Have blogged on this before, but League of Serious Persons reminds me this morning our chronic jobs crisis could be ameliorated, at least in part, by lowering, not raising, the Social Security retirement age---to create more job openings for younger workers. And the best way to induce older workers to take early retirement is to offer them a Social Security package that will sustain them comfortably in the event they haven't managed to save up enough on their own. (And most older workers haven't.) Now $15,000 a year might---repeat, might---be sufficient to scrape by if you live in a trailer park in the rural South, but it's completely inadequate almost everywhere else, and that's why Social Security disbursements need to be sharply increased, not cut. How to fund this? Well, there are many ways, but a good place to start would be to stop rewarding rich people for the simple fact of being rich, and transfer all of that money to the people who aren't. Two hundred billion a year would go a long way!
---Baron V
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