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blue bits. red rocks.
Saturday 31 October 2009

And when you’re focused on achieving a certain goal, you can eliminate poverty. You can deal with the environmental questions. You can, in fact, do this if you can sustain a course of policy for, let’s say, a 30 or 40-year period. That’s—and then you may have strong institutions which can carry you even further. Social Security, for example, is a nice example. It keeps the elderly population of the country largely out of poverty. If I had one thing I could add to the health care debate, I would lower the age of eligibility of Medicare, say, to 55. And the reason for that is that it would help workers who are only hanging onto their jobs because they don’t want to lose their medical benefits, to move out of the labor force. And there are a fair number of those, and it’s a fairly heavy burden on the business sector. So what you want to do, you want to create jobs. But you’ve got to recognize. We’ve lost 7 million jobs. Many of those are older workers, and the jobs that you create, you want to give the first crack at those jobs to people who have started their careers. You want to get them into the work force. James Galbraith

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