Steve Soto (The Left Coaster) Interview with Paul Krugman (Part III)

[Dudley_DUright]

There were two questions that people had asked me to ask you about, which I think relate to the possibilities for the future if our country was in a more normal state. Is there a way to create a sustainable system for social security and Medicare, perhaps providing universal healthcare that our country could actually support for the long term?

Well, the important thing to know is that there are two issues here that are really quite separate. One of them is social security which is primarily a retirement program and also a disability program which people overlook. That is not a serious problem.

If you actually do the arithmetic, particularly if you use economic assumptions that are comparable to those used in other forecasts, (the social security administration uses figures that lowball the growth), that program really has some pretty minor problems. It’s good for another forty years without any problems, and with modest changes you would push that out so far in the future that I don’t think it isn’t worth even thinking about. For all we know, robots will be doing all the work by the time it really becomes an issue.

So, social security is not a big problem. In whole, the demographics issue is important, but not crushing. If the only thing that was going to be happening to the United States was that we were going to get older, then what you’d be seeing is that over the next 40 years or so, federal spending would have to rise by about 15%. And given that we don’t have particularly high taxes compared to our own past and to other countries, this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

The other issue is healthcare. It’s not just Medicare, in fact, it’s a broad problem. The reason it’s thought of as a Medicare problem is because we do have national healthcare insurance for seniors. We don’t have it for everyone else, but we probably should. So we have problem that manifests itself in different ways for everybody else. We have a problem in which the costs of Medicare are rising and in which health insurance is becoming harder and harder for working people to get.

more...

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/002485.html#more

Link to thread on part II

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x67402

Link to thread on part I

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x67044

[Cassandra]

1. There's a Krugman lecture in October...

in NYC
http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?catalog=92y%5FCatalog&category=The+Economy+Today+with+Tom+Herman&productid=T%2DLC5CM02