On Tuesday, May 12, the trustees who oversee Social Security and Medicare will issue their annual report. I don't know what will be in the report. But I do know what the response will be. Conservatives, libertarians and center-right Democrats will take whatever the report says as evidence that there is an "entitlement crisis," which should require us not only to address spiraling healthcare costs (a genuine issue, affecting the private sector as well as Medicare and Medicaid) but also… more
While 2008 will go down as a year of hope and change in
American politics, the collapse of Wall Street and bursting of the housing
bubble will probably mean that fear and anger take center stage in the 2010
elections. If so, the most coveted swing voters may soon be the Busted Boomers
- individuals 50 and older who placed supreme faith in the financial markets
and now find their long-held dreams of a comfortable retirement eviscerated.
It has become an axiom of American politics that government
will always and everywhere screw up if it gets hands-on control of a private
industry. In reporting President Obama's big plans for General Motors and
Chrysler on Tuesday, even the nominally liberal and learned New York Times bought into the notion,
observing that, "In the past, the United States government had briefly
nationalized steel makers and tried to run the railroads, with little success."
The massive corporate bailouts that Washington is undertaking as a result of the economic crisis have left most of us feeling deeply nervous. It’s not just the price tag, measured in incomprehensible trillions. It’s also the fear that the problems of the financial and auto industries may be so deep and so tangled that no one can fix them--and certainly not a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington.
In a recent interview on "60 Minutes," President Obama laughingly lamented that, "The only thing less popular than putting money into banks is putting money into the auto industry."
Explaining the dissonance between his mood and the grim reality of the situation, he cited the need for "a little gallows humor to get you through the day."
