x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Optimist Economy

Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi

Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards and co-host editor Robin Rauzi talk about the fundamentals of the U.S. economy and how to build a better future one problem and solution at a time. Our premise is that the United States has remarkable economy — and yet for tens of millions of Americans it is not performing up to its potential. It could be more open to aspiring workers, less hostile to change, safer for workers, less risky for retirees, and so on.✨ Support the podcast at: optimisteconomy.com ✨Ask

government

All Episodes

42:22

Corporate Profits Are Up. Their Tax Bill Should Be Too.

Optimist Economy ·

2026/03/24

The corporate income tax rate got hacked nearly in half by the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act. So nine years later, how’s that working out? Corporations’ effective tax rate (about 9%) is lower than what the average American household pays (about 14.5%). After-tax corporate profits have hit record highs for the last four years — about 9% of GDP, a figure not hit since 1929. Workers' share of total national income, by contrast, is at a 70-year low. If corporate taxes go back up, some companies may

en

51:21

If AI Gets Hired, America Can Handle It

Optimist Economy ·

2026/03/17

Switchboard operators. Typists. Secretaries. Lots of factory workers. The economy has a long history of technology slowly eliminating not just jobs but entire occupations. The U.S. also has a long history of not doing a lot to help those thrown out of work by major economic shifts. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, who literally wrote her dissertation on unemployment insurance (her professional assessment: "it sucks"), makes the case for a wholesale rebuild that triages joblessness,

en

49:38

Boomers Didn’t Ruin Everything. Really.

Optimist Economy ·

2026/03/10

The popular narrative is that baby boomers rode cheap houses and 401(k)s to wealth, dismantled the welfare state behind them, and left everyone else to fight over scraps. But conflating boomers and conservatives lets the latter off the hook for 25 years of tax cuts and disinvestment in children. It erases the Black boomers, poor boomers, and pensionless workers who never got a slice of that wealth. And it lays the groundwork for the one policy outcome its loudest advocates actually want:

en

48:48

Can $1,000 at Birth Make Us a Country of Savers?

Optimist Economy ·

2026/03/03

“Trump Accounts” might evoke the president’s other side hustles, like gold-plated mobile phones or meme crypto coins. But these investment accounts for children are one of the actually beautiful things to come out of the "One Big Beautiful Bill." More than 30 years in the making, these accounts have previously been pitched as KidSave, Baby Bonds, the ASPIRE Act, 401Kids. They’ve been proposed more than a dozen times by Democrats and Republicans alike. Economist Kathryn Edwards explains the

en

57:59

Social Security Upgrades for Retirement's Realities

Optimist Economy ·

2026/02/24

Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards is a Social Security fan girl. Would it be possible for her to love it even more? Yes, if the old-age insurance program got some updates to handle the messy, gradual and interrupted way that retirement truly transpires. Her four blue-sky pitches: changing benefit calculations for caregivers, taking benefits temporarily, a sliding “full” retirement age based on years worked, and a tax on companies that abuse 1099 non-employee compensation. Plus: A big retcon

en

52:45

What The Actual Fed.

Optimist Economy ·

2026/02/17

The Federal Reserve is in the news constantly these days. Beyond the regular will-they-or-won’t-they question on interest rates, there are multiple legal battles with implications for the central bank’s independence, President Trump’s nominee for chairman may (or may not) get a hearing in the Senate soon, and Jerome Powell's may (or may not) leave when his term as chair ends in May. So let’s try to demystify the Fed. How does it stop bank panics? How did it make the Great Depression worse

en

45:07

We Don't Have a Housing Shortage. We Have a Paycheck...

Optimist Economy ·

2026/02/10

Recent polls show 54% now consider housing unaffordable and the cost of homeownership dominates Americans’ economic anxieties. The popular “abundance” narrative says there’s a housing shortage and suggests cutting zoning or environmental rules will let us build our way out of it. But we don’t have a simple net shortage of units—we have a deep mismatch between what gets built and what workers get paid. After 50 years of wage stagnation, the median mortgage payment is over $2,200 while

en

48:10

Affordability vs. the Poverty Line

Optimist Economy ·

2026/02/03

An essay went viral by claiming that $140,000 is what a family of four needs to just get by — a number higher than what 70% of American households earn. Conservative economists called it idiotic. Kathryn dismissed it and got a nasty DM. What’s the real controversy? It’s not that the poverty line is misleading. It's that we have no measure for our current affordability crisis. And the American mindset has been so warped by decades of bad economic policy that we think the only way to get help

en

49:15

$79 Trillion Worth of Income Inequality

Optimist Economy ·

2026/01/27

Our own optimist economist Kathryn Anne Edwards worked on a research project several years ago to measure income inequality. Its massive headline number has taken on a life of its own in columns, talking points, memes. We explain how Kathryn and co-author Carter Price managed to answer this question: What would have happened to Americans’ incomes if they’d grown at the same rate as the U.S. economy overall? Spoiler alert: 90% of us would be a lot better off.Read the working paper Kathryn

en

0:55

We're Back with a Backlog of Optimism

Optimist Economy ·

2026/01/20

Hey optimists! Season two of Optimist Economy is finally here. New episodes coming on Tuesdays starting January 27. More at www.optimisteconomy.com

en

15:59

What’s the Skinny on Laws that Make Salaries Public?

Optimist Economy ·

2025/12/10

Listener Max did his grad thesis on pay transparency laws in Colorado and found that they narrowed the gender wage gap by 8 cents on the dollar. But some big-name economists reported that such laws can actually reduce wages. So what’s the deal? Kathryn’s answer during our October Q&A was so overlong and multipart that we jokingly called it, “The Max Show.” So here it is, as a mini-episode. Holiday shopping for the optimists in your life? Check out our shirts and hats at optimisteconomy.com

en

53:09

Thanksgiving Prep: An Optimist’s Guide to Dinner...

Optimist Economy ·

2025/11/20

Your drunk uncle calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Your crypto-bro cousin thinks tariffs make China pay. Your grandfather blames working women for tanking wage growth. Economist Kathryn Edwards takes on a dozen hostile dinner-table challenges to help optimists everywhere prepare for dinner table debate. Robin plays every annoying relative you've ever argued with. Pass the [expletive] gravy. Ready to rep Optimist Economy with a shirt, hat or tote bag? Hit up our new website and merch store at

en

41:28

Retcon on Season One (+ Executive Orderpalooza)

Optimist Economy ·

2025/10/21

Optimist Economy got its start almost exactly one year ago with a phone call that began, "Hear me out…" Thirty-two episodes later we ask, “What have we done?” Mostly we conditioned ourselves to keep our eye on the ball – the better U.S. economy and future that are possible – through a lot of very bad news days. In the background, we both moved. Kathryn kept a lot of pregnancy symptoms hidden. We incorporated a nonprofit. And somehow, we managed to drop a new episode every Tuesday. Thanks to all our

en

51:01

How Health Insurance Got Shackled to Jobs

Optimist Economy ·

2025/10/14

Why is anyone’s health insurance tied to their job? It's because of a superintendent in Dallas, World War II wage freezes, a 1953 tax code quirk, and decades of inertia. This accident of history costs America $384 billion a year in tax breaks to corporations for providing coverage. And what do we get for that? A system that locks people in jobs they'd otherwise leave, suppresses wages of those who look "expensive to insure," and disadvantages small businesses that can't afford gold-level health

en

52:29

Optimist Q&A: Evidence for UBI, What to Do About...

Optimist Economy ·

2025/10/07

In the final Q&A of the season, economist Kathryn Edwards answers listener questions on recent universal basic income experiments, legislative budgeting tricks, and the value of more aggressive IRS auditing. She also explains what eradicating the minimum wage exemption might mean, particularly for disabled and incarcerated workers. We also discuss what people actually do for money when they stop job hunting. Fair warning: this one runs long and the keeping it f-bomb free resolution lasted about

en

67:56

Can We Fix America's Broken Unemployment Insurance...

Optimist Economy ·

2025/09/30

Just how broken is Unemployment Insurance? Consider this: During every recession since the 1950s, the federal government has had to step in and prop it up. Of people looking for work, only half qualify for Unemployment Insurance. And just half of those actually receive benefits. That’s what you get from a system designed mostly for factory workers nearly a century ago and then left to the heedless care of states. Benefits vary wildly by state — $235 a week in some, over $800 in others. Most states

en

60:36

The Ghost Recession: A Brief Economic History of Now

Optimist Economy ·

2025/09/23

The economic pain that Americans experienced in 2022-23 was dubbed the “vibesession,” suggesting that negative public sentiment was out of sync with a healthy economy. But what we were truly experiencing was more like a “ghost recession.” As the Fed squeezed the economy by raising interest rates from zero to above 5% to get inflation under control, only the extraordinary circumstances of the post-pandemic economy kept unemployment low and the economy growing. But if we had a ghost recession, that

en

49:47

The Cash-for-Kids Study: Misread and Misrepresented

Optimist Economy ·

2025/09/16

You might have heard recently that a years-long poverty study “found” that giving $333 monthly to kids with poor parents didn’t make a difference. But here's why that’s the wrong takeaway: The "Baby's First Years" study wasn't designed to test cash payments. It is multi-year, ongoing scientific research into how poverty affects child development. Researchers found "selective impacts on preschoolers' brain activity with possibly different impacts across brain frequency bands" — which roughly

en

54:37

The Case for Going Big on Paid Leave

Optimist Economy ·

2025/09/09

Paid family and medical leave is a confusing mess: only 27% of private-sector workers get paid leave from their employer. Some others are covered by state programs, but those vary. The rest of us scramble to patch together short-term disability with other paid time off, if we have it. Meanwhile, the United States instead has a federal Family Medical Leave Act that protects unpaid time off. Truth is, sooner or later, nearly everyone needs time away from work to care for a sick spouse, a new baby, a

en

54:10

Aren’t Free School Meals a Conservative's Dream Policy?

Optimist Economy ·

2025/09/02

Free breakfast and lunch for every public school student — an idea associated more with countries like Sweden and Finland — should instead be viewed as a truly American policy that liberals and conservatives can both love. Want complete meritocracy? Then you should be furious that some kids can't focus in class or during tests because they're hungry. Want to compete globally? Eating better raises student test scores. Want to make America healthy again? Professional kitchen staff serving

en

43 results

Similar Podcasts

The Fly

Georgetown"s Institute of Politics and...

THE CONSTITUTION STUDY

Paul Engel

The DSR Daily

The DSR Network

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

Fora do Baralho

Rádio Observador