Hello and welcome to the riches of this land edition of Slate Money or Guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios.

I'm here with Anna Schumansky of Breaking Views.

Hello.

And we are also here with Jim Tankersley from the New York Times.

Who are you?

And what is your book?

Jim Tankersley, I cover tax and economic policy for the New York Times.

My book is called The Riches of

This Land, the Untold True Story of the American Middle Class. We have a great episode this week.

We are going to talk to Jim about his book, of course. We're going to learn all about the

middle class and how it got to where it is. We are going to talk about China and whether TikTok is going to be

banned or whether TikTok is going to wind up being merged into LinkedIn, which would be

quite a thing. We are going to talk about the digitization, the virtualization of the American

economy, whether that's going to last. And we are also in Slate Plus

going to talk about Donald Trump and what kind of credit he can claim or blame we can lay at his

feet for the state of the economy. All of that coming up on Slate Money. So Jim, you've written a whole book about the American middle classes.

And it's a book full of people.

And a lot of the people in your book, as with a lot of Americans,

had generally positive experiences up until a certain date. And then since that date,

they have had generally not so positive experiences. So what is the middle class and when did

things start going sideways? Great question. The American middle class is actually sort of a

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