Q&A Part 2: Working Two Jobs, Incentives vs. Handouts, the Gold Standard, and Government ROI

Optimist Economy

Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi

Public Policy, Economics, Government, Economy

4.9 • 829 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Economist Kathryn Edwards is back with more answers. In Part 2, she talks more about student loans, who actually “lives off taxpayers,” why gold reserves aren’t a great idea anymore, the importance of mobility in worker power, and whether ROI is a good measure for the work of government. If this two-parter was too much, blame the listener who said he didn’t like it when we used the timer back in May.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine. And I'm Robin. On this show, we believe the U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time.
0:27.8	So, Optimist, we talked to Catherine Horst last week. We decided to record more questions than we really had time for, and we've added a second episode this week for more mailbag.
0:33.5	Usually, we have more questions in the hopper than we could take. We really appreciate all the
0:37.1	ones you sent on Substack and by email, And we'll try to do this maybe every 10 episodes or so.
0:42.3	Yeah, so I couldn't actually stop myself from answering every single question that Robin gave,
0:45.9	even though she's like, let's pick the ones that we think are best. I'm like, nope, that one too.
0:52.6	My blood sugar's crashing. Can we stop now this this microphone from my cold dead hands
0:59.0	you asked me about social security and CBO in the same hour like how does one stop it was a little
1:07.8	bit like Christmas these episodes it was Christmas for Catherine. It's true.
1:11.9	All right. So more questions, more answers. Let's go. Here we go.
1:17.3	Next, Navid in San Diego.
1:21.2	Does it actually matter that America has abandoned the gold standard? Is there real evidence
1:26.9	that leaving the gold standard has had
1:28.4	negative economic consequences, or is this a bunch of nonsense being pushed by the descendants
1:33.6	of the John Birch Society? Would there be any benefit to returning to some version of the gold
1:40.4	standard? No. I think that the easiest one is no. There's tradeoffs and risk. Of course, there's
1:46.1	something we lost from leaving the gold standard, but what we gained was independent monetary
1:50.2	policy that wasn't tied to the amount of gold we had on reserve. So this is the real value
1:56.7	to having a federal reserve is independent in overseeing the money supply. So we get a stronger
2:02.8	independent central bank to help manage the economy if they're not basically shackled to the gold
2:09.1	standard. This is why the gold standard people are also anti-fed people, because you can't
2:15.1	have it both ways. If you want gold, you don't want strong monetary policy.
	...

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