David Brancaccio

On a good Sunday where it's beautiful outside and you have mountains and oceans beckoning, you're here to chew on some topics about the economy.

That gives me some hope.

I also know that pendulums swing.

I also talk to a lot of younger adults in my line of work, and also we have three younger adults who are offspring.

And they are not uniformly upbeat at all times about the state of the world.

But they also are preparing themselves for a time when the time horizon is longer than it seems to be now.

And our job isn't to tell you what the choices should be.

Our job...

is to show you the range of policy possibilities, the ways people are thinking about this.

One of the first projects under this new aegis that we're really excited about, haven't done the reporting on this yet, just some basic research, it might be called Robots Ate My Taxes.

Robot Proof Jobs or something like that.

That was about technological unemployment before we talked about large language models.

But Robots Ate My Taxes, you know how you and I, how many stories have you and I done about the demographic challenges, right?

As our population ages on average, right?

More people drawing social services later in life, fewer younger people coming on board, overlay restrictions at the border, and you have, you know, it's going to turn us into Japan here.

So that is a big issue.

It is possible that equivalent in scale to that issue is during this disruptive period where AI comes on board and a lot of people get thrown out of work, at least for now, they're not going to pay taxes.

Robots don't pay taxes.

So when Jack Dorsey lays off 40% to 50% of his people the other day, he said it was AI.

I don't know.