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The Great Wage Stagnation
Season 2 Episode 13
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 g…
2 months, 1 week ago
Tax Reform Gone Wild
Season 2 Episode 12
From California to Washington to New York, states are trying to tax the very rich. The press keeps rehashing whether millionaires and billionaires wi…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Nobody's Pulling Up Stakes Anymore
Season 2 Episode 11
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 …
2 months, 3 weeks ago
The Optimists Have Questions…
Season 2 Episode 10
Fourteen questions. Zero softballs. Listeners from Tacoma to Montreal wrote in to ask about retirement savings, taxing capital gains, home-buyer assi…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Corporate Profits Are Up. Their Tax Bill Should Be Too.
Season 2 Episode 9
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’ …
3 months ago
If AI Gets Hired, America Can Handle It
Season 2 Episode 8
Switchboard operators. Typists. Secretaries. Lots of factory workers. The economy has a long history of technology slowly eliminating not just jobs b…
3 months, 1 week ago
Boomers Didn’t Ruin Everything. Really.
Season 2 Episode 7
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 …
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Can $1,000 at Birth Make Us a Country of Savers?
Season 2 Episode 6
“Trump Accounts” might evoke the president’s other side hustles, like gold-plated mobile phones or meme crypto coins. But these investment accounts f…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Social Security Upgrades for Retirement's Realities
Season 2 Episode 5
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 progra…
4 months ago
What The Actual Fed.
Season 2 Episode 4
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 l…
4 months, 1 week ago