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

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Hi, I'm Kai Rizdahl, the host of Marketplace. Our award-winning reporters talk to everybody from CEOs to farmers to help you understand how the economy takes shape in the real world. You'll be smarter every time you listen, and these days, that's price list. Listen to Marketplace on your favorite podcast app.

Hello, and welcome to Optimistic Economy. I'm Katherine Ann Edwards, economist. I'm editor Robin Rousley.

“And on this show, we talk about, wait, no, what do we do?”

On this show, we believe the U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem in solution ahead of time. I thought I could do it from memory, and I wasn't reading, and like look what happened. The problem is, the solution we're talking about today is the corporate income tax rate, and first we're going to do some announcements and other things, but more corporate income

tax rate coming soon. I can't seem to open the studio channel. Oh, well. Oh, well. You guys want to distribute your chat, anything?

Sorry. Can't read it. Announcements.

First announcement is that we have recorded our Q&A episode, but we always take questions from

the optimist. Of course, [email protected] will do another Q&A episode, soon enough, and we'll always take questions. You got, I got a folder of them in our email. Yeah.

Okay. Next up is retcon, which we might not have any knock-on run. Yeah. I'm sure we'll have some. Once people hear the AI, I'll pass them on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on.

Yeah. It'll keep. That'll keep. Let's move into terms and conditions. Did you look anything out this week or have a term for this week?

I had a term that was a question, actually, that came from a listener. I think, over the summer, I've been holding on to. The question was about the way that economists sometimes use the word tax, which seemed confusing to him about where they're not actually referring to a government tax, but they're referring to what would seem just to be a cost or an expense.

Can you clarify why tax gets used in that way? I think there's like an economic reason, and then there's a rhetorical reason, so context I hear this a lot is the US has a tax on childbirth. We don't have a tax on childbirth. The tax on childbirth would be every woman in the labor and delivery room would then have

to pay some type of fee or levy after they gave birth.

“And specifically to the government, specifically to the government, that's how we think”

of tax. Normal humans think of taxes as going to a local state or federal government. You know, sometimes you say normal humans, like a terrible phomo. But we can talk about that later, so yeah, it would be like some government tax agent comes in and collects money or it's recorded that you had a birth and you owe some state

local federal government money and that is the tax on childbirth. We don't have that, but we do have private health insurance that has out of pocket costs for almost all labor and delivery from a private health insurer in their US. If you have to pay three to five thousand dollars out of pocket, even if you have a large group health plan, that is functionally a tax on childbirth.

Because it's the same as like the IRS agent in the room asking for five thousand dollars and said it's someone from your health insurer. So we use it to say, I guess I don't understand how that is functionally the equivalent of that because some people are paying into some people aren't. No, I think because it looks like a tax even though it's not one.

Okay, because this is where the rhetorical equivalent would be. This is just a way to highlight an egregious cost, a cost that shouldn't be there. We're like, I'm paying for a service for something like childbirth, like that's not a cost that we should be charging people for, or you can just think of it as a way to illustrate how destructive a cost can be because we tend to think of taxes as quite destructive

to in manipulative behavior.

“Yeah, that's what I was wondering if it had to do with the incentives and manipulation”

of behavior that we associate with taxes.

But I don't know if that's, I don't feel like when I hear used as always suggested with

that. Yeah, I mean, I think it has more of a rhetorical point than an economic one. I think it's more helpful rhetorically to say, you know, it's a way to express that there isn't added cost that's maybe not necessarily related to the price that you're paying.

But I think it is a very, like rhetorically, I think it is really helpful of, like, would you tax childbirth? No, that's ridiculous. But like, you make women pay three to five grand if they're lucky three to five grand out of pocket.

If you think a tax on childbirth would be ridiculous, then why do we have out of pocket costs that would function the same way?

Yeah, you know, Sophie's pointing out that, you know, she hears things like the pink

tax. She's referring to the things that women have to buy them and don't have to buy and then make it more expensive in our society to be a woman.

“And I think that maybe makes it clearer than a tax on it on a very specific narrow thing,”

like labor and delivery. I think, for the record, I think labor and delivery is part of the pink tax calculation. Yeah, sure. But yeah, okay, so I do realize that I was like, rhetorically, it's pretty good. Again, I am not an editor, famously not an editor.

So that's just me, economists being like, yeah, that's a word good. Digging from the word one, that's good word. All right, what's your term in condition? Capitalism. Oh, capitalism.

Well, capital slash capitalism. Okay. But because we're talking about the corporate income tax right today, I thought it would be helpful to do a little bit of capital back story of what is capital. What is capitalism?

What is capitalism? Yeah. Well, this is again, the Batman quote of like, we were born in the dark. Capitalism is what is what we all grew up with.

“And I think that people, you kind of accept the system as they, you know, experience it”

and live in it, but don't necessarily know the definition of it. You need three basic ingredients for capitalism.

The first thing you need is private property.

Okay. So you can have a system of private property that's not capitals and I would be like feudalism. So private property is the first thing you need. Second thing you need are markets where you can sell your wares or goods or services. That also existed before capitalism.

You can think of like a market and like a, even like a dark ages or middle, middle English trying to think of some historical period for capitalists. I'm very struggling. But like people will be like, okay, I make shoes and I take them to a market and I sell the shoes that I make and I use that money to buy other things.

Like I, you have a market economy that operates with private property, but that is still not capitalism. Capitalism is the introduction of firms who own their inputs, their capital goods like the storefront, the tools, the manufacturing facility and they employ people. And the firm is really kind of like the necessary ingredient for capitalism because firms

can specialize in a good, they can specialize in the production of that good, meaning that like they make one thing and then they also specialize in how workers are used to make that thing. So when we talk about the corporate income tax, we're essentially saying we would like to tax capital, which is tax the firm.

But now we refer to these firms as corporations. For the most part. Great. So, it's already going to be a tough one. So here's the thing.

The third version is we want to tax those (beep) a lot more.

Do we? Is that what we want?

“Uh, I think there's an argument to be made.”

I think there's an argument to be made. Are you made? I get the sense sometimes from our listeners that we have a set of like relatively conservative people who like, hearing about the economy. And this is a interesting way to hear about it.

And I then I get a distinct sense that some of our listener base is like to the left of Lennon and it's like waiting for like some type of communist revolution slash social revolution to burn capitalism to the ground. And I'm going to do, this is not an indefensive capitalism episode, but maybe a like consider, consider capitalist, before you can get the baby out with the bathwater, consider

capitalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so we're going to take a break and then we'll be right back and we're going to talk about corporate income tax capital and capitalism capitalism. Capitalism. All right, we're back for a tight five on capitalism before I go back to my family vacation

in New York. So taxes on capitalism should we have them? Okay, let's talk a little bit about the context of this, we, we meaning the United States not we, you and me, well, we changed the corporate tax rate in the tax cut and jobs act of 2017 and a lot of those changes got made permanent and some other changes were added

in the oba, oba, oba, oba. So the corporate tax rate in the United States was in the, it was 35% and now it's 21% is that right? Something like that. Just like really quick, the tax cut in jobs had two types of tax cuts, one for the corporate

income tax rate, the other was for a set of household tax breaks. The corporate income tax rate was permanent, this household tax cuts expired and in fact,

Which is why the one big beautiful bill was passed in 2025 and it made all of the tax cuts

“that were temporary in that bill permanent.”

I can say that the tax cut in jobs act was the single largest reduction in the corporate income tax rates in US history. The corporate income tax is quite old, it goes back to the teens and yeah, it was a 40% reduction in the right. And the corporate income tax rate has a statutory rate on paper, the tax on profits is

10% that 10% is set by Congress. But they also have a ton of deductions and write-offs and ways of reducing their taxes. So we have an effective rate of how much they are actually paying in taxes given their profits and what they report. On the effective rate, even when it was 35% statutory was still quite low, I wouldn't

want anyone to be under the illusion that we just made the tax code simpler and that

we reduce the statutory rate so that we wouldn't have quite somebody deductions.

We reduce the effective rate too. I do think maybe just for listeners, we should be clear about a couple of terms that have already come up. One is statutory, meaning that that is what's written in the language of the law. The other being that corporate taxes are a tax on profit.

So corporate profits are the amount of money that is left over after a company is taken in all the money from its customers and paid out all its expenses and profits are what's left over. They only pay taxes on that, they don't pay it on all the money they bring in which would be their gross revenues.

Yes. So to give you the numbers, in 2017, the last year before the tax code and jobs act went

into effect, the statutory corporate tax rate was 35%, but the effective tax rate was 17.2.

So they were able to reduce their most in half more than half in 2018. The statutory corporate tax rate was 21%, and the effective rate fell to 8.8%. More than half. Corporations now have a lower effective tax rate than the average American household. Oh, but a long shot.

Like if you were to add up all of the income earned by households in the United States and then all of the taxes paid and just put that as an average, it's around 14 and a half percent. And it has been around 14 and a half percent for a long time. That's how much we pay in taxes.

So I wanted to talk about the corporate tax rate for a couple of reasons, which I'm going to prime and give you even more numbers and quick succession, I'll say them faster to help our listeners to make sure I get them. I'll go through the semester. I am.

Yeah. Okay.

“There is, I think, two questions for the corporate income tax rate.”

One is, do we think it should be higher, why or why not? Which is what I wanted to talk about this episode. Then there's the question of how you actually do it. Which we don't have time or space to put into this episode because it gets really complicated especially with global corporate income tax rates and how effective tax corporations

are at hiding taxes and low tax countries. I think that some people would hand wave and say, oh, but we can't because of global taxes and wave to the air of like, no, it's not possible to effectively tax corporations. No, I assure you it is. We wanted to tax a company as profitable as Amazon with a higher corporate income tax rate.

I promise you we could do it. It is, if there's a will, there's a way when it comes to taxes and I think one of the more effective, not even propaganda, but just effective rhetorical tools that very wealthy people and including corporations have put forward over the last 15 years is that you can't tax a wealthy even if you try.

And maybe you're of tried and it didn't go well so you can't tax them here. Y'all, not true. We don't, we don't quit before we play the game.

“And honestly, I'd like a few at bats when it comes to designing wealth taxes.”

So same thing applies to corporate income tax rate. You've probably heard we can't have it high. It's too complicated and it wouldn't work anyway. I'm going to try and convince you of why the corporate tax rate can be higher and then you'll just have to trust me and we'll do it later episode how we can get it higher.

How's that? That sounds fun. So you obviously think it should be higher. I mean, a lot of the arguments about why it shouldn't be higher is that it comes out in either higher prices, customers, or lower wages to workers.

Yeah. But the money's going to come from somewhere and it's going to come from one or both of those sources. Yes. We would call this the tax incidence. This is come of a ton with tariffs.

If I have an import tariff on something that I use in my firm's production, I'm going to pass on the cost of that tariff to customers. So even though I pay the tax, customers actually bear the tax incidence.

not a specific input. In theory, it's the money left over at the end of the day. Like a tariff is a tax on an input.

“Tariff is a tax on an input or something that you sell, right?”

Like if I need a very specific widget from China and now I have to pay a tax on it, but I can't make any product or sell anything without this widget, I will pay that tax that I will pass it on in the form of the higher price of my big widget. For a corporate profits, it's different because I can still have efficiently produced goods and not pay a tariff on whatever good and the tax comes on at the end when I report my

profit for the year.

So those arguments are, wait, what was the first one you said?

Because the second one you said was they're just going to pass it on to consumers. The other one is it comes out of wages. Oh, yeah, y'all. Not much left in wages to come out of is all I'm going to say for decades the argument about the corporate income tax rate has been that capital is mobile.

Right. And if you have too high of a tax on corporations in the US, they will pack up and move elsewhere. Right. They'll go to Ireland or...

They'll go to Ireland. They'll go home to something.

“Barbados, like they'll go somewhere else and so you have to keep the corporate income”

tax rate low in order to keep corporations here. And when economists talk about the corporate income tax rate, that is what they're talking about. They're almost entirely talking about the mobility of capital. As I said, in terms of condition of the big sea capital.

The actual year, which the tax is fell, you know, the motivations behind the tax cut

were obviously not like, hey, these really large corporations are basically practicing

extortion. And they've told us if we don't lower the tax rate, they'll pack up and leave. So we have to respond to that because apparently when you're in Congress, you do negotiate with terrorists. They didn't say that at all.

What they said was this is going to be good for the American worker. This is going to be good for the American family. We're going to have more jobs here, and those jobs are going to pay more. And so that's the jobs part of the jobs act. It was the jobs part of the jobs act that we're going to cut corporate taxes and keep

jobs here and they'll pay more. Right. Well, the way that a tax cut is absorbed is right away. Like if I cut your taxes, you make changes today. So the difference between that sense, like if I'm a, if I have a company?

Yeah, you person benefited by the corporate income tax rate or you household who benefited from a lower income tax rate. Okay. That year 2018. Yeah.

It was mid lane wage growth. It wasn't low, but it wasn't high. A lot of companies said that they would pay up bonuses to workers. They didn't. If they did pay bonuses, the most generous estimate is that it was less than 2% of the

corporate tax cut. More importantly, it was the single largest year in history for a corporate stock by that. Okay, explain, explain that. How does that lead to corporate stock bybacks effectively would happen to corporations

is that they got a much lower tax rate. They had excess cash in 2018. What did they do with it?

They spent it on corporate stock bybacks, which is where you basically invest in your own

share price in order to make it higher. That's because your, as your corporation buys a bunch of its own stock, you're just driving the price up or is it because there's then less stock on the market? I think it's both. Yeah, so I mean, the intellectual argument is like, y'all, we can't tax corporations.

They won't stay in America and they're saying, if you give us a little corporate tax rate, we'll have more money to pay workers wages and that is playing out. I mean, but the absolutely paid out is that the workers didn't get anything and they absolutely had, I mean, the largest year for corporate stock bybacks in US history, it wasn't even close.

So when companies get money in the US, they have corporate stock bybacks. But they would say it's getting the value of their company higher, allows them to make capital investments and expansions.

“And at the stock price, since that's how they could issue debt, since that's how they”

value that affects what they can borrow, what rate they can borrow at, that that is a way to bring innovation and expansion and that it's working through a higher stock price. Certainly not working through workers, I'm sure they would deny that too. I guess my, here's a way to think of why I think the corporate tax rate, like, if I had to make, like, what is your most succinct argument for why the corporate tax rate needs

to go up? It's because nobody, no locality in the country is advised now that they should do this for a company within the US. Okay, obviously, I feel like actually, as a California that states all around the country, you're trying to steal California businesses with lower tax rates.

So Texas had a specific corporate tax rate that was meant to entice companies to move and relocate their headquarters to Texas. And what set of researchers found when they looked at people who actually claimed that tax rate was that almost all of them were going to move anyway. The tax didn't influence their decision.

Was the key part?

“It just made it more lucrative for them.”

You think of a company, like, a big relocation was exon moved from California to Texas. They didn't do that, like, waiting for the Texas legislature. The biggest clown car in North America to come up with some kind of package they approved of, because there's a trustworthy set of people. Like, no, they had had plans for years, right, that they were going to relocate, they

wanted to move to cheaper cost of living, or whatever their reasons were. And the paper was, I thought, was really interesting, but it's basically, like, once they decide to go, then they tell the location, like, you know, will come if you can get a business friendly environment and make sure our taxes are lower here. And it's unemployment taxes, it's property taxes, and not just state-level corporate income

taxes. Business taxes? But you're saying that nobody advises states to do that anymore because of that, that finding? Well, so even the Mercatist Center, which is a very conservative economic think tank,

“they say that using tax incentives to lure a company into your state or locality is throwing”

money away. Yeah. The advisement now is do not do this, because they will make you promise the moon, and they mostly don't deliver. So, you know, great examples of Foxconn, and Wisconsin.

The big Chinese manufacturer of iPhones and other electronic devices. Yes, they were going to make a Silicon Prairie in Wisconsin, and they said, here's the number of jobs, we're going to have, here's how much they're going to pay, we're going to make

this much billion in capital investments, and we need a package that's friendly, you know,

the governor goes down to the statehouse, tells the legislature, hey, if we approve this, we're going to get all these jobs, and this is going to be good, the legislature approve the tax package, and then yeah, they don't come. And some ways Amazon HQ2 might be more familiar, but you know, definitely left's egregious, but it was similar.

Like, they promised 50,000 jobs that were making a $100,000 on average with some billions of capital investments, nine years later, they've got 8,000 jobs, and they've built two of their buildings, but not the second half of capital investment. I mean, they just, they didn't deliver as promised. So, these, these bids are, they're specific to the one company, it's like a negotiation

with Amazon. It's not, we're changing the tax code for all the companies, which you could imagine per year study would be, I mean, of course you're going to wind up behind. I'm not even necessarily think Amazon acted in bad faith with HQ2. I think they make decisions that are irrespective of the corporate income tax rate.

Like, they're making a business decision. It has its own motivations, it's not because they're necessarily, like, a mean, spiteful, just wanted to see how much localities could bend over backward. I think that their business changed.

And I think that we have just passed this moment in U.S. economic history that is an incredible

reduction in the corporate income tax rate. People are going to write in and tell me what a stupid economist I am that I don't know how economics works, that this is Econ 101, like, she's a bad economist, she's not a real economist or whatever you want to hear because I don't think the corporate tax rate should be this low, and I think it should be higher.

And I understand perfectly that there is a risk that if you raised the corporate income tax rate in the United States, a company would leave. And I think in my mind, I'm like, okay, goodbye, bye, if I raise the corporate income

“tax rate, so you have to pay 20%, or you have to pay 30%, and you pack up and go, good”

riddance. I would bet my life that you are a terrible employer that you pay awful wages. And I bet you make a suspect product, but sure, go to that low tax haven of Canada. Well, you know, I just didn't have businesses in 2017 when the taxes were higher. No, no.

And I think that this goes back to why I wanted to talk about capitalism and the terms of the condition, like I am a capitalist, like at heart, I am really a capitalist. I know. I'm surprising sometimes. When that guy called me a garbage communist lefty, I felt like he didn't know

why he wasn't insulting me, but I'm not really a communist, like I do believe capitalism has done more for the eradication of poverty and destitution than almost anything else we could point to.

I mean, it creates an incredible amount of wealth.

It does not spread it around. Government can do that with like really light touch policies, but we are just in a state where we have given too much difference. And I, if there was, if Amazon was like, yeah, well, we're going to pack up and we're going to leave North America and Amazon will pull out.

I would be like, yeah, man. It sounds great. Take, yeah, you would leave jobs behind, but we have an entrepreneurial capitalist society, someone would produce you because you didn't exist 30 years ago.

down, sounds great. People will still drink coffee. I mean, I don't like, I don't champion people losing their jobs. I don't like the idea of there being layoffs, but our economy will pick itself up by the pieces of a Starbucks, list America and move on.

We live in the largest, most dynamic economy in the world. It would be hard, there would be people who genuinely suffer, but we can ease the suffering and help people invest in new things. I'm sure someone's like, you're a naive little girl. Yeah, some sure.

Doesn't know what your job is. We're talking about, some may say that to you. Someone said that to me, or satisfying in front of Congress in front of the Republican led houseways and means committee that was putting together the one big, beautiful bill. I was saying that we need to have an effective tax structure in the US, and this guy,

oh, some gibbon said, don't you always notice how it's the people that have never created

a job in their life that are the ones telling us what to do. And y'all, that was the closest I got to like, rage crying during that hearing was when that guy said I wasn't a job creator and I was like, fuck, you man, I made my own job. And it is not a corporate income tax rate that is preventing me from expanding. It's the lack of reliable childcare.

I was so mad. So, I didn't mean to trigger you with that memory. I'm okay, but I do need to come and count more after this. Can I ask one other question before maybe, maybe you're going to get to this, but how

“much are we talking about in terms of corporate taxes?”

Like how much of that is, I mean, it's nearly, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money, right? It's a lot of money and tax dollars that we don't have to do anything else with. Okay, so how should we think about how much money is left on the table by having a much lower corporate income tax rate?

It's hard because companies are always growing.

The economy is always growing and so on. So you can look at the difference in tax collection from the corporate income tax expressed as a share of GDP, okay, which is the size of our economy. So as a share of GDP, it used to be thinking like the 50s, 60s hung at around between three and a half and four percent and now it's around 1.8.

So if you were to just take two points of U.S. GDP, the difference in tax collection, this is 620 billion dollars a year. We don't collect and corporate income taxes. So let's go back and do my favorite math. That's, so 620 billion dollars a year.

20 billion is how much it would cost to have a universal paid family leave system and we'd still have 600 left over. Okay. 100 of that, you could put into a child tax credit that goes to every kid and is generous and basically eradicate child poverty.

You know, another 100, you could spend on universal preschool, universal daycare and then

“I think you could, you know, what the hell, as long as you've got the money, add another”

hundred to have universal after school and universal summer programs. Yeah. Honestly, universal Medicaid for all kids, that wouldn't cost that much because we ensure most of them at least half of them on Medicaid anyway and they're quite cheap.

And then we would still have one to $200 billion left over just to deal with the debt.

And that's just from corporate income taxes. It's just, it's, it's a lot of money to leave on the table for jobs, Robin, jobs. Their job creators, not like you and me, stupid women who don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the big man's corporations. I mean, I would feel so differently about this.

I would, I want to make some things very clear. I would feel incredibly different about the corporate income tax rate if we had universal paid sick days. Yeah. The minimum wage wasn't $7.25.

If 100% of people had paid family leave or if everyone got bereavement leave or if we made, you know, more income, I would feel really, really different about the corporate income tax rate if they have ever proved that they spent it on workers. Cake, eating it, I don't know how that phrase works, that's corporate income taxes. I'm so, well, now, and if you're like, I don't know, I don't know, Catherine, even after

shrinkation, I still think I'm on big corporation side.

“I want to explain why I think corporate profits are too high and labor income is too low.”

I'm going to start technical and I promise I will get to a human place. We measured the size of the economy through gross domestic product. It has a sister's statistic called gross domestic income and you can use gross domestic income to understand how much money goes to corporations after profits. As a size of the economy, how much money goes to the wages compensation and non-wage

benefits of workers. Well, this series starts in 1929, and in 1929, corporate profits as a share of the economy was 8.9%.

we'd ever get that high again.

“The last four years, corporate profits as a share of the economy have been over 9%.”

The highest four years on record in almost a century of how much money corporations make in profit are the prior four.

They have never been so profitable.

They're even more profitable now than they were just before the Great Depression wrecked the economy. Similar measure is, you know, kind of same shares, how much goes to workers. That number has been falling for 60 years and is now at a low, just under 52%, which puts it on par with how much workers made during the Great Depression, right, in the 1930s.

So corporate profits right now are higher than the peak of the stock bubble. Labor income right now, close to where it was during the early 1930s of the Great Depression, something has to change. When I say corporations are making too much money and people aren't making enough money, like yes, I'm a liberal progressive economist and I want nice things, but I have 100 years

of data behind me when I say corporations are making too much money and workers are not making enough. I feel like, yeah, I feel like it's weird, I feel like we have the same conversation in like 15 different ways, like, people are not being paid enough.

“I think some things are really complicated and they require an economist like me to explain”

and some things are not that complicated. One has too much money. The other has too little, like mom, mom, like here at government, like you've got a job to do. It's not that hard.

We're out of balance. Yeah. We are a lot of the way there, but now we have to deal with incredible complications and how businesses are taxed that they can then use to reduce their tax rate. Right.

Right. Well, corporations can deduct and how they can deduct them and how soon they deduct them and whether they deduct them over those expenses over time and we've made it way easier for you to lower their tax bill by climbing your expenses immediately in your one. And I should say that like moving to a simpler tax rate is easy, you know, legally.

You have a tax code that's thousands of pages long and you replace it with one that's much shorter. It's that we have turned our tax system into a complex bonus and reward mechanism. And there's almost no way to change the tax code without creating some kind of loser. And this is how we've gotten to where we are.

Oh, yeah. Make tax is simpler, but not on my thing. Yeah. The cents we stick, sir. Very.

Yeah. And everybody knows where the carrots are, where the sticks are. Yeah. So one wants to lose their carrot. Yeah.

And some corporations the same.

“So I think much like our state tax episode, like there are still some like very complicated”

questions related to these state tax, but like basis, junior, I'm coming for you. You know what, basis senior, coming for you too. Did I get people mad enough about how much profit corporations have relative to how much money they have and all the nice things we could buy. I mean, I don't know, do you want to go back to your capitalists at heart?

I am a capitalist at heart because I don't think that this incredible economy that's 31 trillion in size that employs 170 million people should be held hostage by a corporation that wants lower taxes. Yeah. Like I would bet on 170 million people, people who have access to a loan to family money,

to put it all together on a credit card and they put their life on some dream business. I would put my money on them over Amazon any day. Yeah.

I would always put my money on people, building new businesses, then old businesses,

staying in power because they are able to use their threat in their size in order to get more money from the government and get more protection. I also don't think it's good for the economy to have such concentrated wealth among businesses. Yeah. Big businesses don't innovate.

Innovation comes from new businesses, not big businesses already in existence. Yeah. Big businesses just bully everybody around them. Wouldn't this tick a master and what they just, you know, yes, it's like, yeah, all right. Well, eradicate tick a master.

You know, y'all know, still have concert tickets, like I have concerts. It's funny. Like we're afraid to talk about the pain that comes from making a big corporation mad. But we're okay with the pain that comes from staggering income inequality on perpetuity. Or the pain that comes from not being able to afford child care.

The pain that comes from not being able to afford health care. As your parents are dying and all these terrible decision, all that pains okay. But if like Bezos feels the squeeze, and he cuts jobs, we can't allow that. There are things stopping Bezos from cutting jobs now.

I mean, you're never going to cut 10,000 jobs.

I don't know in the next few months. You know, yeah. I mean, corporate income taxes don't give you, they don't like recession proof the economy. They don't create wages or income.

Like I just don't like that. I don't feel like that's very American or capitalist. I'm certainly not getting this subsidized child care. All right. Okay.

We need to wrap. Take a quick break. Yeah. Quick break. We're right back.

Okay. We're back.

“If we have executive orders, Catherine, do you have an executive order?”

Uh... Come back to me. Okay. Okay. I'm going to share an executive order from Valerie Worth in Raleigh, North Carolina.

She wants all commercial construction sites to have a sign that tells you what's being built. She wants to know whether she could be excited that she's getting a yummy restaurant versus a boring bank. Like this should be very, this would be very easy. I'm also down with this. I'm very curious.

What is going in in that hole? Uh-huh. Similar to the, am I moving in or moving out? Yes. Yeah.

I'm moving trucks. Yeah. I want some like idiot proof in here. Like I want like a little picture of what it's going to be. They do that sometimes.

They do that sometimes. Yeah. I do it sometimes. I want more. Um...

My executive order. I am currently in the greatest city in the world in New York City.

And it has some of the most incredible playgrounds.

My children have ever or will ever go to. And we need like a massive playground fund. Just to build playgrounds everywhere. Like we every airport needs one. Every library needs one.

Um, most public spaces need one. I mean, I want playgrounds like I want to be able to walk and trip over a playground. There's a new street in the US. Once I want a massive playground fund. And I'd be willing to take it from people who own corporations.

“Because I think we got two to three hundred billion dollars left.”

Yeah. Yeah. We've got two to three hundred billion dollars, but yeah. My executive order is we need more playgrounds. They need to be built like with art students. I mean, I'm thinking like big government liberal stuff from here to high heaven.

But I want some like, I want some like public funded art student. To be working on playgrounds all over. And every airport and train station need them. So more playgrounds. Spiritual sponsors.

All right. We under show talking about our spiritual sponsors. Which are the non-financial things that get us through the week. Gather with your spiritual sponsor. My spiritual sponsor is mutton busting. What is this?

Okay. Okay. Imagine a rodeo. We're like a cowboy gets on like a bucking Bronco horse. And he has like eight seconds to try and stay on in the horse like tries to kick him off.

Okay. Now imagine instead of a man on a horse. It is a kindergarten on a sheep. This is mutton busting. This is an actual activity.

This is no good. Hold on. This is a cartoon. What is this? No.

No. Mutton busting is real. It happens at the Houston rodeo. I just watched it. Mutton busting.

They put these little kids on sheep. And they were like helmets.

“And they have like a pad on their chest.”

And basically they put the kid on.

They have them like wrap their arms around the sheep. And they hold on to the wool as tightly as they can. And the sheep just runs from one side of the like the Bronco to the other. Yeah, they go. They are at a pad that's like 50 feet long.

And the sheep is trying to just run from one side to the other. And then you just see how long the little kid can stay on before he falls off. This is mutton busting. They're like featured on the local news during the rodeo. It's so precious.

A lot of times the kids are really traumatized and crying. Sometimes they think it's hilarious. But it's just, it's adorable. So the sheep that I saw this year were woolly Nelson. These are the names of the sheep.

The sheep. Yeah, woolly Nelson. Meryl sheep. Fleaswood Mac. Lamb burgini.

And then of course my favorite. The toddler tosser. But the sheep are so. I mean, they're so mild and dumb. Like they just jog over.

They, they just stand in one corner of the pen. Like they don't do anything. They just, they all know to stand in one group. They stand at being like 20 sheep or just watching the other one. Run up.

Being like he had a kid on you. Have you done anymore? Anyway, mutton. Mutton busting is my spiritual sponsor. Excellent.

You can see videos of mutton busting on mine. Okay. Well, my spiritual sponsor. Before I knew you were going to talk about Jeff Bezos and Amazon so much. Was I just read that Mackenzie Scott famously.

His ex wife but also the most prolific philanthropist this country has ever seen.

That gave away $7.17 billion in charitable giving last year.

And just, you know, the giving rate among the ultra wealthy is generally 1.2% of their net worth. And we should fund college scholarships and programs that connect low income communities with union jobs.

And every time I read a story about what she's done and who she's funded, it's just totally inspiring. But did you read about her process? Yeah. Listen, this is crazy.

She basically they do an incredible amount of research on their side.

Then Scott gets in touch with the people that they want to fund. And it's like, yeah, we like what you do. So here's $20 million dollars. Like they don't make them fill out like applications for days.

“They just send an email and it's like, can we schedule a call?”

And then I read it. It is this story I just read recently. There was a person who just kept throwing it to junk. It was like until finally she sent it to her, you know, the development team and the development team replied.

And then call that and was like, they want to give us $20 million dollars.

She was like, what? And it was historically like college in Maryland. So she gets all the call and is ready to make this big pitch. And they're like, oh no, no, no, we already know. Yeah, we're done.

“It's 20 here. Great. Yeah. It's amazing. It's amazing.”

I appreciate philanthropy like that because I feel like a lot of philanthropy has formalized labor intensive begging. Yeah.

And I like that. I mean, the quote from the Scott people was, you know, we do all the hard work are on art.

And so they don't have to. Yeah. And I was like, wow, that is not how much people know philanthropy feel about it. It's like, it's like, please spend a week on this application so we can give you $3,000. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, not that.

“Not that you and I would know anything about that anyway, we got to go.”

Okay. The optimistic economy podcast is edited by Sophie Llan. Our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson. Thank you very much. You can share video clips from the show on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn.

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