Government Debt and Structural Social Change (A Rant)

The debt showdown in Washington is supremely frustrating as it illustrates the complete inability of our current political system to deal with the structural changes that we are facing.  At present course and speed things will get a lot worse before we can hope for them to get better.  Trying to fix the budget without fixing the underlying problems in the economy and society is the proverbial attempt to prevent the sinking of the Titanic by rearranging the deck chairs.  

Here are several areas in which we need profound changes to get back on track:

• We need to stop fighting multiple wars and cut military spending.  Instead of weapons systems we need to invest in domestic mass/public transit infrastructure.  Instead of fighting a war on drugs and incarcerating a large portion of the population we need to legalize and invest in treatment.
• We have to come to grips with living longer. That means raising pension ages and switching to defined contribution plans for everyone including government employees at all levels.  Because people will not be able to rely on pensions we need to fix health insurance (see next point) and provide a last resort social security system.
• At the same time we have to re-learn to accept death (at least for now).  Health care spending can only be reined in if we don’t waste ridiculous amounts of money on end-of-life care.  Hospice care dramatically cheaper and vastly more dignified.  As an aside, I personally believe that we will eventually conquer death, but that time has not yet come.
• We need to stop kidding ourselves about jobs.  We will never again have the levels of employment of the past in an industrial setting.  Automation and a global job market make that impossible.  Instead of high stakes testing and pushing students towards increasingly meaningless college degrees we need to focus on acquiring real skills as are required for making, crafting, small scale farming and yes engineering.  

Sadly, none of our politicians on either side speak with clarity of understanding or purpose on these pressing issues.  I don’t know whether it is because they don’t actually understand or because they believe that the public doesn’t want to hear things that will hurt.  And a lot of this is going to hurt like hell as we fix it.  But if we don’t fix it we will be hurting slowly and for a very long time instead.