Optimist Q&A: Evidence for UBI, What to Do About Billionaires, and Where Will the U.S. Economy Be After Trump?
Optimist Economy
Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi
4.9 • 829 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the final Q&A of the season, economist Kathryn Edwards answers listener questions on recent universal basic income experiments, legislative budgeting tricks, and the value of more aggressive IRS auditing. She also explains what eradicating the minimum wage exemption might mean, particularly for disabled and incarcerated workers. We also discuss what people actually do for money when they stop job hunting. Fair warning: this one runs long and the keeping it f-bomb free resolution lasted about five minutes.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hold on. I got to close my window. |
| 0:05.2 | It's that time of Thursday when the military helicopters fly over, which I'm just going to say |
| 0:12.4 | has predated the Trump administration, so, you know, this is not a new thing. |
| 0:24.2 | Hello, and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine. I'm Robin. |
| 0:27.7 | On this show, we believe the U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there |
| 0:31.5 | one problem and solution at a time, except for on these episodes where we do Q&As, and we |
| 0:36.8 | actually talked about lots of problems and |
| 0:38.3 | solution at one time. |
| 0:40.9 | This is meant to overwhelm you drink from the fire hydrant. |
| 0:45.6 | Let's do it. |
| 0:46.4 | Let's do it. |
| 0:47.3 | Thank you guys for all your questions. |
| 0:49.1 | We got probably three times more than we're going to be able to use, but we're going to get |
| 0:52.8 | started here. |
| 0:54.6 | First, |
| 0:59.1 | I do want to thank Sarah McGill of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who was a spiritual sponsor for the show this week. Also, for all of you who have sent in ratings, we've got 582 of those as of today, |
| 1:06.0 | very, very close to our goal. And we'll also be posting a listener survey so that we can get some feedback |
| 1:12.1 | specifically about what we should do or not do for season two of the show. And I'll put a link |
| 1:17.7 | to that in our show notes when this goes live. Okay, are you ready, Catherine? Yes, I wanted to |
| 1:23.5 | very quickly thank that the getting people to write in reviews and rate us also led to a lot of |
| 1:29.1 | really delightful reviews and delightful in the Robin and Catherine's censorship is that they're |
| 1:33.6 | just hilarious and a little bit biting. But I need to particularly shout out the person who said, |
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