INTELLIGENCE SQUARED DEBATE OFFERS LITTLE IN THE WAY OF ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE2
by Dale Coberly
INTELLIGENCE SQUARED DEBATE OFFERS LITTLE IN THE WAY OF ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE
I am reading a short article on the Intelligence Squared debate I previously referred to in Social Security For the Young. It turns out they were more concerned with “insurance” than with Social Security.
But they don’t seem to understand the idea of insurance. The “for” side of the debate resolution: “Commitments made to seniors decades ago…saddle our children with unmanageable debt…” neglected to mention that Granny paid for those “commitments,” and there is no “debt,” manageable or otherwise. But granny didn’t get much help from the “against” side. Here are excerpts from the article here.
One shocking statistic is that 37 percent of those who came of age in this millennium are unemployed,” Rosenkranz said. “When consumers lack the confidence to spend, when businessmen lack the confidence to invest and to hire, it is the young that suffer most. The health insurance debate focused on the uninsured. But think for a moment about how health insurance is priced. Almost everywhere the young pay the same premium as their more illness prone elders. A massive subsidy for the old paid for by the young. Tens of millions of young people quite reasonably said no thanks to health insurance until the government mandated that they say yes.
The motion was that the young are being asked to sacrifice financially for the entitlement programs of the elderly, and the Conservative panelists argued in favor of that motion.
Arithmetic still matters,” Zuckerman began. “Medicaid now pays for both health and long term care for roughly 55 million Americans. It finances more than one third of all births in the United States, and pays the cost of almost two thirds of the people in nursing homes. The federal government underwrites 50 to 77 percent of the cost, depending on the income level of each state. Even so, Medicaid is the second biggest and fastest growing category of state spending. Costs are up more than 60 percent in the last five years and are expected to exceed $450 billion this year and to keep growing by about eight percent annually for the next decade. In the next — by the mid-2030s, the 65 and over population will nearly double, and health care costs, which have been rising far faster than worker productivity since the end of World War II, may be completely out of control, resulting in a tidal wave of federal spending.
But the Liberal camp did not see America’s entitlement programs as something that needs significant renovation.
The elderly used to be the poorest group in American until in 1926 the farm states where the Depression started began Social Security, which has then spread to a national program by Roosevelt in 1933,” Dean argued. “So this is a core program. We just need to make it work and we just need some mild tweaks. Health care needs a lot of tweaks, but the whole system needs tweaks, not simply Medicare. And we should stop victimizing Medicare for the sake of keeping our taxes absurdly low. The fact is people need to pay their fair share in America, and the Bush tax cuts need to sunset. You know, when the taxes were at Bill Clinton’s rate, the economy was a whole lot better than it is now. And I wouldn’t mind going back to those taxes and paying my fair share at all.
Beginning with the fatuous remark by Zuckerman that “Arithmetic still matters” it seems to me that neither side understands what they are talking about.
Arithmetic only matters if you understand the problem you are “solving” in the first place.
I doubt very much “the young” pay the same for private health insurance as “the old.” But in the case of Medicare, and less directly Medicaid or any government paid health insurance, the whole point is that THE YOUNG WILL BECOME THE OLD. It makes more sense for them to pay a small premium, while they are young and healthy and working, over a long period of time, so that they will have paid in advance for health care needs that will come when they are old and sick and not working. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF “INSURANCE.”
And that is the whole reason that government paid insurance is “better than” private insurance. It just is not possible for a private company to pay for health care forty years after the premium was paid in. Government plans, whether explicitly “pay as you go” plans for which the insured person pays directly, as Medicare is in part, or just a general “we are all in this together” plan where “on average” younger workers are “paying for” older people out of general taxes… but will be paid for in their turn when they become older… can manage this kind of infinite “pay it forward” financing with no problem at all. No problem except for the political liars who pretend that the young are bearing the burden for the old.. as a trick to fool the young into voting for someone who promises to lift the burden… and leave them to the mercies of the free market when they get old and sick and out of work.
The fact that costs are going up is not an argument FOR cutting your insurance. In fact it would be insane to CUT your insurance because you think costs are going to go up. With pay as you go financing the increased costs will be to some extent subsidized by the “next” generation… but that generation will have its own increased costs subsidized by the following generation. Moreover each generation will be richer than the last, making it easier for them to pay the increased costs. This is not a Ponzi scheme, because each generation will get the same good deal as the last…and it can go on forever. In fact, it’s the best deal “the young” can hope for.
Unfortunately Howard Dean’s remarks, as quoted here, don’t seem to address this simple fact. Rather he offers a kind of vague “we need to pay taxes to save the program” which is true, but doesn’t really help anyone understand why. or what. or how.
Go back to what Rosenkranz said at the beginning of the excerpt: “When consumers lack the confidence to spend, when businessmen lack the confidence to invest and hire, it is the young that suffer most.”
And what does Rosenkranz think will happen to consumer confidence, and ultimately to business confidence, when young people finally notice that without Social Security and Medicare they are looking forward to an old age that is desperate,poor, nasty, brutal, and short?
I would add an entirely personal comment: The purpose of arguments like “honoring commitments to granny… impose intolerable debt on the young” is three fold.
First, encourage “the young” to continue to believe they will never get old.
Second, take the young despise the old, and everyone else: “we don’t owe them anything.” We are all proud, heroic, individuals. We don’t need “cooperation”, much less kindness.
And third, enable the young to tell themselves that “commitments” don’t matter. Not just vague promises here, but commitments to give people what they paid for.
Someone more old fashioned than we allow ourselves to be would say this is the way to a society of anxiety, pain, and misery. Pleasures, perhaps, for the “winners,” but no happiness at all, for anyone, win or lose.
In the third from the last paragraph, “take the young…” should be “make the young…”
The so-called entitlements are mechanisms to extend ones resources over time. (In fact, government as a whole is a way of extending shared resources over time.) People have two periods, age and youth, where they need the shared support of the productive middle. A civilized nation ballances two buckets on the shoulders of the water-carriers, one carrying babies, the other carrying the elders. A civilized society braids together all ages and supports them all as needed.
However, to a feedlot society, the elders are wasted effort. Disabled or struggling adults are wasted effort. Babies are potentially of service so they get more attention, but because they aren’t productive, they won’t get a lot of support. To balance the numbers of adults needed in the future, lots of babies need to be born so there will be enough competent survivors when needed. Alternatively, raising new adults can be outsourced to other nations, whose cream can be skimmed when they come of age. Productive adults who are healthy are more valued, but this is contingent on their continuing productivity and well-behaved. Whether they are citizens or not is not material. And then finally, there are the palanquin riders, whose choices and needs determine policy for everyone else.
Of course, there is a sliding scale between civilized society and feedlot society. But the policy choices and the “problems” either trumpeted or ignored in public discourse indicate which way the scale is sliding.
Noni
emerging from the Thanksgiving kitchen — turkey coming up soon
Noni
I appreciate the analogy… if it’s an analogy.
But I need to make the point, again, that those “productive adults” defer a part of their own wages until they retire. It is not the young paying for the old. It is the young paying for themselves.
Social Security etc are “transfer payments” only in the sense that if you keep enough of your paycheck on Friday to pay for Sunday dinner, you are “transferring wealth” from your working self to your Sunday self.
The reason that the Petersons hate the idea is they can’t stand to see the servants loafing around on Sunday.
Seems to me that if you want a source of debt on young workers, just look to the school tuition lenders which prey on those seeking college eductions or other technical training. It can cost a student $40K a year just for fees and tuition at some of the state schools, with tuition commensurately higher in private universities. With interest, it can cost our future doctors and other professionals with special skills hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the training they need to pursue their careers. To add insult to injury, lenders can charge interest on these loans while students are still in school. How exactly does this make sense?
And, in addition, will future generations be so burdened down with taxes that they will have to starve to feed their Moms and Pops? Well, if as some assert, wages will continue to be depressed indefinitely or, in the bleakest alternative, people will have no prospects of regular, remunerative employment ever again, it’s hard to imagine they will be paying much in taxes at all. Unemployed people pay some tax on their unemployment benefits (!), but if their spouses and they fall into the lowest earnings categories, they will pay no federal income tax at all.
If so, SS will be the only means of savings for retirement that the vast majority of middle income earners will have. Is it smart to cut future benefits to such a point that retirement is a meaningless concept? Is it even necessary? I keep wondering who benefits from this constant hysterical insistence that we cut, cut, cut the things we know we need as we grow older? Well, in that regard, I can assure you that given a chance I could definitely make a lot of money running your local SS office as a private enterprise. Just for SS cards, I can see charging $100 bucks a pop for new numbers–and that’s genuine cards, too, not those crummy fakes you see down in your HR shop…oh, sorry. Not supposed to talk about that, am I?
Yeah, there’s money in the SS crisis. If I were just starting out these days, I’d turn a deaf ear to people telling me it costs to much to pay FICA. Right. Got a bridge to sell me? NancyO
Coberly:
Nit Picking . . .
“It just is not possible for a private company to pay for health care forty years after the premium was paid in. Government plans, whether explicitly “pay as you go” plans for which the insured person pays directly, as Medicare is in part, or just a general “we are all in this together” plan where “on average” younger workers are “paying for” older people out of general taxes… but will be paid for in their turn when they become older… can manage this kind of infinite “pay it forward” financing with no problem at all. No problem except for the political liars who pretend that the young are bearing the burden for the old.. as a trick to fool the young into voting for someone who promises to lift the burden… and leave them to the mercies of the free market when they get old and sick and out of work.”
It is possible for private insurance to pay in the future, if what they invest the premiums in and the returns from the investments exceeds the payouts + administrative. This is how most private insurance companies work. If payouts exceed premiums, they increase premiums.
What is at issue is what happens after SCHPS, Medicaid, and Medicare are ended? Much of long term nursing is covered by Medicaid for most people as there are ~7 million with plans of their own. Medicare is one of the few programs keeping a lid on rising healthcare industry costs. Whichever way it gos, provate insurance follows. What happens when all of this is abolished and we turn to the private sector?
Nancy
I could have mentioned, I suppose, that all that money “spent on health care for the old” does not actually go to the old. It goes to their doctors and all ancillary personnel. So the issue is not about a “crushing burden to society.” It’s about letting the old people live… unless they happen to be rich. The “young” could, of course, spend their money on Mercedes’, just like the doctors. That would drive up the price of Mercedes… until the doctors look around and find that all their patients had died, because no doctor was willing to trade health care for a used Mercedes.
Given the people who encourage this “debate,” we should not be surprised that it is completely stupid.
The devil’s purpose has always been to take you gently by the hand with whispers of “enlightened self interest” and lead you down the garden path to blind stupid greed. Misery is the whole point.
Well, run75441, I am willing to work for a modest consulting fee to tell private business people how to make money providing SS services now provided for free.
But other people got there before me. Rick Scott and Jeb Bush in FL have discussed this matter at some length. I understand that Bush encouraged Scott to privatize both public education and all health care services. Scott has taken advantage of the health care idea by instituting drug testing for people who apply for any public assistance or health services. Including unemployment benefits, IIRC. Turns out he has a health care company doing business in Florida which processes the drug tests that applicants must pay for in advance of being approved for benefits. The applicants are supposed to be reimbursed, but not unless their applications are approved. Cool, huh? The applicant pays whether he’s approved or not! Brilliant! The school scheme is even better. But, I’ll spare you. NancyO
This from the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Fogel is an interesting way to look at healthcare costs:
“The main factor is that the long-term income elasticity of the demand for healthcare is 1.6—for every 1 percent increase in a family’s income, the family wants to increase its expenditures on healthcare by 1.6 percent. This is not a new trend. Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875. All of this has been made possible by the growth in the productivity of traditional commodities. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it took 1,700 hours of labor to purchase the annual food supply for a family. Today it requires just 260 hours, and it is likely that by 2040, a family’s food supply will be purchased with about 160 hours of labor.”
What Dr. Fogel fails to mention, and what is also wrong in this post, as expressed by this: “Moreover each generation will be richer than the last, making it easier for them to pay the increased costs”, is that healthcare costs are playing an ever increasing role in the cost of exports. So, with wage trends falling, and with US exports too expensive to allow for ample job creation, healthcare costs must become competitive globally, regardless of where the money comes from.
So the choice that we face is actually whether we provide enough jobs, or, do we continue to pretend that Americans can afford to spend more on healthcare than their competitors. In the past, Americans have enjoyed “exorbitant privledges” such as dollar hegemony, dollar recycling, and all forms of neo-colonialist benefits, but… now, we have instead, QE and ZIRP and, who knows what in the future. But we no longer have any reason to expect that the US economy can afford its citizens to live beyond the means of a population that consumes far more than what it produces.
In other words, assumptions about the US economy, based on a past that has little to do with the future, is a mistake. ‘Entitlements’ must be seen as a component of labor costs and as a participant in the ‘race o the bottom’. Unless of course wages rise from the global bottom. Not much chance of that though, considering just how little is said about the dynamics in play. The ‘demographic dividend’ is just too lucrative for those who pull the strings… so we pretend that the future will be like the past
ray
Ray–Are you suggesting there is no way to change the dismal future–permanently depressed wages, continuously deteriorating standards of living, and so weiter? Well, if there really is no hope of changing the L into a V, doesn’t that mean that entitlements are more important than ever before? We can’t disappear half our population to make it possible to keep taxes low and government impositions such as mandatory participation in employee pension/health care plans at a minimum.
I hate to bring up the possibility of social unrest among the masses, but isn’t it better to pay a little Revolution Insurance than find yourself the center of everyone’s attention as you stand in the dock accused of crimes against the People? Of which, I argue, you might be guilty if you traded securities for Goldman or Citibank in 2006. But, Noni mentions the benefits to be garnered by social cooperation in pooling resources to meet the foreseeable risks of age and infirmity for oneself and hs/her fellow citizens. Sound idea, in my estimation. NancyO
run
i don’t think so. at least i don’t know of any insurance companies that don’t charge older people a higher premium because their current risk is higher. and i know of no companies that will carry your insurance if you stop making payments because you are out of work.
there was a reason SS and Medicare were invented. the government can do this easily. the problem we are facing today is Peterson spending a billion dollars to make us forget how insurance works.
ray
no, i pretend that the present is like the present. your nobel prize winning analysis is a little over abstract for me.
as i tried to point out in my modest post, even if our wages do not go up, and even if health care costs do go up, YOU are paying for YOUR OWN health care, and you may decide you’d rather spend the money on that than on a new Mercedes. or even a new Ford.
“Analysis” based on theoretical ideas, past performance, wild speculation about the future… is really pretty worthless when it comes to deciding what we need to do today.
No doubt providing enough jobs is an important concern. But what does it have to do with the Lie that Granny’s health care is impoverishing the kids?
btw
my “prediction” of rising wages comes from the same predictors who predict rising health care costs.
i am only telling you what “the arithmetic” actually says about the reasonably forseeable future.
i am not interested in science fiction.
Nancy
I appreciate your argument.
But I must insist on my point. “We” are not paying for anyone else’s health care. “We” are paying for our own. Explicilty in the case of Medicare HI. Rather obscurely in the case of Medicaid, or those parts of Medicare paid out of general funds.
And of course, “hopefully” with private insurance, which has a nasty way of not being there just when you need it most.
btw
over a fifteen year period i (my employer, but “most economists agree” it’s really my money) paid 30,000 dollars for health insurance i never used. The day I quit work, that health insurance, and the thirty thousand dollars, disappeared as if it had never been.
As far as the insurance company was concerned my premium was just a bet between them and me that i’d get sick that month. Next month is just another roll of the dice.
What the government can do is charge you a premium each month based on a prorated “expected cost” over your entire life… including even infancy. Then it can charge you an extra premium to cover the chance that you will be out of work an unable to pay the base premium.
The government can also do a better job of controlling costs than either an individual can, or a private insurance company would find “cost effective.” It’s one thing to deny coverage, but it is NOT in their interests to keep costs low. If costs are high, people know they will need insurance… unless of course they are talking about Medicare.
There, as we have seen, we can tell the people scary stories about rising costs and convince them they need to cut their insurance. After all, why would a young, strong, healthy Ayn Rand hero want to pay for the health care needs of the old and sick?
coberly,
“As far as the insurance company was concerned my premium was just a bet between them and me that i’d get sick that month. Next month is just another roll of the dice.”
Thats no different than what the govenment does. You pay your money and if something bad happens you get it back. The essence of insurance. If you had died after that $30 large it would have disappeared also (i.e used to pay other people who got sick). The only difference is the Fed. government can generate a huge pool of people, enough where even 100s of individual outliers are noise to the big picture. The effects of very large numbers. Private insurance could do exactly the same thing if they could pool across state lines.
BUt again we concentrate more money and power into the Leviathon. I’m not sure that is a good thing anymore…
As an experiment lets see how long before my stalker shows…
Islam will change
buff
not quite. the government can collect my premium, let me skip a few months when i am unemployed. and forty years later pay my health care costs…
because instead of “investing” my premium in stocks, it simply uses my premium to pay current costs, and as long as the next generation wants the same “premium security” , it, the government, can do this forever.
private companies can’t.
btw
Leviathan is going to be there anyway. We can decide whether he works for us or for the Billionaires.
I have nothing against billionaires, as long as they come by it honestly. But Billionaire ownership of health care. or retirement, tends to be a chancy thing for working people.
If ordinary people can’t come together to create something that does what they need, and can do no other way, then you can forget about government FOR the people.
Nancy,
It is not so much that the future must be “dismal”, as it is that the past was misleading due to artificial gains and gains that were not sustainable. Americans became spoiled, they don’t understand that spending on Granny’s coma care, and Granpa’s golf habit, is essentially a labor cost.
So it is not about an L or V but instead that wages have been falling for 30 some years and yet wages are still far from competitive, and with healthcare and retirement costs being even less competitive, we are left with a choice between having enough jobs or continuing to spend what we don’t actually have.
Or, we take the MMT route (debt is good)? Or, we accept that higher wages on a global scale will drive growth via human capital expansion. But of course the exploitation of labor is what we know.
love
well, it’s pretty hard to compete with organ doners. but that’s what our leaders want for us. you see, they are the owners of the factories. and labor is labor. the cheaper the better.
but i still don’t see what this has to do with the fact that “the young” are paying for their own insurance.
i don’t really hear you suggesting that labor take a lower wage… in the form of doing without retirement or health insurance… in order to be more competitive with Vietnam.
Nancy:
Read what I said again. What you have here is not what I said
Coberly:
Premiums would never payout what was needed unless the premiums were invested. Regardless of age, the premiums are invete and returns are paid out. If they miscalculate, the premiums go up. If a cohort of a particular dies off unespectedly, the premiums go up. While age is a factor in determining premiums, it is the investments deliverying a return which determines how much the future premium will be. I do not know of any insurance that operates differently than this.
You are an outlier the same as a person whose insurance paid out $90,000 for one year as opposed to your $30,000 for the life of your employment. It is a balancing act. If WS crashes, you are going to pay more and vice versa.
run
yes. but note that the government doesn’t need to “invest” your premium. it only needs to collect exactly as much each year as it pays out. the “investment” that the private company relies on, comes to the government in the form of taxes on incomes which are growing as a result of growth in the economy. the principle is exactly the same, but the “security” in the government case is the best money can buy.
Love I appreciate that paying what we owe to seniors becomes more difficult when we’re in a race to the bottom, or at least stagnating, in terms of wages. And we don’t want to turn Social Security and Medicare into welfare by tapping the wealthy, whose incomes have been growing, to pay for these programs. We’ve been descending into a situation in which the non-wealthy are paying mostly to support these programs for themselves and the wealthy are asked to pay for most of everything else (and refusing to do so). This is not good but there’s little that can be done unless we raise wages from the bottom rather than continue to enrich only the top. I think you are overly pessimistic regarding this approach, with the important exception that formidable political obstacles have grown for three decades.
I also agree that health care cost inflation is harming our competitiveness, to the extent that it’s adding to the cost of labor for exportable goods and services. (It’s not Medicare spending, it’s health care spending.) We have been unwise to pay more and more for outcomes that are no better and often worse than those of other countries. ACA may help but I don’t see an end to this trend without a single-payer type of system–that is, something closer to what our competitors do.
PJR,
I agree with most everything that you said although I seem not to have been clear enough about Fogel’s argument in regards to Americans having more to spend on healthcare by percentage. There is basically an assumption in play having to do with what Americans can afford in healthcare. But the cost of healthcare is increasingly constrained by the cost of US exports (jobs). This cost is also of course affected by the value of the dollar but the powers that be prefer an artificially valued dollar (as deturmined by trade via a fiat currency). Plus, the major exporting nations have made it clear that they will print and dump their currencies if the dollar exerts upward pressure on their currencies due to QE or due to any other unnatural effort to bring the dollar’s value down. So the pressures are making US exports too expensive with the euro also adding upward pressure and global demand is also waning. So unless national debt is accepted as a positive force, or, unless wealth is distributed more evenly, austerity is a given.
rl love
with all respect, you are still not clear enough, at least for me.
you seem to be saying that some Economist predicts that Americans will have less money to spend in the future. That may be, but the “official” prediction is that Americans will have more money. It’s hard enough dealing with the distortions of the official prediction made by the non partisan expert liars without having to answer every economist and his pet theory.
Moreover, even if Americans have less money to spend, they would still have to choose how they are going to spend that money. They may prefer medical care to new cars or trips to Disneyland. Or they might look to see how the civilized world controls medical costs.
Americans are a funny people. They insist they love their high cost sacred way of doing medicine. but they don’t want to actually pay for it. The liberals want “the rich” to pay for it. And the rich don’t want to pay for it, but they don’t want the poor to know they can pay for it themselves.
My guess is that the massa would be glad to call out the vet if you break your leg. But he wants you to be grateful to him for it. Or to depend on him. Rather than “the government.” It’s a power thing.
And of course a money thing.
dale,
So, you prefer to accept the “official prediction” even though the wage trend has thirty plus years of downward momentum that is clearly caused by foreign competetion. Furthermore, you prefer to assume that my analysis can only be what “some Economist predicts” as if I am just another regurgitator. It seems then that you would have your readers simply accept what you provide even though you rely heavily on assumptions which you only take on face value when that suits your argument. Of course the “official prediction” for growth in Q1, Q2 2011 were put at above 4% but we have instead something far short of those predictions. We also had “official predictions” of continued robust growth right up to the day that the global economy collapsed in 2008. But when these ‘official predictions” suit your needs… all else is merely “abstractions”, “pet theory”, and “distortions”. How clever you must seem to yourself.
love
clever enough to try to keep straight what i am talking about.
no doubt a flying saucer will arrive and take you and other wise men to a better planet. but this fool has to work with what everyone else is working with: the Trustees projections. If I just wanted to offer my own opinions and predictions i could say anything i wanted.
rl,
“Of course the “official prediction” for growth in Q1, Q2 2011 were put at above 4% but we have instead something far short of those predictions. We also had “official predictions” of continued robust growth right up to the day that the global economy collapsed in 2008.”
Well said…Thank You….I have attempted several times to make this point about this topic, and it always falls on deaf ears…..maybe your words will allow it to be addressed.
Coberly’s beef is always from the perspective that S.S. is so righteous, even giving it the evil eye should be against the law.
S.S. is under attack, but Coberly has yet to figure out why. In his world…..he has had the ability to simplify it down to…..”If the American people borrowed the money, they have to pay it.” I wish it was that simple…I really do…Nobody wants to deal with this, and obviously we have to have something in place to do the job that S.S. does. The hard Left want to kill it to reshape and expand it under a different name with a long term Social Engineering agenda in play.
It’s also under attack Peterson et al and others because of the recognition that S.S. is insurance, but that’s the problem it is insurance and insurance only, and the left has done a good job of indoctrinating the population into believing it is a retirement plan. Because the American people attempt to use it as that, it has become too big to fail, a wealth redistribution, a virus to saving for retirement, a drain on the economy, and a pirana to the budget. The American people can do better, the S.S. system is nothing to be proud of, it worked well when the demographics worked in it’s favor, but as soon as it experiences a little adversity…it folds like a cheap suit. We must find a better way of doing both the social saftey net, and the retirement plan.
Darren
I think I can skip most of your extended fantasy not based on any facts, but for the record I have never based my “beef” on the righteousness of SS. I have merely pointed out that the “facts everyone knows” do not stand up to simple arithmetic.
if the attacks on SS were based on anything honest,why do they have to lie about it?
i have said, many times, that it doesn’t really matter if the Trust Fund is paid back. doesn’t seem to affect your understanding of what i have said.
i will continue to accept SS as insurance. i am afraid i agree with you that “the left” is trying to turn it into welfare, but i think that is because they are stupid… unless they are in the pay of Peterson who always talks about SS as if it IS welfare already.
Love I had suggested that you are overly pessimistic because you attribute downward pressure on wages to be “clearly” caused by foreign competition (and therefore inexorable). I’m going to ask about that causation the next time I see the cashier at the supermarket or the waiter at the pizzeria. Fact is that foreign competition is a contributing factor but by no means a dominant one. IMHO politics has played a bigger role over the past three-plus decades, depressing wages except at the top and limiting economic growth.