How to fix the economy: another entitlement program for seniors?

You omitted something rather important.

That prolonged and painful process of household deleveraging could take years, perhaps more than a decade, and until it is complete we should seek to avoid additional unsustainable consumer spending sprees.

Sure, retraining takes time. But a great deal of it can be accomplished in 2 to 4 years, which looks pretty good compared to a decade or more. And once its done, you have a better-off society, with workers who have moved up the scale a notch.

Clearly what Lind is proposing is an adjunct to stimulus. Feel free to disagree with and criticize Lind. His ideas might be sub-optimal vis-a-vis pure stimulus. But do it in a fair way – not by comparing his ideas, which he has actually done a reasonable job of justifying – with austerian ideas, which have been ridiculed because they are so obviously counter-productive, and invalidated by a look at history.

And, without gainsaying Summers, one may look at programs that have not only a stimulative effect, but also social and economic consequences that stretch farther into the future. (Though a cynic might want to call it disaster socialism.)

More importantly, Lind’s concepts – a response to a specific request for BLUE SKY ideas – have not a snowball’s chance of even being considered for serious discussion in a political environment where cutting social security is being actively promoted, along with a lot of other mis-guided not only austerian but actively regressive cat-food committee notions.

You’re a bright guy, but you consistently devote large chunks of mental effort to things that are peripheral to what’s going on, trivial in their importance, and unlikely to happen. Kind of a waste in these tough times.

Focus, man.

Cheers!
JzB

Actually, no, it does not always take a long time to train someone to become a radiologist (two years), or to teach, for there are a lot of waiters with plenty of education.

I understand that it is not the job of government to help individuals in this manner. However Michael Lind is no dummy. What he suggested has a lot more relevance than a good portion of the money that has already been spent. Also, those vouchers for in-home care are one of the first attempts I’ve seen to directly match individuals to individuals in an informal fashion. Many self-employed would-be providers of services of all kinds in cities eventually give up because there simply are not enough customers who can pay. Also, those who can provide at home health care eventually save the system money, in that the mere presence of such individuals can be enough to lessen the numbers of times people with chronic illness wind up in the hospital.

Again, government is already strapped with more debt than it can deal with. But just the same, government needs to help people to help themselves at local levels by removing the legal barriers that would allow them to do so.

I am generally ill-disposed to the creation of any new entitlement programs for Seniors at this point.

In the first place, poverty among seniors is simply not the national problem it was 50 years ago. Seniors were once the most-poor segment of the country. They are now the least-poor: http://uspolitics.about.com/od/economy/ig/Consumer-Income–Insurance/Poverty-by-Age-Group-1959-2006.htm

Which is to say, Social Security and Medicare have worked. They are very successful programs. A measure of their success is that they have dramatically improved the lot of seniors relative to the rest of the population.

In the second place, the result of all this attention and treasure being poured on the seniors of this country has been to make them reflexively oppose government assistance for anyone else beside them. Look at the health care debate. Who opposed the Affordable Care Act more reliably than any other age group? Why, seniors–the ones who already get government-provided health care.

So, frankly, screw them. Target aid to the poor, of whatever age cohort. If I get one more email from my 82-year-old grandmother about this terrible government takeover of our health care system, I swear I’m going to break something.