Hello and welcome to the riches of this land edition of

this late money or guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Anna Schmanski 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 from the New York Times who are you and what is your book?

Jim Tagorously I cover tax and economic policy for the New York Times and 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

Tik-Tok is going to be banned or whether Tik-Tok 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

let us go and we can lay it 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 relatively new phenomenon.

It's this thing that Americans have in our minds that, oh, we've always had this vibrant middle class, but really wasn't true for a decent

...