there are some real use cases or real studies that we can look to in the real world of towns or states that implemented sick days. And like we could see what happened. It did not cause joblessness. There weren't these like negative economic outcomes that you might be warned would happen because there's this supposedly very rational Pareto optimal lever where like, if you pay people more than jobs go away, or if you do this, then this happens. And that, that really wasn't what we saw.

[Katherine Edwards]

There's two Objections. One of them, I think is theoretical, and it's very much like insider baseball, how economists talk about things. And the other one is a bit more political. So the theoretical one is that if you make workers too expensive, firms will use them less. So something like requiring people to have paid sick days, a classic economic argument would be, well, you're making expensive than their productivity to the firm, so the firm won't employ them. And so anything. This is the same argument against the minimum wage, it's the same arguments against retail shifts or paid family leave is that if you make workers too expensive relative to what they add in value, you'll demand them less and therefore you'll have fewer jobs.

[Katie Gattytossen]

This is basically saying, like, you bleeding heart people, you think that you're helping these people by forcing these policies, but you're actually hurting them. The thing that you think is gonna help is actually gonna have this unintended consequence that's gonna make their lives worse. And you just don't get it.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, I was talking to this really prominent conservative economist in an off the record meeting and he was like, I just think Democrats don't care about the poor. And I was like, so how do you feel about paid sick days? And he's like, well, exactly. You wanna make those people lose their jobs. How heartless are you? And then I was like, he believes this to his core, that we are the bad guys for making these people more expensive. The theoretical argument against this, like you're making workers marginally more expensive than their marginal productivity to the firm, is that they're already not paid their productivity and that they don't exist in a competitive labor market in which they are paid what they are worth. They are in an uncompetitive labor market where workers have less power and employers have concentrated power. And they use that to pay people less than they're worth. Yeah, that really comes down to how competitive markets are and how you think that's absorbed by policy changes. And that's the theoretical argument. What comes up a lot as the act actual objection expressed by industry is this will make us close. If you make me pay paid sick days, I'll have to shut down. Two things about that. The first is one of the most insightful newspaper articles I have ever read was a story in the Washington Post almost 10 years ago about a leaked internal presentation from the Chamber of Commerce. It was reporting on polling of its members where it found, I mean, the headline was, more than 80% of Chamber of Commerce members were for raising the minimum wage. The Chamber of Commerce is the number one opponent of minimum wage increases. They have been against every single labor law that has ever been proposed in the United States back to child labor and the Fair Labor Standards act of 1938. Their members don't agree with this, but essentially their political strategy is that if one member is hurt, they'll close ranks around the minority as opposed to majority.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Oh, my God.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yes. So when someone says, like, I'll shut down, I'm like, I don't know. The other part of it is firms close a lot. And to the extent that you. When you talk about economics, you have to have a little bit of heartlessness to you. What is the cost to our economy of orchestrating all of labor policy around the protections of 170 million workers, around keeping a fringe set of establishments open in substandard conditions? There have been studies of the minimum wage, like the end of the tipped minimum wage and what that did to restaurants. You have to pay all workers, including the ones that serve you food, the minimum wage. And the minimum wage is gonna go up. Did restaurants close? Yeah, they did. What was fascinating is that in this study where they looked at the effect of the wage, the restaurants that closed were the ones that had the lowest Yelp reviews. Oh, basically, the really good restaurants, the ones that were five stars, they did great. They were fine. In fact, they kind of increased their business. And the people who were at the kind of the margins of staying open, they were the ones that were closed that had to. That went out of business. So it sets up for you. The question is not, is it okay that a firm closes, but what are you willing to sacrifice for workers and the economy just to subsidize businesses that are not performing, aren't very good.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah.

[Katherine Edwards]

And it's hard to say, but y'all businesses close all the time. What year is it? 2025. Katie, what year were you born?

[Katie Gattytossen]

1994.

[Katherine Edwards]

1994. Oh, my God. That's so cute. How many? So I was born in 1985. So how many businesses around in 2025 were around in 1994?

[Katie Gattytossen]

Oh, my God.

[Katherine Edwards]

Probably like, six, you know, or 1985, when I was born, or in 2001 when I got my first job? Workers will live much longer than the firms that employ them.

[Katie Gattytossen]

And isn't the whole point of capitalism that, like, this is the, like, calling process that's supposed to happen? You're supposed to have the archaic ones kind of die out and the new innovator upstarts come in? That's the whole point of the system.

[Katherine Edwards]

I thought you're putting your thumb on competition in support of the people who shouldn't be there. Now that sounds harsh for businesses, but it's important to remember that we live in one of the most business friendly economies that the world has ever seen. And if your business fails, congratulations, you get to start another one. There's no law or no rule that says if you had a business that didn't succeed, you never get to have a business again. And in fact, if you talk to people who run businesses, they will tell you there is a reason why most people's first business can only get financing from friends and family. Because even banks know the first one's not going to be great and then they're going to learn and then they're going to move on to financing. And so I don't say casually let them fail, but that is the system that we live in. And we put a lot of resources and benefits to workers to keep people open with questionable economic returns. I mean, the economic returns of sick days are unquestionable. The economic returns of not having sickness six days to subsidize businesses that are not profitable enough to pay them is questionable.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Bars, dude.

[Katherine Edwards]

Especially when they get to start another business.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Bars. Last week we were talking about Milton Friedman. I kind of made a joke, you know, you were kind of walking me through some of this and I was like, oh man, I wish I could go back in time and tell Milton Friedman like, yeah, what do you got to say about that, dude? Like, oh, intervention is actually help. Interesting. And you kind of were like, like, yeah, you know, there's actually a lot to Milton Friedman, like it's mis. In his, you know, ideas that are kind of misconstrued or misunderstood today. There, there are nuances and caveats that that actual person in history had and made that have been kind of sanded down the sides of this like, free market purist ideology that he often gets ascribed to him. And so I, I wanted to take a second. Maybe the only time on this show where I will say defend Milton Friedman from the, from the jokes and the digs. But I do feel like it kind of matters because I think there is maybe a superficial or misguided understanding of like when we're even talking about free markets or intervention, what that even means or what that originally would have meant by the people who like, supposedly championed it.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, I would wonder if other economists would agree with me if I say, you know, in little ways he's a caricature of himself. He had a big personality. He had big ideas. And I think that he got very much like, adopted and idolized of markets are perfect. Like markets are perfect, markets are best. We need to have markets. I mean, he is the intellectual father of high financialization and deregulation.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Going super well.

[Katherine Edwards]

Going super well. But he was also someone that said markets aren't always good. And in fact, he's associated with a lot of ideas of overcoming what ways in which markets are not successful or in which markets fail. They weren't always good. They weren't all winners. But he was someone who was for a type of policy intervention that was left a smaller government footprint. Not that government didn't need to intervene, but that the footprint could be smaller. And he tried to argue for sophistication in government intervention as opposed to a big footprint. And. And some of those ideas were very popular, salient, appealing, but they weren't a purist of, like, markets and nothing else. So one of his probably most popular ideas was the negative income tax. The economy produces too many people that do not have enough money to live, and they don't have enough money to buy things that they need to buy, like housing or food or healthcare. The government comes in and starts to provide those services themselves. He thought that a simpler way to do it would be to have an income below which you would basically pay a negative income tax, and the government would just give you cash as opposed to services. A recognition of the fact that the labor market and all these capitalist markets didn't result in people having enough money, but a solution that was trying to get at like, let's throw more money at the problem directly to people and not have it go through government. So another one, which is a little bit more obscure, has to do with student loans.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Interesting.

[Katherine Edwards]

Again, the government stepping in seems a.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Little ahead of his time there with that one.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, the government stepping in and saying the market for student loans is not sufficient, sufficiently provided by the private sector. So the government will both finance the loans and regulate them, but also guarantee them. Well, he thought that's too much interference on financialization on the government side. And, you know, one way to go about it would be to have basically reverse loans so that rather than pay upfront, you pay after you leave through a garnishment of wages. So everyone who graduates from your school pays like 5% of their earned income back to the school for a set period of time. And that would incentivize schools to put kids into good jobs. So they would outline their. Basically align the goals of the person, align the incentives.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah.

[Katherine Edwards]

And Align the incentive of the person who wants to have, you know, higher income and goes to college to get a better job with the school itself to make sure it produces productive people. And in fact, there was a period of time in which Yale tried something similar. These are actually getting a second life. And this type of inverted financing has its own industry today. But again, it comes down to. It's not like he thought markets could solve the problem of people are unable to afford the down payment on a human capital investment like school that would garnish get them higher earnings in the long run. He just tried to think of an intervention that had as least government interaction as possible. So, yeah, you end up with these purists who were like, you know, getting Friedman tattoos and putting on there like, oh well, you know, the government can't do anything. I mean, for what it's worth, none of his fixes were ever really adopted the same way.

[Katie Gattytossen]

His critiques were, oh, that's a bar too, kids. Jeez, God, I feel like wind blown right now. You've got so many, many good one liners. Oh my God.

[Katherine Edwards]

Oh my God. Thank you. I'm blushing. Y'all stop. You can't compliment a southerner to their face. Like, I have to like, I'm like right. I'm going off camera.

[Katie Gattytossen]

You're literally moving away from the microphone. You're backing away. The body language is like, oh no. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Choosing the right credit card can be daunting. Among the countless credit card options Apple carries card stands apart. You get up to 3% daily cash back on your purchases every day. That daily cash can automatically earn interest when you open a high yield savings account through Apple Card. Apply for Apple card in the wallet app on iPhone and see a credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple card owners subject to eligibility savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and [e-mail] Come here's a story my e Commerce listeners in particular will appreciate. A company called Lux 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 happen 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 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 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 this is really the role of economists, I suppose, or the role that we've given them is that it is assumed, the underlying assumption of all of these things that we are optimizing for productivity, we're optimizing for income, we are optimizing for wealth. And I think it's worth asking the question, I mean, on that student loan idea, it's like, is that a creative solution? Sure. Would that align incentives for maximizing income? Yeah, that's what it's designed to do. But then there's like, but is there a role for edu? Like, do we want the role of education in society to be all about making sure people make as much money as possible? Is there value in education that does not come down to. Because I think what you get in that situation is sort of like the obsession with like STEM jobs in the 2000s and 2010s, which is like the humanities, literature, critical thinking. We just want to make, you know, you need to become a developer. But is that really the world that we want to live in? Like, these are all questions that I think it's worth questioning the underlying assumptions of, like, what are we optimizing for here? What kind of society do we want to live in?

[Katherine Edwards]

It's an alignment of incentives, but a particular incentive of what schools provide. For my part, I think universities have been living off the fat checks of the middle class for a long time. And they're bloated and they're way too expensive and they haven't really been punished for it, but they're about to be. And the next 10 years say more about that. About to be.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Why?

[Katherine Edwards]

Well, the college going age population has peaked and we're right at the peak of it now. So as we know from the baby boom, birth cohorts, which is the number of kids born in a calendar year, they're not the same size. Fertility in the United States started to crash with the Great Recession. Now fertility always goes down when the economy is bad, but it never recovered. It just kept going down. And the kids who are turning 16 now are followed by 15 years of smaller and smaller birth cohorts. I mean, we're missing millions of children. Well, if your business model is built on an endlessly growing supply of endlessly increasing income coming from the middle class. You're about to be met with a really hard day because not only are you pulling from a smaller set of people, but you're pulling from a smaller set of people that are growing increasingly disenchanted with college. So I don't like to make predictions because I think it goes against my personal belief that policy always has the ability to intervene. And when you make a prediction, in some ways, you're giving up on trying to change something or prevent something. But I will say in the next 10 years, we will see colleges hit pretty dire financial straits. And if kind of left on their own, you're going to see a lot of colleges and universities close.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Oh, man.

[Katherine Edwards]

That doesn't mean there's not room for them to do something creative to get around it, but they've built themselves into a truly unsustainable business model.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Sometimes I feel that way about our entire economy, to be honest with you.

[Katherine Edwards]

But when that reckoning comes, I mean, again, there's always room for policy to make a difference. All right, spitballing, like, if you're a university and your population is declining, like, what are you gonna do about it? You know, after World War II, the GI Bill sent a lot of people to school. But what I think is lost in that kind of common knowledge is that those kids did not wanna go to school for four years. A lot of them, they were coming out of the armies. They weren't all 18. Some of them were in their 20s or in their 30s. They were married, they had kids, and they wanted to get a college degree, but they didn't want to spend four years of their life on it. And so a lot of colleges designed accelerated degrees specifically for the GI Bill to get the kids basically the minimum amount of education to get a degree in the shortest amount of time possible. So I want to say, if memory serves, H.W. bush, future president and father of future president, this is what he did. Like, he got out of school, he got out of the army, and he went to Yale and was like, I'm not spending four years here. I've already got. Jesus. The guy had, like, six kids. So he was.

[Katie Gattytossen]

I feel like that's more of a reason to spend more time there. I'd be like, yeah, I'll stay for eight, actually.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah. But, I mean, they. They, like, adapted their curriculum and their offerings to meet the demand that was coming out at the time. Yeah, colleges haven't done that in a really long time.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah, they haven't had to they haven't had to.

[Katherine Edwards]

So I think, you know, yeah, something bad might come because their fundamental business model is about to come up with a brick wall of failure. But that doesn't mean we won't see things get really creative. And that policy can't, as you know, can't help support that. I mean, there's a lot of people whose jobs will also become obsolete in the next 10 years. And if there is a way to marry, I don't know, a really high capacity for education that is currently poorly financed and not accessible to people once they turn 19 with the need for reeducation and reskilling, that can't take four years. Maybe there's like, I don't know, feels like. Feels like we got some synergy, little bit of synergy here. So, I mean, that's. Those are the types of figures. This is why I don't make predictions, because I'm never gonna give up on a good solution coming.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Okay, I wanna talk about a different type of intervention now. I wanna talk about taxation and tax cuts.

[Katherine Edwards]

Sure.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Since 2000, Congress has cut taxes four times, which totals around $7 trillion lost to government revenues. And right now we're looking at another $4.5 trillion tax cut, which includes an extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It' and you said recently, economically there is almost no justification for doing this. Why not?

[Katherine Edwards]

How long is this show did you say we have? 3 hours. And people just want to hear about my, my taxes.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Tee off, girl.

[Katherine Edwards]

Great. I'm so glad that we're doing like a special half day episode. Oh, God. Okay, so let's do our cold, heartless economist coming in.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Sure.

[Katherine Edwards]

What does a tax cut do? It gives everybody in the US a little bit of extra money. Now, what are the economic situations that would warrant that being the answer? Like what problem does that solve that we just need people to have a little bit of extra money? It's actually a very particular circumstance. When the economy is in recession, people pull back on economic activity. Well, 2/3 of the US economy is the spending of households. So in order to prop up household spending, you want to basically give people some money that feels like a bonus with the hope that they go out and spend it.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Interesting.

[Katherine Edwards]

That is the economic impetus for tax cuts. Okay, now it sounds fine. Two problems with it. One, most of the time people immediately spend it on debt.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Right.

[Katherine Edwards]

Like if I told you the unemployment rate is 8% and like, here's 2 grand, what did you do with it? Pay off whatever debt I can and save the rest in case something happens. I'm not putting that into the economy. No, sir. Yeah, that's problem one is that it doesn't work as intended. Even for its best intended use. It doesn't work as intended because it's not targeted. And that is the fundamental flaw of tax policy as economic policy is that it's not targeted. If you want to give a tax cut to helps people spend, you've got to give it to 130 million people or 150 million people and they're not going to do the same thing with it. So some people, you give them a tax cut and they'll save a little bit, they'll invest a little bit, they'll spend a little bit, maybe they'll hide it, you know, take it out of circulation and put it underneath their couch. Couch and then sit on it. All of those have different economic consequences. Which means as a policy, unless you don't care at all what people do with it, it's really not that good. If you wanted to stimulate spending in the economy, a much more efficient way to do it would be to say, send a hundred dollar check to everybody on food stamps. Those are people who live hand to mouth. They don't have enough money to afford their life. If you send money to someone on food stamps, that money is gone before the end of the day because they will absolutely spend it. So the government has means of duplicating the intent of a tax cut and a much more effective and therefore cheaper way. You know who else spends money really quickly when you give it to them during a recession? Unemployed people. If I've lost my job, even if I'm on unemployment, I'm at most getting half of what I earned, but probably closer to a quarter of what I used to earn. If you give someone who is unemployed 500 bucks, that money is gone on. So rather than send 150 million people a tax cut to incredible expense, right. You could give it to the 30 million on food stamps or maybe the 10 million who are collecting unemployment. It's a lot cheaper and a lot more effective. So that means that the only economic justification for pursuing tax cuts as economic policy, it's still not the best way to go about it. It's like the fourth best option we have for stimulating the economy during a recession. That's why I say there's no economic justific justification for tax cuts. Because even when they're economically appropriate, they're still expensive and ineffective relative to alternatives. That's part one.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Let me ask a question then. On part One, before we jump to part two, because I know that we said we don't think that there is a cabal of people like the people in the Simpsons Shears into evil making these decisions. But I'm like. I'm sitting here and I'm just like, yeah. And you know what? So then why are we doing this and why do we keep doing this? And the only thing that I can come back to is. Is like, well, because who benefits the most from a tax cut? Nominally, it's a rich person. They're getting the largest amount back because the percentage of income. Do you see what I'm saying? And a rich person is. Is actually, though, inversely to what I just said of, like, who's benefited the most, it means the least to them because they're already rich. So if. If there's no justification and it's going to cost the most to give it to the rich people who are going to, quote, unquote, benefit the most from it, I am having a hard time coming up with a rationale other than, well, we just. We just are very, very excessively friendly to. To rich people. And to me, that's about as close to the, like, cheersing to evil conference room table scene that I can think of here.

[Katherine Edwards]

I. Okay, so it's worth.

[Katie Gattytossen]

I mean, pushback. Like, tell me.

[Katherine Edwards]

I'm like, I'm gonna make you. I'm gonna make you optimistic. You just wait.

[Katie Gattytossen]

No, tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me why I want to be wrong about this.

[Katherine Edwards]

This is like my. The most economic thing I say is that you can be right and wrong at the same time in this economy. And I think, you know, the economic justification for tax cuts. It's also helpful to remember that a lot of people, including your elected members of office, they don't know that it's not good policy. They've probably been lobbied to say, but in their mind, taxes are crippling the US economy. And even though we've cut $7 trillion in taxes, if we don't cut more, the vitality of the US Economy is at state. And even though there's no evidence behind this, they are deeply committed. So last year, on April 15th, I actually think. I think it was on tax day, I testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about this tax cut that they're debating right now. This is, as I would call it, an away game because it's a Republican majority. So there's four Republican witnesses, bunch of dudes, me at the end in a bright blue, stunning blazer, I look amazing. It's like they're all in black. It's like these four guys that are all in, like, muted suits and, like, red ties. And then there's me in the end, and I'm like, why don't we just embrace that we're the Democratic witness? But that hearing, it was like, in their core, if taxes went up, the US Economy would go into free fall. And it was so hard to shake them of this belief. And at various points, they would say things like, do you think it's fair that the top 1% pays 45% of all income taxes? Dr. Edwards, let me ask you just a couple quick questions. We're talking about the not fair share. When the rich are not paying their fair share, so they pay 47%, the top 1%, what percent would you think is appropriate for them to pay? Y'all. Y'all, I don't decide fair. No, I mean, that's what we hear all the time. Pay their fair share. Pay their fair share. And when what the top 1% pay 47% of the taxpayer burden. I want to know what, what, what a Democrat witness say is the fair share. Well, speaking as an economist and not as a Democrat, what I would say, sir, is that the top 1% have also seen the accumulations of income over the past 20 years. Part of their outsized burden of how much they're paying in taxes is also a fact of how much faster their income has grown over the past 40 years. And the top 1% income share is now at a 70, 70 year high. It's not just the rate that sets the share, but also the total amount of income they earn relative to the economy. Yeah, and I would. You know, I'm not going to disagree. Their facts are always your facts and my facts, and that's just the way life happens. I was so frustrated that they didn't want to learn. I also am struggling to come up with the bright side of people who are committed to both not educating themselves and doing some damage. But at the same time, this is kind of like the destruction you see from the Trump administration today of you are just proving to everyone that you don't know how to solve a problem, because you keep dipping back into that same solution. And you may be doing it earnestly, you may be doing it motivated by love of country, but you are ineffective. Tell me one problem that $4.5 trillion of tax cuts will solve that the first 7 trillion didn't. It doesn't exist. Whatever problem you have, they don't have the answer. Because the only answer that they have had for 20 years is tax cuts. At some point, hopefully the electorate realizes that.

[Katie Gattytossen]

It's like that meme where the guy's sweating, he's the two buttons, but both buttons say tax cuts, both buttons say tax cuts.

[Katherine Edwards]

They genuinely think that if you have more tax cuts that people can start more businesses. And there is an argument that if you lower taxes, more people will work because your increasing the returns to work. I mean no proof that it's ever worked, but I mean they really love it.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that's like. Is this not like laugher curve thing not just, not that more people will work but that like you will. The end result of tax cuts will actually magically be higher revenue because more work will create more tax revenue.

[Katherine Edwards]

Kind of. I mean Laffer is basically saying that at some point your economic potential is clipped when you have too high of taxes.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Okay.

[Katherine Edwards]

This is saying specifically it has to do with like income and substitution effects from an extra dollar of if you have a different amount of money that you're getting from work because you have lower taxes that you pay on it, are you going to work more? The labor income argument for tax cuts is that if taxes are too high, you'll pull back on the work that people will have because the return is lower. And so because you're increasing the return to work by decreasing taxes, it will get people to work more again. This is kind of like using tax cuts to stimulate the economy. It is the most expensive, least effective, least targeted way to do that. If you wanted to get more people to work, you'd offer free childcare. It would cost a lot less money. The 10 year cost of universal child care, even if you were going to be generous of like whatever they've estimated before, double it, we could have universal zero to five childcare in the United States nine times for the cost of this most recent tax cut because it cost about half a trillion dollars when this tax cut's gonna cost four and a half trillion. So you could just take nine universal childcare programs and like stack em on up and that would get more people working than this tax cut. So I think this is the problem, is that there's this shred of economic logic behind tax cut that it propels them onward because sometimes when you believe something you just refuse to let it go. And the more effective, better economic policy is there, but they don't want to see it. So yeah, they're probably going to pass this tax cut. And these past two months I have Found myself saying over and over again, I'm so glad their cards are all on the table. They can't disavow their actions. What did you do? On January 20, 2025, the US was at a 4% unemployment rate and CPI, PPI and PCE showed us that inflation had fallen below 3%. You were gifted a strong economy ready take off. And you came in with the promise that you were going to help American families. And what did you do with it? You started a trade war that will likely cause a recession. You fired the federal services, you fired people enough to increase layoffs economy wide. And then you gave four and a half trillion dollars of government money away. And none of those problems that elected you into office, none of them are being addressed.

[Katie Gattytossen]

We did it, Joe.

[Katherine Edwards]

We did it, Joe.

[Katie Gattytossen]

We did it.

[Katherine Edwards]

But I think on some level I'm like, good, put your cards on the table. This is how you helped people, people by hurting the economy. So I don't take pleasure in that, but I do feel empowered with the knowledge that double speak in election goes away when you've got a voting record and a policy record.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Okay, on that note, you mentioned recession. You've mentioned that you do think that the tax cut will go through.

[Katherine Edwards]

Since the election they have been promising we are going to have a tax cut and we're going to introduce a quote unquote, one big beautiful bill. They cannot seem to get it to the floor because it is going to be almost entirely debt financed. So there's two kinds of fights happening within the Republican Party about this tax bill. One is should it be merged with a border bill? The Senate would like to separate a kind of like a border policy immigration bill with the tax bill. And the House wants to do it all together as one. Estimated cost is that it will be $4.5 trillion. They would like to pay for it through a tr of other spending cuts and they have focused on Medicaid. The backlash is even before they've announced how much they'll cut Medicaid, the backlash is already mounting. So if they don't cut Medicaid, they'll have to borrow 4 trillion in order to pay for it.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Oh, that's why we're firing the park rangers, right?

[Katherine Edwards]

That's why we're firing the park rangers.

[Katie Gattytossen]

That's where we're going to do it, folks. To Photoshop licenses and the park rangers.

[Katherine Edwards]

This is their conundrum, is that tax cuts, both the ones we've had in the past and the one that they're proposing devastates the federal budget and they absolutely, absolutely raise the debt. My understanding is they haven't brought it to the floor because they haven't figured out how they're going to pay for it. And they can't pay for it because it's so large and because people hate Medicaid cuts.

[Katie Gattytossen]

But you do think another tax cut will come?

[Katherine Edwards]

I will say that over the past 25 years, it doesn't matter what the economy is. It doesn't matter what the state of the national budget is. It doesn't matter if people like it or if they don't like it. They don't care. When Republicans get in power, they pass a tax tax cut. The tax cut in 2017 was polling even lower than the one that is now. And they still passed it. They didn't even hold hearings on it. They just got it through as fast as possible. So, like, my confidence comes from the fact that they said they were going to do it. Trump wants them to do it. And this is the one type of legislation that they've proven effective at passing for the past 25 years. But this moment is getting increasingly hard for them to justify such broad scale economic destruction because the President's doing that in a lot of other ways.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Ah, okay.

[Katherine Edwards]

So I think they want to get this passed. They don't know how to justify it because borrowing $3 trillion when the deficit is already running over a trillion per year makes it expensive.

[Katie Gattytossen]

And it's not a good look. Like you said, it's not a good look.

[Katherine Edwards]

And it's not like people are calling them, demanding it.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah, well, because people know that you're not like. You've seen the charts. I've seen the charts. It's like for most of the country, we're talking a couple hundred dollars back per year.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yes.

[Katie Gattytossen]

You can't childcare with that. You can pay for one trip to Costco with that.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah. Even for people who are at the 75th percentile. So that means that they're richer than, like if you were it online, every income tax paying unit. So just houses, joint filers, units. I mean, sometimes I talk like an economist and I have to be like, so if you think of tax units, AKA people, humans, people in houses, I don't know, what are they called? Families. Oh, families. You're right, families. I'm sorry, I'll get there. If you think of tax filing units, AKA families, if you line them up from, you know, the highest amount of income that they report on their taxes to the lowest amount of income and you were to Say like, all right, what is the top cutoff for the bottom 75? Those people at the 75th percentile, max, over the past 25 years, they've seen a $2,000 reduction in their tax bill. So if you make less than the 75th percentile, you're going to see less than $2,000 back every year. And so, I mean, you tell me if that helps you afford rent and childcare and G and health insurance. This is a very, I said before, cataclysmic time. And there is part of me that has something like hope that this is such a bad idea that they won't be able to do it. I don't know if that's gonna happen, but there is something to watching them try to do it. Cutting Medicaid to pass a tax cut, y'all, that is robbing from the poor to give to the rich. And I think what I. A lot of members of Congress are being educated on what's more American than that? Yeah, I mean, but they're learning how many people are on Medicaid. I think in their mind, Medicaid is a fringe issue and that like, we don't need it. 77 million people are on Medicaid. Yeah.

[Katie Gattytossen]

And like half of them are kids.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yes. And there's a lot of people in old folks home. Like it's a lot of elder care, assisted, like nursing home assisted living is a lot of Medicaid. So I don't know if it's going to pass. I know it won't be good. And no matter what, we'll have to review, reverse it.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Well, yeah, it's like where you're kicking the can down the road.

[Katherine Edwards]

Sorry. Someone in a few years is going to have to be responsible and make up for the eleven and a half trillion dollars of damage we've done to the federal budget. We're not going to do it, but somebody's going to have to do it. We're going to wait, bide our time and then try to pass a four and a half trillion dollar tax cut. Like, keep your eye on the ball of who is failing whom.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah, I know that you mentioned recession. I know that this has become kind of a hot topic. I actually have not used my phone this week. I've just kind of had it off in another room because I realized I needed some space away from the push. Not of breaking news, breaking news. But I did see a couple comments come through of people being like, can you please talk about what we should be doing with our money right now? Because everyone who's just acting like things are normal is really rubbing me the wrong way. And I hear that critique and that complaint big time. We're not in a normal moment. I've heard you reference more than once in interviews and in your column. Maybe the economy is like standing on the edge of a cliff with the wind at its back. It's one strong gust and that puppy's going over. And so I think it's very easy to hear things like this and feel alarm. I would like to address that for the class, for the group, for the friends here with us today and basically say it's not that there is some secretive, magical financial strategy you should be enacting right now. It's all the best practices of personal finance that we always talk about with a little bit more panache, with a little bit more throwing your back into it. All the same things. Go for periods like this. It's figure out where the money's going, cut back where you can keep the resume buffed up, make sure the emergency fund is good. And I recognize that sometimes that advice is kind of like, oh, good, save money. Thanks. Didn't think about that. But we do have the Personal Finance 101 resources. We do have the Investing 101 resources on our site for free. You can spend a weekend doing and give yourself that sense of like, okay, I know the steps that I need to take, but I recognize that it can be scary to hear things like this of like, yeah, they're probably going to cause a recession. Yeah, we're kind of standing on the edge of the cliff. But I do think that where I take some level of optimism from you and maybe you're just rubbing off on me now that I'm saying this, but I do think, think that something was going to fundamentally break either way. And the faster it breaks, the faster we can start rebuilding it in a way that actually works for everybody.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah. And I would tell your listeners that the recessions are scary and markets go down, firms pull back. It's a very, in some ways, not uncertain, but certainly scary. And what I would point out, and I say this knowing that it sounds a little bit casually cruel, for the most part, recessions affect a pretty small group of people, and that's the people who get laid off. And there's really two paths through the recession. The people who are laid off and the people who aren't and the people who are laid off. That's a really small group of people relative to the overall economy. I mean, even at their worst, you're looking at possibly 8% unemployment, which that's not great for those 12 or 14 or 16 million people, but that means that another 155 million have kept their job. The scary thing about recessions is that the pain is so concentrated. Concentrated. And it's a concentrated upon the people who lose their job. And even then, hiring never stops in a recession. It just slows down. The familiar beats of a recession from the labor market's perspective is there's an uptick in layoffs that sends a lot of people into the unemployed, and unemployment rate goes up. At the same time, there's a slowdown in hiring. So while you increase the number of people in the unemployed, you're a lot slower to pull people out of it. And then it'll eventually, eventually kind of reverse and hiring will pick up and the unemployment rate will go down and the economy will recover. And how long that takes really just depends on the strength of the economic recovery. But even for people who lose their job, it's not the end of their economic life. And even for people who have a hard time getting hired, hiring never goes to zero. It's a lot of concentrated pain for people that puts them in a bad situation. But even that bad situation does not mean for everybody, doom. And if you lose your job, apply for unemployment insurance.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah.

[Katherine Edwards]

Ask about severance, do everything you can to support yourself. Not for nothing is recessions when we see a lot of people start new businesses because they lose their job that they didn't love anyway and they try to start something else. And so remember that you live in an economy that is very big, that is very creative, and there's more than one way to thrive here. And if the rug gets pulled out from under you, you, you know, you're not a business, you get to come back.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Thank you for that. That is needed, that level of reassurance. I think on the note of labor power versus kind of the power that employers or businesses have in this particular labor market right now. I do think that this sense of precarity and all this talk of recession does kind of go hand in hand with, with businesses sort of flexing their power after the last couple of years when maybe the workers were starting to gain a little bit of power and ability to be selective and to demand more pay and to demand more benefits. And so something that has come up recently is this return to office mandate. And that this is in some ways like businesses saying, yeah, fund's over, kids. We're going to show you who's boss now. We're Flexing that power and that leverage that, that we have over you and that it's kind of becoming more of a. A bargaining chip now.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah. So the pandemic sent everybody home, and the lucky ones were able to work from home. And even though the first lockdowns were hellish in so many ways, a lot of people found that they wanted to work from home, that they liked it. Not having to commute, being able to be flexible for the needs of your family. It became an amenity that a lot of people valued on their job. And, and in surveys of workers, they love it. Like they don't want to be in the office five days a week, nine hours a day. They like having the ability to work from home, that they feel more productive at home, that they are, in fact, more productive at home. So this is an amenity that employers gave away for free. So I think all they're doing now is just clawing it back. And what I've been looking for is data and reporting on whether or not the gate entry actually went down at these five day a week return to office announcements like JP Morgan, Check Chase or Amazon says you have to be back in the office five days a week, nine to five. Or people don't really change that much, but they've renegotiated their contract, so maybe they took a smaller pay raise in order to have it. Or they said like, everyone has to come back nine to five. But for certain people, they were like, tap on the shoulder, you can still work from home three days a week. It's just taking a bargaining chip that you gave away from free and you're bringing it back. Does it actually change the number of people that are showing up to work? I mean, that remains to be seen.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah.

[Katherine Edwards]

If it goes to a hundred percent that everyone at every one of these firms goes back to office five days a week, that'd be one thing, but I don't even think we've seen that yet. I think it's just taking that little chip of power that you gave workers and bringing it on back so that now you have it to negotiate with.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Do you think that we'll see employment rates among women or disabled workers go down as a result of this?

[Katherine Edwards]

Yes. Yes.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah. Something that I've kind of casually noticed recently on the note note of women work from home, et cetera, is the fact that, like, it's becoming more common among lifestyle influencers of, like, varying degrees of religiosity to have three, four, sometimes five children. And that strikes me as notable during a time When a very predominant narrative among young people is that, well, having a family is too expensive. I can't have kids because my life is not stable enough for that. And so I've noted this as kind of like a shift of having a big family sort of becoming a status signal or like a signifier of upper class status, at least online. It just brought my attention to this idea of, like, the way that we talk about that decision in America, which is don't have children that you can't afford. That is kind of the, the default posture about the decision to have kids. And I've just been thinking a lot recently about the fact that what does that mean in the long term if, like, we are just like, slowly and slowly, fewer and fewer people can actually afford to have kids?

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, that one. You've got to, you have to clap back so hard if, like, you classist. I can't believe you would, you would actually say that family is a privilege in the United States, that we, we like to put a little income test on it. Like, if you show up to your OB, they'll be like, well, show me your W2 and we'll decide if you can have children. But I think to me, it ultimately represents the failure of policymakers to readjust and regulate our economy so that family isn't a privilege. And you're basically adopting their failure as part of your identity. Like, hey, man, childcare costs more than a mortgage in college tuition in almost every state. And your answer is like, don't have kids. I fixed it. I don't think I've ever seen such, like, lazy thinking on proud display. And then someone says, don't have kids if you can't afford them. I'm like, this is who you want to parrot? That's the mindset that these people are so bad at their job that children have become a privilege. And you're going to double down on that with a smug little don't have children you can't afford. Children are expensive, and so they are becoming a privilege. And larger families are a sign of wealth. I think all that is happening, all reversible through good policy. The casual disregard that society has towards women and their struggle struggles will always be hard to swallow. Just this. Don't have kids you can't afford. Thank you, sir. What a great idea. You're so good at your job. What's your answer for unemployment? Start a farm? I mean, come on, come on.

[Katie Gattytossen]

I mean, yeah, the callous disregard for people generally, but women specifically is really frustrating. And I, I wanted to talk to you about the limits of empowerment rhetoric, because if economics is a study of power, I think this empowerment rhetoric is often aimed at motivating the group that just like, occupies the lowest ground and who does not have the upper hand. And so something that it feels like we should be very clear about when we discuss about this nebulous idea of like, empowering women is that the US has never pursued an agenda to give women equal economic footing to men. They have never tried to do that. They just tossed Lena in at us. They sang Chapel Roan's Good Luck Babe at us, and they slowly backed out of the room. And something that you have pointed out before that I find incredibly telling is that you actually can't throw a rock in Congress without hitting someone stressed about pouring billions into bringing back manufacturing jobs. But when the subject is raised of stagnant pay and worker shortages among teachers or nurses or child care workers, or these fields that are traditional, traditionally staffed by women, sometimes low income women, this pink collar work, it's like, oh, well, the market's efficient. It's going to solve this problem. What do you make of that?

[Katherine Edwards]

I think women are really good internalizing social failures, but they're really good internalizing policy failures too. And we have this industry that'll tell you how to fix yourself. I mean, you could do all of that and you wouldn't have paid family leave. Follow every New Year's resolution, ask for more, ask for a raise, meditate, be grateful, lose, lose 10 pounds, gain 10 pounds, make time for yourself, fight for a better work life balance, like, spend some time exercising, take up a new hobby. I mean, do all of those things. And honey, you still won't have paid family leave, you still won't have childcare or after school care or summer care. And I think we get a lot of make work thrown our way because in some ways it's just feeding the beast. We have so much on our plates, we are so desperate to make our lives better that being told, sorry, you have to wait for like Ted Cruz to come around on this, that's not very satisfying.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Ted Crawley, he's in Mexico, Keds. So you know, he's actually in Cancun right now on vacation.

[Katherine Edwards]

There's a kindness to the amount of empowerment narrative that we're fed of. Hey, like, it's a bad situation, but like you can still make the best of it for you. And that, that's not, that's a kindness, right? That's telling someone, like, don't let other people define your life and your Happiness, but it's also a get out of jail free card for the people who are activ hurting your life and your happiness by not having good economic policy. We just need to swing the pendulum back and be like, hey, every fourth meditation of gratitude needs to be an angry ass phone call to Congress of saying like, where is paid family leave? This is barbaric.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Now we're going to empower you to do your job.

[Katherine Edwards]

Like, I'm going to send you a great article about practicing gratitude. I think for whatever reason, the gratitude one is really gets under my skin. I don't know, I'm not very good at the empowerment lifestyle stuff. I think part of the reason why this argument kind of came to me naturally is, I mean, I don't like yoga. I don't like meditation. The stuff that gets fed to you of like here's a skin cream. I also think most beauty products are a lie. Like I'm just that none of that stuff is going to appeal to me. And so I think I just register its volume. It just. Wow, is this a lot?

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah. Your bullshit meter is like, this isn't solving anything. You're kind of pointing to this tendency, which is like you mentioned, internalizing social problems, but also internalizing problems. It's that we're internalizing them, but then we're also trying to use cultural or social nudging to solve economic problems. So there's this idea that like by encouraging or coercing people to get married, women to get married, that that's the best way to solve problems like inequality. And there's a really fascinating theory that Melinda Cooper writes about that basically ties the proliferation and preservation of, of neoliberal economic ideas to social conservatism. Because the idea is like, well, if individual men will just support individual women and individual women will allow themselves to be supported, we actually won't have any of these problems and you, we won't have to do this job anyway. The government won't have to provide any social services if they'll just shut the up and marry rich guys.

[Katherine Edwards]

I mean, okay, so let's throw some of their advice back at them like lean in and ask for a raise. Raise. Do women make 85 cents on the male dollar because we're bad at asking for raises? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is not, that is not why we don't make as much money. We make as much money because there's a massive motherhood penalty that leads to a, you know, 10 to 30% reduction in our lifetime earnings. And the Gender wage gap almost doesn't exist before you have kids and then it blows up afterwards. So that this whole idea that women earn less than men is truly that mothers earn less than fathers or non parents. It's a motherhood penalty, not a women penalty. So I mean. Yeah. Is it just that those moms didn't ask for raises and they need to be better? No.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Like, I think that there's also. I do like Claudia Goldin's work on this because she emphasizes the motherhood piece and there is a piece of this, I think probably, I don't know, a quarter of the wage gap could be attributable to women's overrepresentation in low wage work. And then that gets into the chicken or egg of like, well, is it low wa. Because women are doing the jobs that also I think you can draw a line between this idea that, well, it's the occupational segregation, that the person doing the job impacts how we perceive that job's value.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah. And then to kind of go back to this internalization of why don't we just marry rich? You know that, that you have this kind of social conservatism meeting an economic conservatism. To me, I always view this through the lens less of women and more of poverty.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Oh, okay.

[Katherine Edwards]

The women argument for me is the failure of social. Of economic institutions to create a fair economy for women. We don't have these very necessary things that families need and so women bear the loss. But when it comes to social. And I see that as just an economic failing, we don't want women to be equal or at least we could have tried. This view of women need to marry rich comes down to how America views poor people. So I teach a class on poverty in the history of social policy as it relates to poverty in the United States. We're halfway through the semester now and what it comes down to is whether or not you want to fix the problem or fix the people. And so much of our policy as it relates to poor people is that we want to fix the people. And it just so happens that the poorest group of American is single moms, but it's that we don't approve of them. You know what's really hard? Increasing wages for the bottom 55% of earners. There's 60% of earners that haven't seen a big wage increase and doing so in a way that doesn't jeopardize our economic growth through making it hard to run certain businesses or hard to provide certain services. And we need to Move that forward so that we have good strong jobs for the economy versus they should get a man. And the temptation to fix people is so high. And the difficulty of fixing institutions that fail them is much higher. And so you're gonna just opt to fix the people every time. And in some ways, because of the overlap of being a poor person and being a single mom in the United States is so high, it expresses itself as an anti parent policy. But you know what? They would give parents a ton of money if they could find a way to not give it to single moms.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Ooh, that is a really interesting interpretation of that challenge.

[Katherine Edwards]

This is probably of my economic policies and beliefs. This one is by far the most radical one that I have.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Almost. I mean, I would not classify it as radical. I just think it's astute. I think, I think it's spot on.

[Katherine Edwards]

I mean, like we have a child tax credit in the United States right now that you have to be rich enough to get. So the vast majority of people who get it are two earner households.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Because you have to have enough income to be ta. Like for tax credit.

[Katherine Edwards]

It's not a refundable tax credit.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Gotcha.

[Katherine Edwards]

So if you owe the federal government a thousand bucks and there's this $2,000 tax credit, it can reduce your tax bill to zero, but you won't get the overage.

[Katie Gattytossen]

I didn't realize that. I thought the child tax credit functioned like a cash payment if you didn't pay income tax.

[Katherine Edwards]

That is the earned income tax credit, not the child tax credit.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Oh, I thought they worked the same way.

[Katherine Edwards]

The earned income tax credit is for single moms who have earnings. And only if you have earned income on your income tax can you get a refundable tax credit. Should you be a very low income family, which is often single moms. But the earnings part makes it a work requirement. So we'll help you through a tax refund if you work enough. The child tax credit is just a $2,000 per kid gift that the federal government gives, but they only give it to people who have a positive tax liability. So a lot of the women who would maybe didn't work enough or didn't work at all, they don't get it. I will get the child tax credit this year and have every year that I've had kids and I couldn't tell you where that money goes. Right. It comes out in the wash. I get $2,000 came off my tax bill. It didn't go to kids money. Maybe it did. It went to me, went to my family's bottom line.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Your economic unit's bottom line?

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, my joint filing economic tax unit's bottom line. But you know, when we had the refundable child tax credit in 2021, that sent the credit out in advance. The people who benefited from the expansion weren't people like me, because I had always gotten it. It was people who had low enough income or no income that they got it for the first time. And that was why it was so effective at lifting children out of poverty, 3.1 million to be exact, is because it went to families that had really low earnings. And at the end of 2021, we're like, wow, this is amazing. We found a really effective way to get kids out of poverty, so we should probably stop. And we did. And we took those 3.1 million children and we just tipped them back into poverty. And in the meantime, we had surveyed their parents, we had surveyed households, we had looked at spending, we had looked at their bank accounts and we had every piece of evidence we needed to know that when you give poor parents money, they spend it on housing, food, utilities and their children. But that didn't matter. I've never been subject to any behavioral test because I'm a rich woman who's married. But if I was a poor woman who had kids, I'd be subject to every kind of behavioral performance test and manageable. And most of the times it wouldn't matter if I passed. They weren't going to give me the money anyway. So we're about to put work requirements on Medicaid. The earned income tax credit is a massive work requirement. Medicaid is going to get work requirements. Food stamps already has work requirements. We basically ended welfare by making the work requirements so severe. Like we are trying to fix these people.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Yeah.

[Katherine Edwards]

Because it's them, not us. And the problem is them, not our economy.

[Katie Gattytossen]

You in a video recently said that this mentality can be best summed up by poverty is caused by poor people.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah.

[Katie Gattytossen]

And you had spoken about how over a four year period, 34% of Americans fell below the poverty line at least once. Only 2% of the population is actually chronically poor. But like, poverty is not a disease, it's not a permanent state. It is a risk that between 34 and 40% of Americans face, depending on the timeline that you, you're looking at. I had no idea. That actually really surprised me. I would have assumed it was the opposite, that you had a more stable, chronically poor situation and then a smaller number of people that were maybe cycling in and out. That I think is a really powerful statistic to. It's not that I don't think people care, but I do think you're right, that there is this underlying. Not just with our legislators, but, like, in general, there is this idea that, like, poverty can't affect me. I'm not subject to that.

[Katherine Edwards]

Yeah, well, I'm a hard worker, so I would never be poor. And if 30 to 40% of the country could fall into poverty, is that because they're all lazy or because the economy dealt them a bad turn? I mean, this goes back to the start of our conversation of what is our capitalist economy producing right now? It's producing a pretty high risk of poverty. And we have kind of backed ourselves into this rhetorical and moral corner of, like, well, it's their fault, but poverty is caused by poor people. People is just one half of a coin. The other half says, don't have kids you can't afford. You know, what's causing poverty is that people who can't afford children are having children as opposed to. Our economy is dealing out economic risk and insecurity to an incredible degree, and we don't do enough to protect people from it.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Okay, who do we call and what do we say? Let's talk phone numbers. Let's talk messaging.

[Katherine Edwards]

Y'all stay focused and don't get distracted and stay fighting. You know, before we started our interview, I was saying to Katie that I think the biggest risk out of all of this is apathy. That you just get so burned and so cynical that you don't think anything you will do will matter, and that is. That is the end. That is the opening that they are dying for you to give them, it's the death knell. They are dying for you to look away and let them run amok. And if as long as you pay attention. And there's a balance here, right? Like, yeah, the news is horrifying as it comes down, but, like, we also know that there are good solutions. And you've got to have this yin and the yang of, like, you're messing up and there's a better way to do this. I know both, and I am not turning my head. You are going to have to answer to me. At the end of the day, I don't have, like, much faith in Congress, but they do have to run for office, and they do have constituent services. And I don't know. I can't tell you how much your voice matters, but I can tell you it matters not at all if you don't say anything. The only way to guarantee that your voice doesn't matter is to stay silent. So risk that phone call. Risk that letter. Send it in. Your silence is their victory. Your apathy is their victory. Your cynicism is the ultimate victory for them. So just don't give them the satisfaction. And certainly don't reward them with your silence.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Well, I told you that we were going to go all over the map today. I feel like we delivered. And part of me feels like we should just make Keds our Washington correspondent, force her to come back every quarter to break down the economic news for us. But in the meantime, that is all for today. We'll see you next week. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Hannah Velez and me, Katie Gattytossen, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew. Content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson. There are some departments that if you go into them, you have to to have really thick skin, and HR is one of them.

[Katherine Edwards]

Here we go again. I know. Here we go again. Right? But ear licking. Everybody had to attend a mandatory Bible study because that supervisor was a minister and it was approved by hr.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Her picture was also on there, and.

[Katherine Edwards]

Her nickname was Do Me Decimal. Oh, my God. I also had a college librarian. Her nickname was Big Tits McGee. Have you ever worked the full day with your kids hidden under your desk? No. No. Allow yourself. Give yourself the privilege to be human. That's what it is.

[Katie Gattytossen]

Just.

[Katherine Edwards]

Just feel it so that you can go through it. Yeah. And come out the other side mic.