Is the Labor Market About to Tip Us Into Recession? — ft. Kathryn Anne Edwards

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Follow projects whagger now wherever you get your podcasts. Today's number 13. That's the percentage of us adults who believe Bigfoot is real. Edward, are they called Bigfoot in Europe? I don't know. Big meter. People some people are complaining about how pornographic my jokes are, so I'm going to I'm going to get them to bag for the dirty jokes, which is bad dad jokes. I like that.

“I think that's a good idea. How does Bigfoot tell time? How? He's got a Sasquatch.”

Basically. Market to a finger, then. What you have here is a structure change in the world history.

Cash is trash. Stocks look pretty attractive. Something's going to break. Forget about it. Welcome to property markets. It's dad minus the vulgarity. How are you? I'm doing well. It's a beautiful day here in New York. It's finally spring here. So everyone's in a good mood. Everyone's feeling happy again. So am I. I'm doing. I'm doing well. You're looking very fall. It's the spring. You need some quince. It's funny. You said this actually

is quince. But I need some new spring collection. So yeah, I'm doing well. How are you doing? Where are you? How is spring break? Lots of questions. I'm in Los Angeles. Spring break was great. I was in Florida, ton of time. But the boys. Beautiful there. Love my place there. And then I went to Palm Springs to go to Coachella. And now I'm in Los Angeles

at my second home at the Hills of Delaware. I just had a really threatening breakfast.

And I'm talking to you. And I'm waiting for my agent to come meet with me and have lunch. Jesus Christ, I'm a douchebag. Ask me about Coachella. I was just going to ask you that. I did not know that you went to Coachella. How was Coachella? I figured out the ultimate hack for Coachella. Every three years I go and I realize I'm too old and I hate going to the fucking festival and you walk for three hours and it's like crowded and someone bumps me and I

get all bummed out. And so this year I did it exactly right. I would. My friend has a beautiful home there and I just hang out by the pool. And then I go and I get great Mexican food. It's some dog Mexican restaurant. And I don't go to Coachella. And if David Bern is playing, I go home and I take an edible and I listen to David Bern which is almost as good. And then I go to the after parties because I get invited to these fun after parties. But I saw I do Coachella but I

don't go to Coachella. Is that sad? Is that sad? Is it genius or is it sad? No, it's not sad. It's not genius. I think it's genius. Yeah, it's a little douchey. Well, have you met me? Yeah. And I go with a bunch of friends from L.A. And I meet up with them after it's some like branded tequila party or nylon magazine or there's something called neon which is a carnival which I don't get and I think I'm the only person they are not an M.D.M.A. But yeah, that's nice

and I love pump springs. What did you do this weekend? No, very exciting. I worked pretty much all weekend. It was actually one of my most... Stop complaining bitch. Wait, your boss? Your very old boss is

“at Coachella and the 26 year old is working all weekend. I like that. I think that's why I get to go to”

Coachella. Let's connect the dots here. That's the idea. That's what we're doing here. What were you working on this weekend? What are we going to going on? Well, I was working on a presentation that I'm doing in a couple of weeks. But that's actually sort of not really the headline news here because

And that is that we are officially going on tour. And we are officially announcing it today. We are taking property markets live. We're going live in cities across the US at the end of May. We're hitting San Francisco, L.A., Miami, Chicago and of course, we're going to hit the hometown New York. We hope you'll join us. You can go get your tickets at ProphecyMarketsTour.com. You can do that right now. I encourage you to do that. I hope to see there. Scott, what do you

make of taking this show on the road? Everybody's going to show up. I want to set you up with their daughter. So it's going to be a bunch of baby boomer parents with 24 year old daughters who like are fed up with dating in New York and complain. And they're like, I know how to do that. That's the young at Ellison must be rich. He's talking about the markets every day. And he wears all these sweaters. I get the sense out. And he went to Princeton. Hello, son-in-law. You're

literally every mother's in every dad's dream. That's going to be the crowd. Okay. I bet we sell

out in the next 72 hours. I think I can just feel it. You're, yeah, we'll see. This is just an incredible

promotion for our new show. Yeah. Now I'm not, I mean this sincerely. It's like, there's so much shit in our business. I worry about. Yeah, I'm not worried about the pricing markets too. I think that what cities are going to be in? I just want to point out professor of Brian's strategy. This is just about the worst promotional monologue. I've, I've, I'm not worried about this one. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not worried about this one. What cities are we doing? The ones I just read,

“Simon Sisco, LA, man. You should go and go in New York. Wow, other than Chicago. I'm lifting all those”

cities, I think. Which city are you most excited about? I'm most excited about LA personally. I think that's going to be epic. Why is that? LA's Hollywood. It's exciting. It's sexy. It's fun. I think that's going to be very fun. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure how I feel about Simon Sisco. Either they're going to love us there or it's going to be a bunch of tech bros and vc's who hate us. And they're going to throw it to mountains at us. So, well, I think they hit you. I'm, I'm actually

very popular in that community. Now, I'm a big supporter of the venture capital community. And, I, you know, I, I, I just think that guys who would fuck their sister for a nickel are kind of my

heroes. Yeah, a property market store. It's going to be amazing. There's going to be merchandise,

dancing, girls and boys, magic tricks. It's going to be outstanding. Ed, what do we got on the darker today? Excitement is palpable. We're talking to our friend Catherine Anne Edward's labor economist. Oh, we love her. So, let's get into it. Last week, Mark Zandy told us that the biggest risk to the economy right now is the labor market. In fact, when we asked him what he's watching most closely over the next six months, his answer was

simple layoffs. Several forces are converging that could reshape employment in a meaningful way. First, AI is already starting to show up in the data. Emerging is the top sighted reason for planned layoffs last month. Second, the Trump administration is tightening immigration, which has historically

“been a key driver of growth for the US labor force. And then there is the added uncertainty”

of the war with Iran, which is already pushing inflation higher. Consumer prices rose 3.3 percent year over year in March. And as the biggest increase we've seen since 2024, and if inflation continues to climb, the Fed may have to respond by raising rates, which would only add more strain. So, with all eyes on the labor market, we thought it was a great time to bring in our resident labor market expert, Catherine Anne Edward's PhD economist, economic policy consultant, and

columnist for Bloomberg news. Catherine, it's always good to see you. I'm going to jump right in here.

When you look at the labor market right now, which appears to be weakening, and you can correct me if I'm wrong there. And when you look at the cracks that seem to be emerging, which stand out to you as the biggest, and which are you most concerned about right now? Sandy, I think hit the nail right on the head. Layoffs are the biggest concern. What we're seeing in the labor market is a slow down of the gears. If you think of the back of a watch, you do turn it over and you see the gears rotating

“in the cogs hitting. That's how you should picture the labor market. If workers go from job to job”

to unemployment to job again, mobility is everything for workers. The ability to move jobs, change jobs, get job offers. We have now three years of data showing just how much those gears have slowed. And it's not, it's something that we typically historically see in the unemployment rate, but we're not seeing now. You can look at hiring. You can look at quits. You can look at the three months growths and wages. They all point to a decline in labor market mobility. Layoffs would just

lead to a terrible recession quite quickly. How close to that scenario do we think that we are at this

point? I mean, we had the March jobs report, which showed that we had actually a plenty of jobs added at 178,000. But we also know that these numbers keep on getting revised down. And then you look at February the previous month, which was like the totalops, it's story. We lost 133,000 jobs. So it's hard to tell how close we are to that point. And if we're actually approaching it,

“I mean, do you think that layoffs are about to come in this economy in a big way?”

One data point, one jobs report does not make or break the labor market. What's more concerning for me is that the economy shed jobs in four months of last year. And in fact, we've been on track

every other month since June. We've lost jobs. So let's see if I can do this on the fly. June,

August, October, December, February, we lost jobs. That's, I mean, I don't know how to say this more plainly. That's not good. That's indications of an economy in a labor market that's slowing down. I mean, we're to say that we're, we cannot come closer to teetering on the edge as we've been over the last 12 months. And we haven't moved really in either direction. But I think one figure that shows this in a really just truly striking way, easy enough to pull up, just the total number

of jobs in the economy, payroll employment. Go back to 1939. I believe when this statistics begin. And you can see it's just a solid line going up and then every so often you have a little divot and a little divot and every little divot is a recession. What makes the last five years so remarkable is it's the first time this, this measure of basic size of our labor market has shown

a flat line. We've never just plateaued. You know, we get to the top and we fall. We get to the

top and we fall. The idea that we would plateau for one to two years is absolutely historically

“unprecedented. But that's what we're doing. So what do we think is the cause of that? I mean,”

this is also fits with what Moxandi was saying when we spoke with him last week, which is like we're not seeing, you know, job loss yet, but basically we're seeing that a lot of businesses just aren't hiring people. It's just completely flat. And then we spoke with David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who I think pretty much speaks for the entire industry when he told us that the long-term projection for the business is to keep head count flat, just don't hire and don't

really fire either. Why do you think that that is happening right now? Like what are some of the forces that might be contributing to this plateau effect that you describe? Uncertainty in the economy and economic policy. Sometimes you don't have to look that hard for an explanation. Parsing the economy right now is so difficult because it has the administration has pursued

“what can only be described as relatively chaotic economic policy and to the extent that we know”

what it would do, it's destructive. We can only hit the economy so many times before it falls down. We've been watching it be punched over and over again. It's been resilience more resilient than a lot of people expected it would be, but that doesn't mean that it's impervious to economic policy that's meant to cause harm. Policy like deportation, policy like gutting the federal government, policy like tariffs. And now add to the mix policy like Iran.

We have a tendency to focus on this headline number of unemployment, but we don't spend enough time talking about which pockets of the job sector or which individuals are fairing the best of the worse. I read that there's been a spike in unemployment among women in their late 20s and that the story there was the effects of doge and the cutting of government jobs, which are disproportionately affecting young women. Can you give us a little bit more color on which types

of people or sectors are fairing the best and worst? Health and education are doing great. Everybody else is doing some type of bad. Health and education jobs tend to be educated women. Not necessarily highly educated women, but at least a high school degree. You'll have lots of technical occupations, masters degrees, all the way up to doctors. That is the only sector of the economy that is showing consistent and reliable strength. Everybody else is on some form of

decline, either holding steady or outright shedding jobs for the last 12 months. Now men and women don't hold the same job and neither do people of different ages or different races. And so a lot of the pain in the economy is proxied through the type of job you are more likely to hold.

New York Times of just how kind of ironically enough beneficial the Biden administration was for men's

employment given that it had put so much money into manufacturing as opposed to 2025, the first year

of the second-truff administration manufacturing, shed a pretty remarkable number of jobs. You see that pattern if you look hard enough at any job. So you're also going to see that middle-aged black women in the DC metro area, we're going to be hit hard by doge versus younger graduates that have a doctorate or in health or education unit, they'll do okay. Those patterns hold for a lot of reasons. I was reading today that a very prominent economist was saying that the answer

to this puzzle of men's unemployment is to make certain jobs less feminine because they seem to be the ones that are growing for the future. It was an interesting note that kind of reflects what we all see if we can't describe that men and women don't hold the same jobs. Yeah, I remember reading that one of the best things for young men would be if we defeminize nursing because it's such a growing trade high-paying. Are there certain sectors you would argue

where the growth is more beneficial to the economy than others? Because when I see that health care

“jobs are growing, I think of an aging population that quite frankly is misproductive and that”

ultimately we're all just going to pay for that. Or does it result in productivity because foreigners come here for, or there's innovation that spills into the pharmaceutical sector? Are there certain sectors where unemployment or strong employment is not as good as if we had employment growth and other sectors? I think I tend to prioritize growth that is both reflecting underlying economic activity as well as growth that is keeping the gears of the labor market moving.

As much as I would have my preferences over the labor market, the ultimate

the ultimate policy is not to mess with it too much, right? It does so much on its own. 170 million

people have a job in this country across, you've got people who are basically 14 to 95 years old they have every level of education possible in every state, in every locality and they've all got jobs. Mostly it's all working really well. I think what I don't like to see is maybe the better answer to the question is, I think the sickness we have in the labor market is not sector specific. The sickness that we're seeing growing and mounting evidence of long-term is that we

have employer concentration that's freezing mobility and dampening wages. Think of it a monopoly amongst employers. There's mounting evidence that this has been slowly occurring for decades, so my preference would be whichever sector has the most businesses, the less agglomeration,

“the most competition for workers, because that's what will be associated with lots of wage”

growth and mobility. I want to talk a little bit about AI and I don't afford it. He's this near respond to it that everybody's AI washing layoffs. They blame AI because if you're a CEO hasn't met his or her numbers or you overhired during the pandemic or just generally speaking you're the underlying fundamentals of your business for a week, you can say I overhired or the fundamentals of our business to manor week or you can say we're using AI and we don't need all these

people because I'm part of the Pepsi generation and you should take my stock up because that will directly result in greater EBITDA on a higher stock price. I feel as if it's sort of kitchen sinking or wide-washing of AI and then everybody reports that AI is impacting the labor market. My thesis is that it's overstated. And by the way, that's not good. It just means the underlying economy isn't strong. But do you bind to this notion that or the thesis that AI is being used

“as sort of the buggy man here to blame all the layoffs on innovation around AI?”

To a certain degree, yes, it's convenient and it's financially remunerative to corporations to say that they're laying off because of AI. I would be one thing if there was no penalty, but it appears to be

there might be a reward for saying that you're utilizing AI. It's not the first time this has happened.

The economy, we'd like to think that it's just numbers, but it's really so much narrative as much as it is hard data. And the narrative around companies blaming something else for layoffs. I mean, that's tail is old as time. It's not that we want to cut jobs. It's just that the minimum wage is too high. And therefore, we need to put your retail staff on an iPad. It's not that we, you know, don't want to raise your pay. It's that healthcare, you know, Obamacare made it required

and it's too expensive. I mean, if you go back every decade has a new person to blame, a new story that shifts the blame from employer or rather corporate responsibility onto some other factor in the economy where they say, you know, our hands are tied. And this is a blameless way for me to make a decision. I'd like to make any way. Lots of candidates for that over time.

what the data tells us with clear eyes. Those eyes are hard to keep clear. I think it's certainly

possible that AI is being used as an excuse to lay off workers and lay off young people and that there are other reasons to lay them off. But at the same time, I feel like the more we lean on that argument, the more we rule out the possibility that actually, in a lot of cases, people are being laid off because of AI. And when I look at the data and when I look at the evidence that we have right now for unemployment among young people specifically, especially among

college educated young people, the people who are kind of in the prime position for these white collar and often cases tech-focused jobs, the unemployment rate for those people is the highest it's been in a long time, outside of the pandemic at least an over a decade. And I also was just reading an article from Bloomberg explained that the share of US job openings today that our entry

level has fallen from 70, it was around 80 percent and would down below 75 percent. And so it

makes me think that like, I mean, whether or not it's AI washing, it seems like young people are getting a little bit screwed in this labor market right now. And so I'm not really sure what to do

“with that information. So I think that what it comes down to is we don't know the degree or effectiveness”

to which AI has been adopted by firms, so we can't trace out its labor market consequences. So it leaves room for basically both of your scenarios, both that AI is starting to crowd out certain positions that could be entry level, so it hasn't led to layoffs, but it's reducing hiring and at the same time it could also be a very convenient fall guy for otherwise corporate mismanagement during what our unprecedented academic times coming out of a pandemic and going

straight into inflation. Meaning over hiring, just just to be clear, you're saying they missed manage the high to many people and now they're trying to pull it back, right? Yes, and it's and it's leaning I think both stories lean on what we think to be absolutely the case, which is that AI will replace jobs in the future. It will cause job loss to the extent that it'll also cause job creation and we don't know what the pace of those two things will be and we don't know how

it plays out over time. We know looking back to every other technological development that has hit the U.S. labor market, it takes a long time for it to be absorbed into productivity. I mean, I could show you, you know, per worker productivity in the United States going back to the

forties and you, if I if I if I covered the x-axis, you'd never find the internet. You'd never find

computers. You couldn't point and say that was when that that's the year that the internet became mainstream or that's the year the personal computer sales took off. You would never see it

“because it takes a long time for that productivity to be adopted. So it's I think where we are right now”

is in a place where we don't have enough data points to parse out a story. And so we we know what's going to happen. We don't know how it's going to happen or how quickly that leaves room for both of these things. I mean, my my instinct on this is that a lot of people are using AI on the job and that they've, you know, whether or not they told their employer, they've got Jackie B.T. or Claude going to help them work. You know, could be to impress the boss, could be to prevent, you know,

them being the one that gets laid off when something occurs. But people using it on the job versus adoption at the firm level that would see that would kind of be a clear cause and effect to lay off. So I don't think we've seen too much firm level adoption yet, which is what most economists would say when the layoffs would really start to roll in. You know, this is the problem with new technology. It's just I leave a lot of room for guessing. I think what we can rest on are

certainties and things that we know are happening. The economy is slowing down. The administration has destructive economic policy and we have longstanding weaknesses in our labor market that can be exploited by new technology and would absolutely cause harm without having to guess. The point about, you know, it takes a long time for these things to settle in. I know that point can we look back at the data and be like, oh, yeah, that's why this happened. That's why this, you know,

“the internet occurred and then that's why we saw these changes. But in order to do that, you have to”

like wait a really long time. If you want to base it purely on the data and I mean, you have to look both be backward looking and also over a period of like several years. And so for me, this is where I get a little frustrated with the conversation because it's like, oh, well, we don't have the data yet that companies are using AI. And I'm like, well, they're telling us that they're using AI, they're firing thousands of young employees at a time, whether or not it's literally like the

AI is doing their jobs right now. I don't know. But what I do know is that there is an expectation incumbent on every large organization that if you're not laying off lots of people, if you're not

And that to me is significant in and of itself. I take your point. But I'll put back to you. What do

“you need to know? Do you need to know exactly what AI is doing on the job into workers to respond”

to weakness in the labor market? I mean, it's not as if the only thing standing between young workers in a job is what private employers are doing or say they are doing or will do with AI. We have a weak economy in a weak labor market with terrible social supports and almost no investment in people that don't have a job. I don't need to know what a company is doing to AI to know that our government does a terrible job in certain aspects of the labor market.

So I think its your frustration is well deserved, but not necessarily well placed because there are solutions that don't have to come from just knowing more about AI, but have to come from holding our policy makers accountable for economic mismanagement. AI is today's story, but there will be another one weakness as weakness in the labor market. We don't have great infrastructure for helping people who don't have a job. AI won't change that. It'll just make it look worse.

So it's almost they, I could see it being so dissatisfying to have to deal with your story ed, but there is satisfaction if you go after the things you can change as opposed to things you can't change or even see. It seems that the idea that AI isn't that transformative is an excuse to not have to create policies that will help people. And I feel like this is a trend that we see in the labor market where it's like someone like you or me would say hey there's a problem here

and then a lot of people will get together and find reasons as to why no that's actually not a problem. Everything's normal, everything's fine and it gives us almost like an out to not address the underlying problem in the labor market. And so I guess my question of view is like as someone an expert in this field, I mean, am I wrong in thinking that it seems like we need to create a policy here that is forward looking and that is going to front run at least the possibility

that thousands, about millions of jobs are going to be wiped out because of this technology.

“Or is that maybe the wrong thing to focus on? I think that it's the thing that people care about”

today, the thing that people are afraid of today. So the economy, we don't work for the economy, the economy works for us. If this is a thing that we think is coming that people are afraid of, we can respond to it. And I can, I can sit in like my big room full of books and be like well, actually, people said the same thing in the 1920s, they did. America does not like unemployed people, but that's not, that doesn't mean that like we have to do something to correct for the past and

meet point out that we've never had a great system for unemployment support. If people are scared

about AI today, then let's act on AI today. It's going to, it's going to put you at the same place that it would have put you about adoption of capital technology in manufacturing plants that reduce the number of manufacturing workers. It would have been the same thing that would have said mechanization of agricultural labor. It's the same problem, but it's today, a lot of people are going to lose their job and they don't know what they'll do after. We have failed this moment

before. We don't have to fail at this time. So I don't want to say that you are wrong. I think that

“I think that it's, if this is the moment and that is the mood, then that's what we should act on.”

And it doesn't have to be the perfect diagnosis of labor market issues. It doesn't have to be that there's overwhelming evidence that AI's destruction is already clear. If it's something that will make the American economy and labor market better, something that will switch the affairs of American workers, it's the right thing to do. The years will tell us just how right it was. We'll be right back off to the break. If you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend

and please follow us on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This is advertiser content brought to you by Virgin Atlantic. Again, a couple weeks back. I got you a birthday gift not to pair myself on the back, but it was a pretty good one. It was, indeed, you surprised me with Virgin Atlantic upperclass tickets to London. So tell us all about it. It was pretty

incredible. From the moment I entered that upperclass cabin, I have to tell you I felt like a VIP.

Anything I needed a drink, snack, assistance with the seat, flat seats, flat seats, exactly. Had the four course meal, got my champagne, very delicious, enjoyed the food. And the journey home. The journey home was great. I went to the Virgin Atlantic LHR Clubhouse. That's the Heathrow Clubhouse. Heathrow Clubhouse was awesome. Got myself a coffee, headed over to the meditation pod that they called the somedome, kind of felt like a sort of spaceship where you relax and think nice thoughts.

boots, where you could do some work. You could even record a podcast. I didn't do that,

“but maybe I should have. It was a very enjoyable experience. So, Ed, they cool real question here.”

Is what are you planning to get me from my birthday? See the world differently with Virgin Atlantic. Flying should be more than just transport. It is part of the adventure. It's a version at Atlantic.com to learn more. Take it's a lounge access provided by Virgin Atlantic. Support for the show comes from BCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward to their ingenuity and determination.

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to see how much you could save. That's SoFi.com/markets and start making smarter money moves with SoFi. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank and a member FDIC additional in terms of conditions apply and MLS 696891. With back, with profty markets. My understanding is this is the first year since the Great Depression where we've had net negative immigration. More people have left the country that have come in.

Does that result in fewer people fighting for the same number of jobs in an increase in wages or does that suppress demand because there's less economic growth? Talk a little bit about

“the focus on between how does this change in net immigration impact employment and wages?”

Yeah, let me start from the beginning. Economy equals people. The size of your economy is really well predicted by the number of people in it. But people don't have the same level of productivity or relationship to the economy. We've got children. We've got old people. So really, the more workers you have, the bigger your economy is. And this is the basis for the economic returns for things like child care, for things like

paid family leave. That if you maintain a worker in the economy, you've made the economy larger. Immigrants are people. It's not as if the labor market discerning from them in the way that policy makers tend to when they're trying to drum up nativeism. If it's a person doing a job, it's not as if the economy is like, nope, this is a separate person or this is a different kind of worker. It is a worker. They're doing a job. They add to the economy. Immigrants rarely come as children.

Most, and I rarely come as the elderly. Most immigrants come in the prime age of their working years to earn money here. And immigrants have given their age distribution of relatively high labor force participation rate. So when we lose immigrants, we're not necessarily losing, you know, any random person, we're losing people who are highly attached to the labor force. So we're losing workers, which means the way that you think about, say, how child care would

improve the economy is that it has a similar kind of throughline for immigration, more workers equals bigger economy. Lower the number of workers equals lower economy. What a lot of anti-immigrants will policy makers and shills will say is that they're taking jobs. That rests on the notion

not communist. It doesn't work like that. We're a market-based economy. The market is a function of the people in it not with the government dictates or how those jobs are allocated. So we said, at the top of this, that when you look at men and women's employment, they don't hold the same jobs. Immigrants and natives don't hold the same job either. So if I, you know, if I were to tell you my answer for male employment is I'm going to fire half of nurses in the US and then men

can take their jobs, you would just be looking at me jaw-dropped like, no. That would never work.

“You have to train those people. They'd have to get the right job and they don't want those”

jobs anyway. They don't see it as a male job. But if I tell you that we deport immigrants and then Americans will take them, you know, we have such an underlying racism and nativeism behind that you'd fall for that argument, but you wouldn't fall for the male female female one. But from the labor market perspective, they're relatively similar. Not everyone wants the same job. If you deport someone from a job, they're holding. It's not clear that just anyone can slot in.

We have these patterns in the labor market because we're human beings. We're not cogs. We're not worker bots. So I, the underlying economics is when you reduce the number of workers in our economy, you reduce our economy, full stop. Yeah. Makes sense, right? Everyone talks about importance of population growth. How has the spike in oil prices impacted the labor market? What have you seen happen so far? What do you expect to see? I haven't seen much yet because I think everyone is hoping

“that it's a quick and transitory. The official line from the Federal Reserve is that they”

look through, quote-unquote, and things like this, where they're trying not to, gosh, I'm so bad at metaphors. It's going to take the forest for the trees. Is that it? Yeah. Okay. Well, it's close enough. You all know what I mean. Right? You don't want to think that 3.3% inflation last month is a sign of underlying pressures to raise prices overall in the economy that need to be met with higher interest rates. We know where it's coming from. It's coming from the spike in oil. However,

that can translate to overall price increases quite quickly. So it's a very tenuous balance. And the labor market, I haven't seen anything directly yet, but that doesn't mean it won't come. When you asked me earlier what I was looking at, I have this like very odd fixation on surveys of manufacturers. Texas has one for the Texas Survey of Manufacturers, and then something like this shows up in the beige book of the Fed, but the Texas Survey of Manufacturers, it's a delightful

reading. They're very plain spoken. It's a trait we have. But they'll say one more month of this, and it's completely broken me. I've been through so much over the past two years. I simply can't do this anymore. I'd rather fold up shop than have to have business in these conditions. I mean, they're very plain spoken about just how much is on the line and how close they are to the edge. I just don't know how far you can push people. And once one's employers say that this isn't worth,

almost not worth our time to stay in business when it's so risky and difficult, that's when you start to see big job loss on that end. But there are other ways the high energy prices can effectively remark it. That's just one that is top of mind. It feels like, I mean, just to sort of plot out the big forces that are affecting the labor market right now. On the one hand,

what seems to be propping it up is basically just healthcare. I mean, it sounds like that's literally

what happened last year. We added nearly 700,000 healthcare jobs. And, I mean, from my assounding, the entire economy added actually less than that, which, I mean, to me, the takeaway is,

“if healthcare didn't exist last year, then we would be losing jobs in America. Is that right?”

Deep recession. Deep recession. So you've got that force that's propping it up. And you can either feel good about that, or you can feel bad about it, because it basically means that our population is aging and becoming increasingly sick. You've also got the immigration force, which is pushing things down. You've also got the uncertainty dynamic where businesses don't really know what Trump's going to do next. So it's pushing things down. And then you've also got

potentially the AI dynamic where especially tech organizations, white collar organizations are looking for a reason to lay people off. Is it necessarily directed? Because of AI or is it excuse? I don't know, but it's something to do with AI. When you look at all of these big forces,

which in your mind are the most important and having sort of the largest influence on the

labor market in America right now? From a number's game alone, the relationship between overall job growth and health is probably the most worrying. And I can add to your troubles. It's not just that it's an aging population and an elderly population. It's a horribly organized sector. I mean, I suppose maybe to answer your question a little after the fact's got, I don't necessarily

private markets. This is it's propped up by government intervention 15 different ways, hundreds of

“billions of dollars. So to me, I think it's a it's a it's own kind of bubble and that we are relied.”

Like the more we rely on health care sector for jobs, the less likely we really want to look under the hood and see how that sector is performing or organized or how reliable it is on public spending. So let me just add to your worries there. But yes, I think through numbers alone, the fact that we're only adding jobs from health is likely the the biggest concern. The rest of them are all there. We don't know the like exactly how they're combining

in the labor market to create weakness, but in some ways we don't have to. The direction matters more than the data points. I know that it's putting downward pressure on the labor market to be supporting immigrants in particular workers. I don't know the exact number and I mean, talking about data with a lag that takes a long time to figure out because of the relationship that unauthorized people have with paperwork and with federal surveys. But I mean, I know that

it's downward. I don't know the exact degree, but the direction matters more. When you think about policy, I mean, all of these things are the kinds of things that policy make is a supposed to be thinking about especially when it comes to jobs where it's literally people's livelihoods that are on the line. What is the right directionally the correct kind of policy that would make for a better labor market where people are feeling better about the economy.

“And we know now that actually consumer sentiment at least is at its lowest level I believe ever.”

I think that was what we learned last week, certainly one of its lowest in very, very long time. What should policy makers be doing to improve the situation and to make for a stronger and healthier labor market? To have a list, we need a new unemployment system. Our current system is on an employment was created in the Social Security Act of 1935. It's 53 separate state and territory programs. They don't coordinate benefits. They don't

coordinate benefits size, benefit eligibility. They've got 53 age and computer systems that don't talk to each other and they don't cover workers that are not in W2 employment. The benefits themselves are incredibly meager. They don't go to the majority of the unemployed or a replace even a majority of their wages and it's very much a program that was designed around temporary seasonal layoffs in manufacturing in the 1930s. It's well funded to a certain degree relative to because it's a

social insurance program. It's funded by payroll taxes so it never runs out of money. The same way

that if it were funded by the largest of the federal government, it could very easily have been ended 15 years ago. The federal government walked away from careful management of this program in the 70s and we have suffered every session because of it. A new dynamic unemployment system, I have hours worth of ideas about it. I'll let you pick what you want to hear, but I've always thought that the scariest thing about AI is losing your job. Well, I can't

change AI, but I can change how you feel about job loss if there was a system of unemployment that you felt confident in. Can we hear some of those ideas? I mean, not, not, not several hours.

“Of course. I don't like to ask. So, yeah, problem one, it needs to be federal. You need to have a”

federal system that incorporates not just W2 employees but the self-employed, your contractors. Number two is that it needs to be triaged to look more like what we know unemployment to look like, which is a lot of people who are unemployed for pretty short amount of time. Some people that are unemployed for a longer amount of time but still get a job and then the very long term unemployed that need to get retrained or move into a different occupation. So, you need to triage your unemployment

system so that it looks like unemployment. Some people who lose their job to AI, they'll probably get a new job within one to two months. Some people, they'll take six, they'll pivot a little bit,

but they'll be fine. Other people, they'll never find a job in the career they were trained for again.

Our unemployment system basically is hands over the eyes, hands over the ears, shaking its head, not recognizing that any of that new ones occurs. It absolutely could just triage through them. There's also a lot of ways we could deliver benefits that would be smarter in more fitting to how people respond to unemployment. So, an idea that's been kicking around for such a long time, but no one wants to take initiative on is, it should be paid out as a lump sum.

Right now, it's a weekly benefit. You're eligible for a period of time, sometimes up to 26 weeks, longer in a recession. But, you know, 26 weeks of a fourth of your pay is really tough if you've got a mortgage, if you've got rent, if you've got a car payments, if you know a friend who has a job

benefit is so poultry. It's enough to not lose everything, but it's also so little. You'll lose

“something. A lot of people think that you should be able to just get your four weeks or eight”

weeks of unemployment paid out as a check. And then if you need to move, if you need to pay for something, you know, you just, you empower more workers. I think the part that's scary for a lot of policy makers is that we're not a country that easily gives power to workers. And this would empower them greatly. I just have a thought on immigration. I mean,

one of the things that you basically explain there is that if you are being, if you're super

anti-immigration, then you're kind of anti-growth. Like there is an economic argument to immigration. In the overall political conversation in America, my understanding is that people have kind of on the on the both of them and certainly on the right. But on the left have coalesced around this idea that Biden did not handle immigration correctly, that he let too many immigrants in, we saw too much immigration. And it's one of those things that like I feel like most people in politics

kind of agree on like, you know, Trump got one thing right. And that is that he cracked down on immigration. What is your response to that argument? Is there not an argument as to why too much

“immigration is a bad thing for an economy or do people have it wrong?”

Your response is policy person first, economists second, human third. So policy person first, they're both failures. We need, we need an immigration reform. We, we have let

roughly, I think, six to eight million people into the country and told them to apply for

legal status on this side of the border. And then we're mad. It takes a long time when we don't have immigration reform or fund immigration courts. I mean, they're, they're both two sides of failure, which is that we need to have immigration reform that decides, one way or the other, we are they're going to let immigrants in and make them fully incorporated into our economy and society where we're going to keep them out. And both of them are doing it halfway. I appreciate

both perspectives on some level, but it is absolutely ridiculous to say that there's any winning on any type of immigration policy if you are not reforming our broader system. And that keeps

getting lost in this political fight of like, oh, let two people, too many people in,

let not enough people in. Y'all, our system is broken. It hasn't been reformed since I was about six months old. I'm 40. About to be 41. Like, we need to move here. This, this system is broken. So that'd be my policy response. My economic response would be the, even the most ardent anti-immigrant economist would agree that immigrants increase the size of the economy. They'd say that immigrants affect, that is, deleterious to the economy comes from wages and that immigrants

can suppress the wages of native born workers. You know, this is kind of like losing jobs because of the minimum wage. It's not that the pressure isn't there. It just hasn't show up in a large degree in the data because if immigrants are growing the economy, they can have a downward pressure on wages, but not actually reduce wages. And so there's lots of case studies of high levels of immigration where people look. So what happened to low wage workers in that locality did the

rush of immigrants hurt their, their, their wages. Probably one of the most famous examples is the Mario boat lift, which sends, you know, a very large number of immigrants to Miami. And so what happened to the wage distribution in Miami? Well, the economy grew enough from those new immigrants that the wages of even low wage workers still grew. But even the most ardent anti-immigrant economists would say, they grow the economy. They would just say it's not worth it for the effect

“on wages. People like me would say the wage effect is probably there, but small, and that's why we don't”

see it. Me is a, as a human would say, we talk about immigrants, even in this framework, that they're not like us. Should we let them in? Should we not let them in? We are still approaching it as they are different from us on some fundamental level. And I think that that is a function of our broken immigration system that we tend to knock them down a peg. You know, at the end of the day, these were people that showed up at the border desperate saying that they

were in danger if they stayed at home. What is the answer to that question? That is something America has not decided. And it needs, it needs to decide whether it slams the door in the face or not. But the way that we phrase it and talk about it seems to be a calculus that forgets that these were people struggling that we decided to help. I don't know if that should have an economic benefit. I don't know if it needs to. My human self would say, my economist self would say,

But I mean, as a human, do you need that? Do you need me to show you? It's good for the economy for you to help someone in need? That's fine if you do. But at some point, codify that into immigration law. It almost seems like the way people handle that question as they say, yeah, it's mean and I don't really want to slam the door in the face, but it's a trade off because they're all these negative consequences. But then you listen to someone like you

explain how actually there are positive consequences. It's like, wait, what's the trade off exactly? Like, why do we, why do we think that we have to do this? Because there's some

reason. I mean, maybe it seems like it always just goes back to cultural reasons, national reasons,

native-ish reasons, maybe it's something about American culture. Perhaps a conversation for another

“time. I think it's legitimately hard for people to understand that someone who doesn't look like”

them can be an American. And it was actually George W. Bush, when he was president, early in his first term, he said something, I don't remember the exact quote, but it's, it's roughly Americans have no race but creed, right? We don't have one way that we look or that we have looked, you know, from the beginning and that's very hard for people to handle. You prefer people that look like you. Everybody does. The degree you're willing to accept other ones. I mean, I could

rattle off so many statistics about how much of our economy, innovation, small businesses, entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 companies that are run by or started by immigrants. If that makes a difference, go out and find those statistics. I don't know if it has to.

So I can answer the economics of immigration questions, but I always like to put in this

“caveat that I, I don't know if that's the only way we should evaluate these type of humanitarian”

cases. We'll be right back and for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at propertymarkets.com. Secretary of Defense, PPEG Seth has been talking about the war in Iran in distinctly biblical terms, citing Psalms, the resurrection of Jesus, and the Book of Quentin. And I will strike down upon the with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.

President Trump is comparing himself to Christ, Vice President Francis Faiton with the Pope. Watching all of this is the increasingly influential pastor Doug Wilson. He co-founded the church that headset of tents. Wilson's a Christian nationalist who would like the USA to be a theocracy. He'd also like to help us get there, though he doesn't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I believe that it is accelerating. I believe that we're making significant gains.

I see a assembling resources and I'm encouraged in that labor, but I don't expect to see what

“we're praying for in my lifetime. Pastor Doug Wilson and how much you should worry about his plans”

on today explained from Vox weekdays afternoons wherever. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice rates and deep decision protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in many hour. You will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space,

it's talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ice. When it comes to

the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want

border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States and any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America actually, every Saturday in your audio and video feet. Hi, I'm Renee Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the curiosity shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun.

We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. With back, with profty markets. We're entering into political season, although it feels like it's 24 by seven now. And we have a lot of people who claim they're not running for president.

But there just happened to be coming out with books and willing to come on our podcast at any at any time. So when you hear people who are lining up to run for president in 28,

the underlying economy and labor or doesn't. The economy has told by politicians is such a

weird warped place. It's really hard. It's really hard to discern. I mean, there are a couple

“of things that I like to hear. You know, I don't think that you should frame investments in workers as”

charity. And the way that we would say, you know, 20 years ago, why should you have federal child care free federal child care? You'd hear it as like to help those women. It will grow your economy. And I don't, I think that we have for so long pivoted that social programs, that progressive, you know, are in favor of are somehow like a gift, like they're a bonus. Once the economy is strong enough, then they can help women and children as opposed to seeing directly

as an economic investment. And I don't think it's radical to say, this is an economic investment. Page family leave is an economic investment. Page six days is an economic investment. There was a study of paid sick days that came out. I think the study itself is a few years old. It was looking at sick day expansions through the 20 teens. And it found that women without a

“college degree saw roughly nearly $3,000 more in earnings after they had paid sick days. And they”

weren't working. Like, they weren't taking $3,000 worth of sick days. Having sick days made it easier for them to keep their job because you can still be fired for calling in sick in America. And the people who have to deal with sickness the most are mothers. So you make it hard for mothers to keep a steady job if you don't give them the protection to have paid paid sick days. We give paid sick days. They earn more money, but someone is still going to frame paid sick days

as this is a charity for the poorest workers. It's not a charity for the poorest workers. If it makes our labor market better and fair, it is an investment we need on behalf of all workers. I try to find language like that. It's then on the ground, but I hope language will be like that. I should say, Scott, I'll come knock on your door. I have a book coming out in a year and a half. And I'll just say with certainty, I am not running for President. And I'll do both in the same

interview. I'll talk about a book. And then I'll tell you, I'm not running for President. [laughter]

Oh, yeah. That's the first line of people running for President as I am not running for President.

We're spending $7 trillion on receipts of five trillion. If we are going to do anything resembling some sort of fiscal responsibility or fiscal sanity, how can we not go under recession? I would just love to hear your thoughts on the full crown of the tension between some sanity around fiscal responsibility and the employment market. And also, I feel as if I want to get your that's my first question. I want to get your response to this. Jamie Diamond said that when

asked what a recession was, he said something that happens every seven years. And I feel as if it's become so long since we had a real recession that we've decided it's unthinkable and unacceptable and not a natural part of the cycle. I mean, so one, it thoughts about some sort of attempt to deficit reduction in its impact on the labor market and the economy, and two,

“quite frankly, aren't we due for a recession and wouldn't it be the worst thing in the world?”

Isn't it a natural part of the economy? One, deficit debt. Yeah, we've had five tax cuts this century. Some of them were just over a trillion, some of them were pushing five and you can't cut taxes and expect the debt to be better or the deficit to be better. So it's the solution there

is at least-- And go to war at the same time. Yeah, the solution is quite easy. I think what people

get hung up on is, you know, what matters more is the direction that deficit and debts are going and not a one-year solution. Trying to extract two trillion extra dollars in a year, that would be tough, definitely would hurt the economy. But putting us on a trajectory so that in ten years we're extracting two trillion dollars extra, I don't think spells economic disaster. We have a very progressive income tax system. It does 95% of the work for us. All we have to do is not drop rates

too much. People at the very top have seen their income grow at a breakneck pace to the degree that in the only dedicated progressive system that we have for collecting taxes, they pay a lot more. And all those stats they say about the top one percent or the top ten percent pays x percent of taxes. And they're mostly all true, but what they're not telling you is how much of income they earn. And they're being punished in the progressive tax system because they've earned so much more money.

We don't have to do much to the top tax rates, or even to the estate tax, or to the capital gains tax, or the step-up basis in the corporate tax. We don't have to do that much to start raising money relatively quickly and put us on a trajectory to deal with the debt. And all that matters

two trillion in deficits. It is the direction we were going in, which is to collect less revenue than we should be. So I don't think it has to break the economy. But what do we need to do? You said, I mean, the narrative out there, especially on the left, is we're going to have to get a quote unquote billionaires to pay their fair share, whatever fair share means. But you said the tax system is, or that we have a progressive tax

structure, I would argue that at some point taxes actually go down when you hit kind of the point one percent. But you said we don't need to, well, what do we need to do if you believe that we need to reduce the deficit? Sure. So we need to restore some of the marginal rates for the top of the tax bracket, and then reduce deductions. That doesn't even involve major tax reform, just to reduce the amount of deductions that people get. New polls. Yeah, bring a tax

right up. And then, you know, people, this idea of a wealth tax, we have a wealth tax in the US. It's the estate tax. We don't, we don't tax wealth until you die. And we've cut that tax for times. So I don't think we need a new tax on current wealth. I think that restoring the estate tax to even half of what it was in 1999, when we still had rich people in the economy,

would generate an incredible amount of income, because you would mainly be taxing the Jeff

Bezos juniors of the world. And they'd still get all their money. They just have to put a little bit of tax in on some of the money that they inherit. Those are very easy fixes. And in the sense that they don't hit that many people. But the reason why I say we have to do all of them is that

“people at the top are incredibly good at shifting their taxes around. So you have to, this is like”

left hand, right hand. This is putting Congress to its intellectual limit, but they have to know what the other one is doing. So if you change the estate tax in the step-up basis, you have to change the marginal tax rates at the top. And you just need to make sure that you do them so that they're coherent. And they cohere with the capital gains incorporating income tax. So you think of it as like I think politicians like to jump after one part of like, let's have a wealth tax. You know,

let's do this. But really you need to come up with like a top 10% tax schema that doesn't look at just income just debt, just capital gains or just corporate taxes, but all of them together. But I don't think that that's that hard. I guess is my point. And they don't require a new wealth tax on billionaires in the process. And wealth taxes don't work. I mean, in the 16 countries that have implemented them 13 have repealed them because people just moved to Brussels. Well, that's going to

be the argument to any, to any step-up in any form of the tax rate. Like, if you go capital gains, if you go estate tax, if you go any form of tax, it's like, well, I'm, I'm headed out.

“Well, let him go. That's where I get. I run into trouble. I'd say, let him go. That's what some people”

say too. What I would offer up, and I think Catherine's going to go with me. And auntie, you wouldn't even need it. It's not tax rates. It's tax code. If you took the highest tax rate, I made it an auntie that wealthy people have a certain amount

had to pay an aunt of 30 or 40%. Lower the estate exemption to a million dollars, not 30 million,

and such a step-based junior gets, you know, 44 billion, not 62 billion when they inherit the money. And then the most obvious one, and I'll lead this as a question, Catherine, is to close the tax gap by funding the IRS, such that the taxes that are owed actually get paid. Oh, gosh, IRS funding is it is, who, okay, I have to calm down. I get very upset at how public servants are attacked when they're doing a job that Congress has told them to do, and then Congress attacks them

for doing that job. In the case of the IRS, so it's hard for me to speak about that with an even keel. What I will say is that audit data is really, really consistent, and that's if you audit high-income households, you'll generate more tax dollars for a decade. You make money. You make money. I mean, it's not how you make money. They're educational. We'll just get them to pay what they owe. But taxes are also complicated, and so they mess up on taxes.

And if you're like, "Hey, you can't claim this." They won't claim it for the next 10 years. And so the impact that you have of audits is instructive to just help complicated our tax code has become and how much more money we can get if people could just follow it. So I -- Yeah, the tax cap.

“Yeah. AMTs, I think I'm opposed to one principle, just because I don't like adding complexity”

to our tax system. I think that it's the weakest component of it. Wouldn't that get rid of complexity? My sense is that complexity has been weaponized by the very wealthy who figure out a way. There's five Fortune 100 companies to pay zero taxes because of loop holes that they're citizen of the United, that these packs managed to stuff that into the tax code, whether it's riding off or fully expensing your private chat or 1202 tax free status

on for entrepreneurs, wouldn't an elegant solution that would de-complexify it be an AMT? I guess I would just not need the A-part. I would prefer if the tax code itself was elegant as opposed to the minimum as an alternative. But that's a -- I think United is six of one

for half dozen of another. I would just like the tax code to be good the first time, but achieve

every seven years. I actually just wrote a newsletter about this where I talk about how this is almost a problem with the way that economists get keep formal language that we tend to put a weight on something when it becomes officially inflation or officially a recession. But that if you look at the labor market right now, I mean, it is a recession for the people who are unemployed, but economists have decided that there's not enough of them for it to be a recession a recession.

So I'm with you. We have not gone from sliding, from expansion to decline, kind of slowly hard to see in real time. We haven't done that since the end of 2007. We're out of practice to see it,

“but I think that my problem with recessions is not that they don't -- there may be not as big”

of a deal or they don't have harm because there is some momentum that goes behind saying that the economy is in recession and it has its own negative consequences. I think I'm more concerned that the level of tolerance we're willing to have for suffering in the labor market has gotten

rather high. I just want to stick on this point. $750 billion tax gap. These are taxes that are

owed that aren't collected and what I can tell you is someone who spends a lot of time around tax planning. The incentives are to be as aggressive as possible because there's a general feeling amongst the wealthy that they don't have the resources to come for you. And the more complex your tax filing gets, the more resources they need and the least likely, the less likely you are to be audited. And unfortunately, what I think AI is going to do is make sure that everybody

with the W2 that makes less than a quarter of a million dollars is going to be -- it's going to pay their fair share. But as you go up and up the income ladder and it gets more and more complex

“and you need humans, I mean the biggest tax -- I think the biggest tax cut in history for the”

wealthy was neutering the IRS. And basically, there's, you know, there's no cop on the beat.

If there's no cop on the beat, the incentives are to increase crime. Wouldn't the greatest greatest increase in taxes just be to enforce the tax cut? Yeah, and I think people would get really upset if they knew just how much how adherent W2 workers are to their taxes owed relative. I mean, it's not even that there's a tax gap and it's spread around. It's really -- you have a wage and salary job, you pay taxes, like you are the sucker. But I think to me that gets at the broader

point of, you know, there was a tax commission put together in the first Bush administration, second term or the second Bush administration, God politics is so disastrous these days. And the second term or the second Bush administration, there was a tax commission put together of design tax reform and the very first word of their analysis was simple. They thought that

“the tax code had gotten so complicated that everyone feels like they're being cheated. And that”

whatever way we move forward, it has to feel like people can understand the tax code so they don't feel like they're being cheated from it, talk to bottom. So I like, you know, the idea of an alternative minimum functions the way that I would like the tax code to for everyone in it. If you look at every line item in the consumer price index going back to 2000, the fastest growing price, bar none, is tax preparation services. That's a system-wide problem, not just a problem for people

at the top. So we can, I guess, short term, we have a deficit, we have a debt, we need to do something better. There's a lot of low hanging fruit for restoring basic things in our tax system. But in the long term, we, we can avoid or at least delay being in this situation again if we make the tax code fair for everybody. And what I worry about is if we need to raise more money, which we absolutely do, then I don't want, there's a way to make people not feel sore about it. And the complexity

leads the hangover of soreness of like, well, I still have to pay more because they're going to do this this and this. And so some type of simplification right now the answer to soreness is that we create a new deduction or a new credit or a new little bonus or reward for whatever person complains the most, like the, the Augusta credit, right? You don't have to pay for renting the income for renting at your home if it's just under two weeks, which is what the people from Augusta got

for the masters. So they don't have to pay income on the money they get when they're end out their houses for that, right? Like we create these types of rewards for people who have

loud concern. Are you never heard the Augusta, the Augusta break? I have not. Is that that

this could, could we have a wider tax break? I mean, literally. So let me get this if you're a member of Augusta, you, and you rent your house out. You don't have to declare that income. If you rent out your house and earn money from renting out the house, here it is. The Augusta rule, formerly section 288A dash G of the internal revenue code, is that you can rent out your personal residence for up to 14 days per year without having to report that income or pay federal

who would rent out their house during the masters. So like when I say complexity and unfairness,

“I mean that, get rid of that, get rid of that. And so it's, I like to think of the reform our”

economy needs as having like a day one in a year one solution. Like day one, there's a ton of things we can do for the tax code. Year one, we need to design comprehensive tax reform to make the tax system more fair. And the day one reforms, you can do and have them implemented within six months. The year one reforms, that's going to take multiple years. And almost any aspect of social policy, you can think about investments and children, investments in the labor market,

regulation of the labor market, the tax system, there's day one things and there's year one things. And so day one, let's raise more money, year one, let's get rid of this Augusta in its ilk from the tax code. I just wonder if rather than fighting the good people of Augusta who have you know, the Congressman and senators that represent them in the thousands of loopholes that it might just be more elegant and more effective just to say, yeah, do all your loopholes,

but if you're not paying at least 30 or 40 percent, that's what you pay.

I don't know. I think we need to go easy on the people of Augusta. They've had it tough.

“I mean, I think we'd be more lenient to them. Yeah, you think, you think?”

Just good policy there. Wait, was this a master's joke? I don't follow golf. I know someone just won't. That's hard to argue with. Someone did win. Roy McRoy just run, but I'm, this is more of a joke about white people who play golf. I don't think they need that much more help right now. We're serious to identity politics to politics. We're falling victim of the same thing and I think Catherine's just given Bernie some talking points.

Ed, last question. We're actually out of time. I'd love to continue this for a long time. I'm

we always love having you Catherine, but I'm going to read you out. We love having Catherine on

“a economist with a heart. We love this. Oh my god, I'm going to put that on a T-shirt.”

There you go. It's your bumper sticker when you do run for president after your books are best out of it. It's going to happen. I know it's going to happen. Catherine and Ed is a PhD economist and economic policy consultant. Her research focuses on the intersection of labor markets and public policy, including unemployment and unemployment insurance, recessions and recoveries, women's labor supply, poverty alleviation, retirement security, and social security.

Yeah, she's running for president. She has testified three times in front of Congress about economic policy. She writes a week of column on the economy for Bloomberg and is the host of the

Optimist Economy podcast. Catherine, always love having you. Thank you for your time.

Thank you Catherine. Thanks y'all. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and the engineer by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carthy. Our research team is down to Lawn. Isabella Kinsel, Cristina Donahue and Mayor Salvario. Jake McPherson is our social producer. Drew Boros is our technical director. Catherine Gillen is our executive producer.

Thank you for listening to Prophecy markets and Prophecy Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday. And come for you. Yeah. As the long term. And the long term.