(Originally aired June 10, 2025) The national debt is $36 trillion. That could be a panic-inducing big number. So maybe it will help to understand how we ran up that debt. We've blown 37% of it on tax cuts, with precious little to show for that. But 28% went to stabilize the economy during two major crises (in ‘08-’09 and during the COVID pandemic), which is when you do want the federal government

Optimist Economy is on break this month, but we know that optimist listeners are interested in tales of economic history, issues of inequality and movements for change. So we thought some of you might enjoy "Occupy!" a six-part narrative series about Occupy Wall Street, the 2011 protest village that lasted nearly two months and turned a spotlight on systemic economic inequality in the U.S. --- EPI

Nearly 90% of private-sector workers get paid vacation days from their job, but a Pew survey found 46% leave at least some of it on the table. Government survey data also show that the share of workers who are on vacation in any given week has fall by about half between 1980 and 2022. Blame thin staffing, guilt culture, and “PTO bundles” that push people to ration days between vacation days and si

About 18% of U.S. GDP every year gets spent on health care. Half of that, 9%, is coming from the government, which is about the whole cost of other countries’ public health programs. In other words, for what the U.S. spends on Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, VA benefits, and the tax write-off for employer-sponsored plans, we could have free basic health insurance for everyone . This is why the co-aut

Just-in-time scheduling lets an algorithm decide when — and whether — millions of people work. Surveys find 40% of shift workers (mostly in retail and food service) don’t know their schedule a week in advance. They can also get sent home mid-shift or asked to be on call, unpaid. Studies show that more than 50% of hourly workers’ income swings up to 30% month-to-month, making it hard to budget for

Nobody has more riding on any changes to Social Security than people under 40. The trust fund is currently projected to run dry in the fourth quarter of 2032, but it could be sooner. Every election, starting in November, selects the lawmakers who will shape the program’s future. Neglecting to fix its finances will mean an automatic 22% cut to everyone's benefit. But for Millennials and Zoomers, wh

(Originally aired 6/24/2025) One in five workers in the United States was born in another country. Without them, the country’s prime-age workforce would be shrinking, and thus so would our economy. So the calumny (Terms & Conditions) directed at immigrants is at odds with the basic fact that the U.S. needs them. What about depressing wages? Research finds such a mixed bag of results that the overa

It’s the United States’ semiquincentennial … and one of us is not feeling it. The other is literally carrying a flag in her bag — and that’s just her road flag. Kathryn Anne Edwards makes her case for optimism right now: The U.S. is undergoing one of the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts of any industrialized nation. Americans agree that Congress is broken. And the people's agenda on w

We can’t give financial advice. Or feedback on your 20-page tax proposal. But economist Kathryn Edwards did take a run at nearly 20 listener questions in under 60 minutes. Among them: Why care about birth rates if robots are taking all the jobs? What happens if the AI bubble bursts? Will the dollar collapse? Can the bond market sway the White House? Plus: Why the minimum wage matters even if it do

This might be the most dangerous economic assertion circulating today: the high inflation from 2021-2023 was caused by government stimulus. The talking point on the right goes: the third COVID-era stimulus checks landed in March 2021, prices took off, case closed. Of course reality is more nuanced. And most serious estimates pin only a point or two of the inflation peak on the bill; the rest was s

Thirty million Americans, more or less, work for themselves. They freelance, do gig work, have solo LLCs, or — as a certain economist says — participate in “ non-employee employment.” The economics of their situation is harder than it needs to be. Making self-employment more viable is good for everyone in the labor market, because when workers have options, they also have more power. Plus: Kathryn

(Originally aired 7/1/2025) Newly minted college graduates are having a harder time landing that first job than in recent years. Is it AI? Is college useless? Is it a crisis? (No. No. And not yet…) College graduates under 27 still have significantly lower unemployment rates (5.8%) than high school graduates of the same age (6.9%). What economist Kathryn Edwards finds worrying is that these new wor

A certain kind of wealthy American has been griping out loud lately — about taxes, about progressive cities, about how unappreciated they are for the jobs they create, the stuff they buy, and the tips they hand out. A narrative is coalescing around them too: that the top 10% of earners now do so much of the spending, the U.S. economy relies on them. But an economy that depends so much on the peopl

It wasn’t just hourly factory jobs that were supposed to come with a 40-hour workweek. Even salaried jobs were supposed to get overtime pay, though very few do do anymore. Overtime protections are the only legal mechanism enforcing work-hour limits, and for 50 years, the salary threshold that determines who qualifies to receive overtime has been left to erode. Employers found another workaround to

Cash is dirty, inconvenient, and so last century. Some 70% of Americans under age 50 think its days are numbered. But we still need those greenbacks, if as an alternative to banks. More than 4% of households are “unbanked,” and three times as many are “underbanked,” meaning bank services mostly don’t work for them, so rely on services like check cashers or payday lenders. And that's before you get

Consumer sentiment is in the basement. Jobs aren't being added. Prices keep climbing. GDP barely grew at the end of 2025, and a ‘meh’ 2% last quarter. Shouldn’t this be a recession? Not so far. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards walks through the clear cause of each bad number: Tariffs explain the prices and foul mood. Mass deportations explain the jobs. The government shutdown explained last quarter.

(Originally aired 5/06/25) What sparks progress? The right political conditions? Social pressure? Economic upheaval? In response to two listeners’ questions, we say… both none of those and all of the above. As an example, we talk through just one bit of the New Deal in the 1930s, which was the law to limit child labor. That movement started decades earlier, and continued decades afterward. For tho

Average U.S. wages have barely budged since the early '80s — and if you account for today's labor force being older and more college-educated, wage growth basically disappears. Economists have cycled through explanations: workers lacked technical skills, then couldn't compete with global labor, then lost the policies that once lifted paychecks, like strong unions and a meaningful minimum wage. The

From California to Washington to New York, states are trying to tax the very rich. The press keeps rehashing whether millionaires and billionaires will flee those states. Wrong question. The more important one is why we’re improvising tax policy state to state when it’s the federal government that should be dealing with health care, child care and affordability—all of which are national problems.

Americans used to move a lot in search of opportunity. But in 2024, the share of Americans who moved at all hit a 76-year low. Barely 2% of us moved across state lines. Some of that is by choice: people are more rooted, and that's not nothing. But when workers stop moving, rich cities pull further away from poor ones, wages stagnate, and the gaps between thriving labor markets and struggling ones