From California to Washington to New York, states are trying to tax the very rich. The press keeps rehashing whether millionaires and billionaires will flee those states. Wrong question. The more important one is why we’re improvising tax policy state to state when it’s the federal government that should be dealing with health care, child care and affordability—all of which are national problems. Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats are proposing to take even more people out of the tax system entirely. None of these specific proposals make income taxes simpler or fairer, but they do suggest there’s an appetite for reform.

---

Chapters:

00:01:18 Announcements

00:02:33 Retcon: Occupational Licenses

00:06:16 Terms & Conditions: Progressive

00:07:59 Big Pilcrow: Everyone Wants to Tax Millionaires

00:38:23 Executive Orders: Unreadable Menus and Tax Complainer Merch

00:41:42 Spiritual Sponsors: Dream Robin & the Nobel Laureate’s WNBA Contract

• Make Optimist Economy economically viable: https://optimisteconomy.com
• We have faces on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠. We’re also on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy.
• The party is at the Substack chatroom.
• In lieu of a “I’m better than you… because I pay taxes” T-shirt, can we offer you an Optimist Economy one?: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

Got economics questions, anxieties, or executive orders? Send them to optimist.economy@gmail.com

Americans used to move a lot in search of opportunity. But in 2024, the share of Americans who moved at all hit a 76-year low. Barely 2% of us moved across state lines. Some of that is by choice: people are more rooted, and that's not nothing. But when workers stop moving, rich cities pull further away from poor ones, wages stagnate, and the gaps between thriving labor markets and struggling ones get harder to close. And when there’s a shock to a local labor market, moving is an important release valve. Fixing a fraction of this worker mobility breakdown could improve the labor market for everyone.

Chapters:

00:00:33 Opening

00:01:45 Retcon: Trump Accounts & Career Pivots

00:07:27 Terms & Conditions: Spatial Equilibrium

00:09:55 Big Pilcrow: Does it Matter to the U.S. Economy if We Don’t Move from Place to Place?

00:39:10 Executive Orders: Frances Perkins miniseries; Sleep Shaming; Election Day Weekend

00:43:07 Spiritual Sponsors: The National Consumers League motto ("Investigate, Agitate, Legislate"); ACFC’s winning start

READ MORE:

The increasingly mobile US is a myth that needs to move on | Aeon Essays

Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home? | Pew Research Center

Job Changing and the Decline in Long-Distance Migration in the United States | Demography | Duke University Press

The Economics of Internal Migration: Advances and Policy Questions

Population & Migration | Economic Research Service

Stranded! How Rising Inequality Suppressed US Migration and Hurt Those Left Behind

• Invest in Optimist Economy: https://optimisteconomy.com
• Faces visible on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠. We’re also on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy.
• Where’s the party? On our Substack chat.
• Represent your optimist side: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy
• Email your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to optimist.economy@gmail.com

Fourteen questions. Zero softballs. Listeners from Tacoma to Montreal wrote in to ask about retirement savings, taxing capital gains, home-buyer assistance programs, corporate profits in the tariffs era, what one state employee can or cannot accomplish, and whether meaningful economic reform will arrive before Millennials drop dead. And more. The inbox did not disappoint.

00:00 Announcements

01:59 Is a retirement savings crisis brewing?

04:32 Tax credits for first-time home buyers… good idea?

08:10 What if tax breaks for capital gains only applied to new investments?

13:39 Explain the $1,700 tax credit scholarship program in OBBA?

16:23 Are institutional investors wrecking the housing market?

21:37 What quick policy moves could reverse worsening inequality?

27:32 Will meaningful reform arrive before Millennials retire?

30:56 Is a hotel tax the right way to fund a stadium?

33:05 Can I move the needle on labor policy from inside the system?

35:08 Why has the responsibility and risk for employment shifted onto workers?

37:50 Is fixing the care economy easier than we think?

40:47 Do rent caps work?

44:50 Can we prevent price gouging by companies?

47:53 If states roll out good policies, does the federal government need to do it too?

• Still have questions, concerns, or worries? Send them to optimist.economy@gmail.com
• Keep Optimist Economy podcasting: https://optimisteconomy.com
• See our faces on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠.
• Commune with fellow Optimists on our Substack chat.
• We’re on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy.

There’s a t-shirt in your size here.
https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

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

• Donate to keep Optimist Economy going: https://optimisteconomy.com
• Video clips are on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠.
• Consume leisure with us on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy. Or meet other Optimists on our Substack chat.
• Feel like dis-saving? Our merch: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

Got economic questions, concerns, or executive orders? Send them to optimist.economy@gmail.com

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

• Donate to keep Optimist Economy going: https://optimisteconomy.com
• Video clips are on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠.
• Consume leisure with us on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy. Or meet other Optimists on our Substack chat.
• Feel like dis-saving? Our merch: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to optimist.economy@gmail.com

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

• Support Optimist Economy by donating: https://optimisteconomy.com
• Video clips are on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠.
• Follow us on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy. Or meet other Optimists on our Substack chat.
• Optimist merch provides great utility: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to optimist.economy@gmail.com

“Trump Accounts” might evoke the president’s other side hustles, like gold-plated mobile phones or meme crypto coins. But these investment accounts for children are one of the actually beautiful things to come out of the "One Big Beautiful Bill." More than 30 years in the making, these accounts have previously been pitched as KidSave, Baby Bonds, the ASPIRE Act, 401Kids. They’ve been proposed more than a dozen times by Democrats and Republicans alike. Economist Kathryn Edwards explains the long journey, what the research says about why auto-enrollment is everything, and why the name won't last but the policy should.

Read more:

Every child deserves a Trump Account: Here’s how to make it happen

Op-ed by Ray Boshara and Michael Sherraden in The Hill [2026].

“Check-the-Box” Enrollment Will Limit Participation in Trump Accounts: Lessons From Asset-Building Research — Center for Social Development at Washington University [2025]

Why Automatic Enrollment Is Essential for the Success of Trump Accounts: Lessons from SEED OK — Center for Social Development at Washington University [2025]

The (Unknown) Children’s Savings Accounts Federal Policy Landscape

— Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis [2024]

• Support Optimist Economy by donating: https://optimisteconomy.com
• Video clips are on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠.
• Follow us on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy. Or meet other Optimists on our Substack chat.
• Optimist merch provides great utility: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to optimist.economy@gmail.com

Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards is a Social Security fan girl. Would it be possible for her to love it even more? Yes, if the old-age insurance program got some updates to handle the messy, gradual and interrupted way that retirement truly transpires. Her four blue-sky pitches: changing benefit calculations for caregivers, taking benefits temporarily, a sliding “full” retirement age based on years worked, and a tax on companies that abuse 1099 non-employee compensation. Plus: A big retcon segment including details from a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco that further explains why "more supply" isn't the whole answer to the housing affordability crisis.

• Support Optimist Economy by donating: https://optimisteconomy.com
• Video clips are on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠.
• Follow us on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy. Or meet other Optimists on our Substack chat.
• Optimist merch provides great utility: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy

Send your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to optimist.economy@gmail.com