How Policy is Failing the American Workforce — ft. Kathryn Anne Edwards

25:28This is in some ways happening in 10 different arenas right now. We had a part of our economy or of our public policy that had been made weak from neglect that wasn't batting a thousand and then was attacked by the Trump administration. And we're left to wonder what happens next. And it's almost, you know, the answer had been there for 20 years. But we're being pushed. We're kind of pushing our, you know, holding pattern to the limit. Like you can't function in a$30 trillion economy with the data that you need to manage it if you are starving your statistical agencies for funds, which we've been doing for the past 15 years.

26:09Firing the BLS commissioner, halting government data collection. We are pushing over the edge something that was already deeply problematic. So we can see this as a, well, we should have done the right thing 20 years ago, but it doesn't matter when you get to the party as long as you brought a bottle of wine. Let's go fix the BLS now. And for what it's worth, prior BLS commissioners, you know, they have in the American Statistical Society and the Society of Federal Statisticians, which actually is an acronym that's like six different words and I'll never remember them. But they have a plan for basically what I joke is the one big beautiful BLS where it's like statistics 3.0.

26:48We know exactly what to do to the statistical agencies to make modernization efforts. They know what to do. They need the money and the authority. So I, but I think this is happening on so many levels of like how we're talking about data collection is how maybe someone at, you know, the National Weather Service or NOAA is talking about their models that they haven't been paid to improve or, you know, various government agencies in there. Everybody's been starved for investment for a while. And then when they inevitably get something wrong, everyone turns around and says that it was politically biased.

27:20And it's like, OK, well, just look at the last 20 years. They haven't been getting any funding. I mean, it's ridiculous to me, but this to me seems to be the playbook. You basically starve these agencies of funding, and then you say the reason that you're messing up isn't because you don't have the money and the technology that everyone else has. It's because you're politically motivated or you're biased in some sort of way. It drives me insane, as you can tell. Well, yeah, it's convenient and obvious and just a touch lazy. It's hard to do good work. And so it's easy to attack it. But that doesn't mean that we should stop or stop advocating or stop relying on the BLS.

27:54I mean, I love the blossoming of alternative data is great because no single piece of data is ever going to be complete. The unemployment rate is never going to describe how most Americans feel about the economy or how they feel in the labor market. So the more data we have, the more we learn and the more we can act on it. But attacking certain data might kind of de facto lead to the privileging of others when truly we need all of it. We'll be right back. And if you're enjoying the show so far, be sure to give Prof G Markets a follow wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

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31:47we're back with property markets so we talk a lot about the struggles of young men on this program and you've written about the rise of am i saying this correctly neats neats neats yeah and that stands for not an education employment or training talk a little bit about what your takeaways are from this growing demographic? There's a lot of worry about NEETs globally, people who are truly not participating in primary economic activities. What are they doing with their time? How are they getting income? Why aren't they being incorporated into the labor market or the training market or the higher education system?

32:27And there's data that suggests that the young NEATs, say under 30, are up all over the world. And that's very alarming, especially when you have the backdrop like, you know, the conversations we're having about boys and men. So what I try to make clear is there are three reasons why we have NEATs, and it almost never changes, even though they can look a little different. So they either can't find a job, or they can't take a job, and that's because the labor market is bad, they are disabled, or they are caregiving. And a weak labor market, disability and caregiving, you can look at a 20-year-old neat or you can look at a 60-year-old neat, and they would have one of those three reasons.

33:12Now, the makeup of that reason can change. Disability amongst an older person is going to look different than disability amongst a 25-year-old, whereas the rates of, say, addiction and substance use disorders tend to be much higher amongst younger populations, whereas a physical impairment is higher amongst older populations. But it's still basically a different flavor of the same problem, which is you are not physically able to work. Same with caregiving. You could be caregiving for, you know, a partner, a parent, or a child. And as someone ages, the likelihood of who that is changes, but it's still that they've got to take care of somebody and they can't take a job, or the labor market is bad.

33:51What type of person background tends to over-index amongst the NEATs. And if you could offer any solutions or public policy solutions, what would you suggest? The NEATs tend to be, in America at least, much more black than white, much more female than male, and much more rural than urban, and come from low-income families as opposed to high-income families. You know, 70 % of NEATs don't have more than a high school degree. so that means they are truly just missing labor market opportunities or they face discrimination in the labor market so one thing i bring up that i i think is often if i were to critique the boys and men conversation in the u.s one thing i think that doesn't come up enough is the criminal justice system in felony records clearing and the unemployment rate of people who are returned citizens who have served their time and are no longer incarcerated is, I would hazard a guess, if we measured it appropriately, will always be the highest unemployment rate in the U.S.

34:56Because discrimination against people who have a felony degree is so high. And in some ways, our society is producing needs because we are producing so many felons, because we have a criminal justice system in desperate need of reform. And if you were to ask me what is the thing you could do to help men the most in the U.S., I would point to criminal justice reform because they're disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system. The other thing I would point to is addiction. It is very sad, but substance use disorders are much higher amongst men than they are amongst women. And that creates a large portion of disability amongst men that women don't share.

35:38So being able to do things like expand Medicaid, The single largest provider of substance use disorder treatment in the United States, as opposed to cut it, would be ways to help a population that is on the edge. But my take on the needs has long been we know where they come from. The question is why we don't help them. So I'm just doing the steel man for more conservatives or more conservative ideology. Is some of it that needs, would you have a reduction in needs, quite frankly, if the incentives were changed and that is there were fewer social programs or, I mean, I've oftentimes, I hear about needs and I think, well, how are they eating?

36:18And is it because they're living off of their parents and have their parents' Netflix and phone and living in mom's basement? Or is it because social, in some instances, and I don't think this is true, but I'll put it out there, that sometimes it's just not worth it to go to work. No, you trap more flies with honey. The U.S. has tried to put work requirements on various social programs for the past 30 years, and the evidence is very conclusive. It really doesn't increase work because a work requirement doesn't change or alter a barrier to work. And if I can't find child care, it doesn't matter if you take away food stamps.

36:53I still won't find child care. So if my grandma is sick and someone has to take care of her, I'm on food stamps. But if you take it away from me, someone still has to take care of her. And as we've gone through, I would say, eras of work requirements being added to social programs, we have not seen labor force participation increase. So if there were some kind of massive effects from adding a work requirement to a program, you know, you should be able to see it pretty quickly. And you're just, you're not seeing it in their labor force participation. You're not seeing it in their earnings. while at the same time, you know, the evidence around, you know, making the labor market more amenable to people who can't necessarily work full time, those returns are there and obvious.

37:39So one thing I point out to people is that Americans love to think that we're hard workers. We're a country that values work, but we have lower work rates than almost all of Europe. And it's in part because we're so mean to people who can't take a full time job as is. and there was a i talk a lot about child care and how much child care would help labor force participation like forget helping children if you have a place where children under five can go for free their moms will work more the only g7 nation that doesn't offer it right but but in in past studies of women's labor force participation in europe they've found that actually the bigger factor for getting women to work is having the right to part-time jobs.

38:22And if you followed the head of Citibank, one of the few financial institutions that has not required five days a week return to office for all their employees, she has said publicly, if I had had to work five days a week with kids under five, I wouldn't have been able to keep my job. That's something that we actually can see in broad data in European countries that the U.S. is missing workers. it's missing a lot of part-time workers. So take that person with a disability who has to go to the doctor every week or has to go to some version of physical therapy. They can't work 40 hours, but they can work 30, but they're not allowed to.

38:56I'm just curious, all of this, and then I'll flip it back to Ed. Have you seen, Catherine, have you seen a series on Netflix called The Maid? Oh, I read the book. Oh, that's such a pretentious thing to say. I'm so sorry. But I think The Maid is based on a book, right? It's a memoir. I don't read books. I just watch Netflix, so I don't know. This is where we meet. But so many of the issues you're talking about, Ed, you don't know this because you're probably watching TikTok all day. But a lot of the issues we're talking about come to life. And that's why I think art is just so important. But a lot of the issues you're bringing up in a fairly sober, anodyne way come to life in this series.

39:35I think it's really powerful and it makes you really feel for this, what you'd call neats. Anyways, back to you, Ed. In terms of some solutions to this, it sounds like you think free and universal child care would be a huge help. Is there anything else that you think would solve this issue? Some of them are very, very low budget. Something like universal access to paid sick leave. In certain cities where they've done this, they've studied the earnings of workers who are brought under sick leave protection. And they find as much as a$3 ,000 a year difference in the amount of annual earnings of, say, women without a college degree who have a child when she has access to sick leave.

40:18Now, she's not taking$3 ,000 worth of sick days. She's basically having stability in employment that if she calls in sick, she doesn't lose earnings or her job. Because you can still be fired in the U.S. for calling in sick. So if you happen to be the caretaker of the most sick population in the U.S., a.k.a. a kid under five who gets on average eight colds a year, you've basically introduced unstable earnings into a household simply because her earnings are now dependent on the health of her kid. so when you take that out of the equation and you add protection for workers who call in sick and even compensation for workers who call in sick she earned three thousand dollars more a year because her earnings were more stable three thousand dollars a year is more than the child tax credit currently there's about 30 million workers in the u.s who don't have access to paid sick leave that is an easy change that could that could make a huge difference for people who are affected by it, but we don't really think of not having a sick day as being a source of employment instability, but it absolutely is.

41:22So basic labor regulations to make it easier for people to maintain employment in the wake of lives that we lead, paid family and medical leave. You could take the bold decision to do things like establish the right to work part-time or have flexible work arrangements. You could absolutely make that part of our labor law. It's labor law in a lot of countries that would be considered our peers. And then you can make the big social investments like child care, a cash allowance for children. You could expand Medicaid. You could do lots of things. And we've done none of them. I think I said this last time I was here.

42:00Remember, we've done almost none of them. So there's just like sky's the limit. There's so much we can do. It's interesting because so much of this revolves around childcare, which I think is, I mean, makes sense. You just think it through logically. Of course, that's a big reason that we're seeing these discrepancies in terms of employment. um what are your thoughts on the trad wife trend this is the cultural trend that has gained a lot of steam recently this idea that you know women should go back to taking up the traditional role of staying at home and being the the homekeeper um taking care of the children making the meals etc um i feel as if this is a big piece of what we're discussing here what are your thoughts on that whole cultural trend that i believe has gotten a lot more popular recently Women who are supposed to stay at home, they make an awful lot of money from social media.

42:57I wrote a column about this, I think it was maybe a year and a half ago, that Tradwives are the new multi-level marketing. And they show us essentially a fundamental weakness in our labor market, which is that high-quality part-time work for women doesn't exist. And that women want to earn money for their families, but they can't take a 9-to-5 job. or they don't want to take a nine-to-five job because they don't want to miss after school or, you know, things on the weekends. And so we have basically, you know, eliminated from our labor market the idea that you could work in a job that pays a decent amount of money and still be part-time.

43:32For us, part-time means low-wage shift sector, which isn't worth a mom's time. So the, you know, the Mary Kay and Tupperware and all the multi-level marketing, I mean, LuLaRoe, I don't know if you, Scott, if you're a documentary person, that was a Hulu documentary on the LuLaRoe craze. It's just a lot of moms who want to earn more money from their family but still want to have the agency to have control over their family life. It's what gave rise to eBay in the 90s. Yeah, or Etsy now. I mean, moms want to earn money. They know that money helps with raising children. They know it helps give opportunities for children that lack of money won't get.

44:13And we just close the doors. And so it's almost like the whack-a-mole. The labor market can be a privilege from a lot of people's perspective. So if you close it down, they're just going to pop up somewhere else. And I mean, I see Trad Wives is just a very remunerative way of selling something. And the Maha movement. Yeah, you're selling culture. You're selling ideas. You're not selling patterned tights or cosmetics anymore, but you're still selling something as a hustle to bring in money for your family. And so I don't put, I think I have been told that I can be quite dismissive of the Tradwife movement because I see the economics of it and maybe not the culture behind it.

44:49People will live their lives. People will make choices. They'll make choices for their family. And then some people will make money off of that. And I just see them as two separate things. I am so glad you say that. The economics are the part of the conversation that people just decide to willingly ignore. And it is so funny, that paradox of you've got all these tradwives on social media who are sort of saying, oh, I don't work, I stay at home, I cook and I take care of the kids. And meanwhile, they are working because they're posting it. They're filming it. They're doing their brand collaborations.

45:22They're making money off of doing it. So I'm sorry, you're pretending that you're not working. I'm watching your video in real time. You're making money off of me watching this. You are working as we speak. So the new Mary Kay. I mean, it's great. And they're making a lot of money and good for them. They figured out a way to be like a one-woman Tupperware. I'm not I can't begrudge them earning money when I don't think that they I don't think that would exist to any degree that we see it now if we had a high paid part time labor market. And it's just it's absolutely missing. And this is how this is how you see it show up.

46:02And it's also just this myth, because it's like, the reason, I mean, a lot of people would stay at home and chill and relax and hang out with their dogs and their kids if they wanted to, but we are pretending as if there's this other thing that doesn't exist, which is, we need to make enough money to pay the bills. And the reality is, a lot of these men don't make enough money for the woman to just, for the wife to just stay at home and take care of the children. You need to figure out new sources of income. That is where we're headed right now. I wish that were more prevalent in the cultural conversation.

46:34What's interesting is I write for Bloomberg, right? So you can imagine like the Bloomberg terminal and Bloomberg people who can actually afford the subscription to Bloomberg News, right? We're talking a very select set of people. And yet the most popular column, bar none, that I have ever written in my years for writing for Bloomberg is Mary Rich. That's the Republican plan for families. because it's not as if Republicans in lieu of, like, if we think women should stay home, well, then you're in favor of universal cash welfare that every kid and mom gets money so that if they can't afford to stay home, you're going to make them stay home.

47:10That doesn't exist. If you think women should go out and work, you should have childcare. That doesn't exist. And so if you take all of the policies that Republicans oppose off the table, the only one left for women is to marry rich. And I don't know why. I don't know if maybe that was like the column header maybe looked like a how-to, and that's why so many finance bros clicked on it. But it was very popular, and I got a lot of feedback of people feeling like they were trapped. You know, when you put in these expectations that this is what you have to do, and you impose that structure on a family, and you impose that structure on an economy, and you follow it up.

47:51I mean, what I think I missed in that column, and I have some big column regrets, I think what I missed in that column, and I wish I had said, is that is American public policy right now. It's not that it's the Republican plan. That is the law of the land. You need to marry rich because we are not going to offer you any type of alternative. And I think I could have swung harder and I didn't to make that point. And if we didn't want to put so much on just find a high-income breadwinner that will take care of you and we're going to do nothing else, there's so much that we can do. But to kind of go back to this cultural conversation, I see it as, you know, it's always a two-way street in terms of causality.

48:33You're just looking at the width of the lanes. And I think in part, one of the reasons why we're seeing this like flourishing of women should stay home and we should have trad wife culture and like the men should go out and work. I've heard more in the past six months that the reason why men don't make enough money is because women are working. And I was pretty sure that we settled that like back in the 80s. And I now have women DM me on Instagram to say, can you tell me what to say to my husband? Because he says it's women's fault that men don't earn enough money. That's a sidebar. But I see it coming as like a defense mechanism because the policy world of Mary Rich and Nothing Else is on the government's tab is under severe attack because child care is so expensive, because child care is unreliable, because families are buckling under the weight of inflation and they need more money and they need some type of service for the government to step in.

49:26Market failure meets families on six different fronts on any given day because we have problems in health insurance. We have problems in housing. We have problems in transportation. We have problems in elder care and child care. And the government is basically trying to defend a really small piece of real estate that is ultimately unpopular. And so I kind of see this like flourishing of cultural arguments for women staying home almost as being like a last gasp of like, no, no, no, us not solving any problems is better because this is the way we want it. And I see it as almost like a transparent, like, okay, nice try.

50:00You're going to have to have, we're going to have to have some type of paid family leave situation. in 2025. And I think I see the cultural arguments that way, too. So I'm not just that women earn money off of tradwifing, but that pushing the tradwife agenda is a way, is a get-out-of-jail-free card for your government's lack of investment in the family. I think the reason that that article went viral or was so popular is, one, it was provocative. But I think, two, you are telling the hard truth. And it is the truth that the direction of our policy is, for women at least, you should marry rich.

50:34And I think this is part of the subtext of all these conversations that I feel like people seem to forget is part of the design of the marry rich agenda is a dependency on the man. That's part of the setup there. If the only way that you get to participate in the economy is through establishing some sort of a dependency on the man's ability to go out and earn an income and make enough money for the family, then you are disenfranchising the woman's ability to be free and independent and make her own choices. And I think these are kind of these issues that we litigated years and years and years ago, like the suffragette movement.

51:16I thought we sort of tackled all of that, but it does seem we're kind of slowly and quietly and surreptitiously going back to that conversation. and this to me seems to be the part that a lot of men that we don't want to acknowledge is actually if we have that again we're going to be we're going to have a lot more power in our relationships and also in the world at large and women are going to have less power for themselves at least that's my view i mean i would push back and say that the idea of mary rich being a policy does a disservice to men as well okay and the expectation of success the definition of success and what it means to be, you know, what men's job is, gets a lot more incumbent on things out of their control.

52:02And it's a recipe for failure and inadequacy if there's only one, I mean, for both genders, right? It's a recipe for failure and inadequacy if you only have one version of success, one version of what you're supposed to do, and that is what gets peddled. I think the problems for women are pretty obvious because it's economic empowerment that we're leaving on the table because we don't get to work as a higher rates or we don't get to earn as much money or we have to pull back. But I think that there's just as much disempowerment on the men's side. It just doesn't show up in the same way. And in some ways, the women's disempowerment is easier to measure because we can look at things like earnings.

52:39But I don't think that these types of cultural expectations do either gender any favor. And that really, I mean, the way that I see the economy as being its truly strongest is supporting people where they are and not making people come to them. I heard about this a lot in terms of fertility because fertility rates are declining in the U.S. and there's lots of questions of, you know, if the U.S. population starts to decline, our economy gets a lot harder to manage. But that's, if people want fewer kids, genuinely want fewer kids, it is not, we should not hinge our economic fate on convincing them otherwise.

53:15Like our economy is strong when it meets the preferences of the people inside it Whatever they are as opposed to having people perform to keep the economy propped up and I see that as a Fundamental source of of weakness that we we try to get people to alter their lives so much just to meet the economy when really The economy when we we have so much money and so much policymaking and so much sophistication and the ability to do so much We should meet people where they are we being the proverbial economy. I want to know what's going on in Scott's head right now. Yeah, but just in terms of meeting people's preferences, which I really like, my sense is that, I mean, there's a lot of factors here.

54:00As women become more educated, birth rates go down. So in some ways, it's a sign of a healthy economy or a healthy democracy. At the same time, I wonder if a lot of people, 60 % of 30-year-olds used to have one kid in the house, now it's 27%. And I wonder if it's less a case of preferences and more a case of a lack of options that people, younger people are having trouble finding partners because they have fewer third places. And also they just do the math and think, I don't have the money to have kids. Two things. One is that part of the reason why we have a falling birth rate is because we have very successfully reduced teen pregnancy.

54:39And so it's a good, like, this is a good fall. Like, we wanted to go down because there was, teen pregnancy had all kinds of deleterious consequences and wasn't necessarily a reflection of agency so much as ignorance about birth control. So that's one reason for the fall in fertility. You know, you can think of fertility as being a function of preferences or constraints. Either I don't want another kid or I can't afford it, Or there's something or it's my, like physically I can't get pregnant again. Or there's some type of barrier to me having a kid. Public policy can do nothing about preferences.

55:16If a woman says I don't want another kid, government is not changing her mind. And a lot of European countries have given us a lot of evidence of all the weird ways that you could try to convince a woman to have a kid. And she'll be like, and the answer is still no. Like it doesn't change preferences. Policy does change constraints. If you can't afford child care, if you don't have good health insurance, if you don't have paid family leave, if you don't have good public schools and so you decided you're going to have one kid and send them to private school, whereas you would have had three kids and send them to public school, the constraints can change but not the preferences.

55:48What's amazing about the U.S. is that we have pretty high fertility preferences relative to Europe. We have the highest share of unmet fertility, of women are not having the number of children they want because they cite these constraints. And so I think it's a I know I said you can't like the economy needs to meet people where they are And I think fertility is an example where you can see it in both directions Where like if people want fewer kids the economy needs to evolve to that But if people want kids that they're not having because they can't afford it The economy needs to meet them where they are too.

56:20We're failing both

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1:00:27We're back with Prof G Markets. So recently, there's been so much information or so much about these ICE raids. I would just love for you to just touch on what likely is the outcome. It's striking. The raids themselves, as far as I can tell, we're talking about a rounding error in terms of the actual numbers of people. But the chill is dramatically changing people's desire to be in America or their self-deporting, if you will. Any sort of top line thoughts on the impact on the labor market of these ice raids and the chill it's kind of sending across the labor markets? I don't think there's a single group of people misunderstood more in the U.S.

1:01:09than immigrants. Most Americans would likely be shocked to learn that 75 percent of immigrants in the United States are either citizens or lawful permanent residents. I mean, people, the federal government has said to 75 % of immigrants in the U.S., you are entitled to be here for the rest of your life with all the rights of citizens if you are not one. You know, the quarter of immigrants that are either temporary or do not have permission, they work at incredibly high rates. And their presence here is almost perfectly predicted by the strength of the economy more than anything else. So I was explaining to a journalist the other day that the population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States peaked in 2007.

1:01:56That was almost 20 years ago. And we are putting more and more resources after what is essentially a stable population, manufacturing a crisis where there's not one. It peaked in 2007 because that's when the economy peaked and they fell afterwards. So I like to table set just to make clear that there are economic forces that draw people to the United States and we don't recognize them. We don't it's not just that we don't recognize that they're in our economy or that but that it's our economy that draws people here and that the most successful, you know, deportation policy was the worst recession we've had since the Great Depression.

1:02:41And that got more people to leave the country than anything else your government could have possibly done. Just crash the economy for three years if you really don't want undocumented immigrants here, because that was the largest decline in the unauthorized immigrant population we have ever seen. So I say that not to be cruel, but to understand what is a credit to the economy as opposed to policymaking or how tough someone is or how many ICE agents there are. Like, I mean, you're throwing cash into the air. If there are jobs, people will come. And that is what the data has shown through 10 different administrations.

1:03:12But as far as the chilling effect, I think this is in some ways goes back to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the parallels there. I mean, we should have had immigration reform 25 years ago. and we have been limping along in this two-faced, are they welcome? Are they not welcome? Are we going to deport them? Are we going to let them become lawful permanent residents? In the meantime, you have roughly 10 million people in the United States who are citizens in all but name. They pay taxes to the federal government. They pay taxes into Social Security. They buy houses with ITINs. Bank accounts, phone contracts, rent contracts.

1:03:51I mean, you know, they own property. They pay property taxes into the school system. And they're doing all of this because the thought was that when citizenship came, they would prove that they had been good citizens, that they called the police when they saw a crime. And so I don't even think it's the chilling effect of people coming into the country. I think it's the denigration of 10 million people that risk so much more than most Americans understand. Do you want 10 million people in the country who will never call 911, who truly stop paying taxes? it's the amount that social security benefits off of them is also pretty high for all the claims that undocumented citizens are taking public programs i mean they're windfall from social security's perspective because social security knows that they're not legitimate taxpayers but it does not send the money back um so i i i think we're risking so much more but kind of like the bls we weren't in a good spot before we had been limping along through you know weak administrative policy in a completely inactive Congress that had never said firmly, here's what America thinks about immigrants in the 21st century.

1:04:54And the cruelty, the inhumanity, and the sheer size of this policy, I don't, I'm not, I'm not naive, but I do think Americans will not like how ugly this gets. I think you already said, but I just want to ask a question around this, because you said something I thought was really striking, that it's the most misunderstood group of laborers or the labor force. And I want to put forward a thesis and just have you respond to it. My sense is that globally, there's never been a more flexible, profitable workforce and undocumented workers in the United States, that they essentially come in when there's jobs, take jobs domestic workers don't want at a lower rate, work really hard.

1:05:41And then if those jobs dry up. They don't stick around for unemployment insurance or Social Security or turn to crime. They actually commit crime. They pay their taxes, yet tax our social services less. And they're the most flexible, profitable labor force in history. Well, I think you've just hit the head on why we've not had policy on them for 25, 30 years. And we've ignored them. We've like, wink, wink, come on in and wipe grandma's ass and serve me my food and build my house. And gather my food, harvest my food. You know, I appreciate that this is an issue in which libertarians and big government progressives agree that the amount of money being spent on deportation by this administration is$170 billion.

1:06:28Y 'all, that's more than we spend on childcare or school lunch in a year. That's a great stat. The amount of money we're investing into this population is coming down to somewhere. I mean, depending on how you do it, because the money was actually kind of hard to understand in terms of how they were spending it. They have four years to spend around$170 billion. You just spread that over the 10 to 12 million people you're talking about. You're spending almost half in terms of a per cap cost per undocumented immigrant. It's rivaling what the federal government spends on children in a year. I mean, it's not close, but we don't spend that much on kids.

1:07:02So kids, we spend$7 ,000 to $9 ,000. I mean, undocumented immigrants with this level of enforcement, depending on what you put into the calculation, I mean, you're looking at four grand a pop that we're putting into getting rid of people who have work rates close to 85%. There's a lot to unmask here, but I think your point is hitting on something that we should say out loud, is that the people who profit most for undocumented immigrants are their employers. And you are seeing them go to the Trump administration begging for exceptions of like, do not raid this place or do not raid this industry.

1:07:40And I have always found that the most deleterious consequence of undocumented immigrants in the United States is that they erode labor law enforcement. And they enable employers who willingly and knowingly violate labor law by giving them people to hire. And then people will say, you know, Americans won't take these jobs. I think they'd take them and report them very quickly. Like, where is my paycheck? Where is my break? Why are you paying me this little? I work in California. I should be earning sick days on the farm now. So I've always thought that the biggest enablers, the people who really hold kind of the key to understanding undocumented immigrants, are the exploitative employers, you know, who don't want to employ people in a way that follows labor law.

1:08:28And I don't think it's about immigration law. I think it's about labor law. And not for nothing,$170 billion for deportation kind of eats alive the just over$2 billion we put for all of labor law enforcement in the United States. It tells you what our priorities are or are not. I just want to repeat the stat because I thought it was so striking. You're We're spending more on the efforts to expel undocumented workers than we're spending on child care. Yeah, that's because the U.S. spends very little on child care. Yeah, I'll pull up this statistic for you so I don't get it wrong. So Congress appropriated in the one big beautiful bill, and I have said that I think this is the ugliest part of this beautiful, beautiful piece of legislation,$170 billion for almost all of it dedicated to immigration enforcement.

1:09:21Some of that is going to go to increasing the annual budget of ICE and the Customs Bureau and parts of the DHS and the Coast Guard. And some of it is a one-time, like, here's$50 billion to build residential facilities where we detain people before we deport them. So in comparison, the U.S. spends the Child Care Development Fund, which is the entirety of federal spending to help people afford child care, is$12 billion a year. The National School Lunch Program, which is the federal portion of helping poor kids buy lunch and breakfast, that's$17 billion a year. So we're spending 10 times more on deportations than we are on lunch for kids.

1:10:07Well, I mean, it's hard because we don't know. The$170 billion, a lot of it was given a four-year time frame. So even if you plussed up the Child Care Development Fund and say, well, it's roughly$50 billion over a four-year period. So it's$50 billion over four years for Child Care Development Fund versus$170 billion over four years for deportation. This amount of money is frightening to me. Because of passing reconciliation, it doesn't have the same level of oversight as a lot of other government apportionment, and we don't know how it'll be spent. But the sassy thing I would say that's probably more like dinner party talk than economic conclusion is you get what you pay for.

1:10:48so you don't want to pay for child care you don't want to pay for kids to have meals you're you're not going to have you're not going to have women working to the same degree and you're you're not going to have the same you know you're building inequality into children and you you you're not going to have as high a fertility so by all means spend that money on 10 million people who are not citizens and focus on them but you you know it's not free i want to wrap us up here uh just finally get your thoughts on youth unemployment, which is at 11%, which is a lot higher than the rest of America. We're also seeing this kind of around the world.

1:11:26I think China's at somewhere around 15%, 16 % youth unemployment. Just any thoughts on what we're seeing among young people right now in terms of unemployment and perhaps any advice or any thoughts that you would give to a young person who's worried about this? For benchmarking comparison, the unemployment rate that we're seeing amongst young workers now, both with and without a college degree, is what we saw for the roughly four years coming out of the Great Recession, which was there was about a half decade period in which the unemployment rate for young people hung out at incredibly high rates.

1:12:05And this was the millennials basically kind of graduating into weak and weak labor markets. So right now we're seeing it almost on the front end where they're there because they have less skills and experience, not to say that they're unskilled, but because they, you know, they don't have the resume of someone 10 years older. They have become their own bellwether of labor market weakness. And it's not a good position to be in to be an indicator that the labor market is going south when you are a person in the world who would like a job. But that is what I make of these unemployment rates. And for what it's worth, you know, the unemployment rate for high school graduates is higher than the unemployment rate for college graduates.

1:12:46So it's not like, like, it can't just be AI or tech companies, because the unemployment rate for people who don't have a college degree is still much higher than the unemployment rate for people who do have a college degree. So I think each labor market has its own stressor. But sometimes the most obvious reason is the biggest one, which is the labor market is going south. What I will say is two young workers, I tell them not to give up. And I tell them that they have a very long time to recover. and historically they do now they might not have as the earnings that they would have if they had graduated when the unemployment rate was three percent they might not have the same career trajectory but they have a long time and little penalty as they enter the labor market in contrast if you lose your job when you're 55 you you may never work again and i would never say to a 20 year old if you don't get a job in the next year you'll never work again but i if a 60 year old or a 55-year-old lost their job, I would have to say reasonably, it does not look good for you.

1:13:57Because you're old, you're expensive, you cost a lot of money, and they're willing to replace you with someone younger. So it's kind of a bewitching aspect of the labor market is that it can be punishing on both sides. I just want to say I feel triggered. I know you're talking about me. It's pretty obvious, Catherine. It's pretty obvious. My podcast co-host is 55, and whenever I bring this up, she's like, why do you have to say 55? It occurred to me right as I said it, I was like, oh, I don't know. I don't know how old Scott is. Oh, my God. This is it. This is my last stop. It's because you look 30.

1:14:32That's why she said it. It's me on a couch watching K-pop Demon Hunters for the rest of my life. It's hard to think you actually have watched that. I do as I listen to the new Taylor Swift album, two of my favorite things. Both those things are lies, Catherine. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I try to embed personal and tax on people's ages whenever I can. It's so hard for young workers. I think they can recover. You have to give yourself space to mourn what you're not going to get. You're not going to get a strong labor market in the next three months. So that's out of your control and you have to mourn it.

1:15:06What I will say is that a lot of the difficulties facing young workers as they look for jobs is a policy choice. You know, we could regulate the job market and the labor market for job seekers. We could do things like you have to notify someone legally if they did not get a job. You have to respond to an application within, you know, no more than 30 days of some type of indicator. If you interview someone, you have to pay them for their time. We could easily regulate the job search process. And I think in the age of AI, we ought to. And so I would also stress to young people that, you know, remember this and then call your member of Congress and say, why don't you have any labor protections for workers who are still looking?

1:15:51Because that is a policy choice and it's one that we can change if we want to. Catherine Anne Edwards is a Ph.D. economist and economic policy consultant. Her research focuses on the intersection of labor markets and public policy, including unemployment and unemployment insurance, recessions and recoveries, women's labor supply, poverty alleviation, retirement security and social security. She has testified three times in front of Congress about economic policy. She writes a weekly column on the economy for Bloomberg, and she is the host of the Optimist Economy podcast. Catherine, we really appreciate your time.

1:16:21Thanks, Catherine. Thanks y 'all so much for having me back.

1:16:27this episode was produced by claire miller and alison weiss and engineered by benjamin spencer our research team is dan shalon isabella kinsel chris nodonik and mia silverio drew burrows is our technical director and katherine dylan is our executive producer thank you for listening to property markets from prof g media if you liked what you heard give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on monday

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