There are 5 million fewer people employed today than before the Covid epidemic struck and 7.7 million of those out of work are officially counted as unemployed. What’s going wrong? Federal policies are making it increasingly attractive not to work.
The Social Security Trustees have released their annual report on the system’s finances. The news is awful. Social Security’s unfunded liability is an enormous $59.8 trillion. That’s over 2.5 times the size of the U.S. economy. Even more disturbing is the change since last year’s report. The system’s unfunded liability grew by $6.8 trillion. In other words, while Congress has been arguing over whether we can afford $3.5T in new spending, the debt we are leaving to our children grew by almost twice that amount without Congress lifting a finger.
But unlike the change in official debt, Social Security’s deficits are carefully kept off the books — for political, not economic reasons. Consequently, not a single media outlet we know of has reported these numbers
Review of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe, by Josh Mitchell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021) 261 pp.
Devon Herrick is a health economist who concentrates on issues such as consumer-driven health care, Internet-based medicine, telemedicine, medical tourism, emerging trends in retail medicine, and pharmaceutical economics.
Greg Scandlen is the founder of Consumers for Health Care Choices, a non-partisan, non-profit membership organization aimed at empowering consumers in the health care system.
Dr Thomas R. Saving, PhD is the Director of the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University. A University Distinguished Professor of Economics at Texas A&M, he also holds the Jeff Montgomery Professorship in Economics.
Robert Sade, M.D. – Professor of Surgery (Cardiothoracic) – Medical University of South Carolina.
Andrew J. Rettenmaier, PhD is a Research Associate at the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University.
Richard W. Rahn, PhD is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and the Chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth and serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.
Philip K. Porter, Ph.D. is a professor of economics at the University of South Florida and Director of the school’s Center for Economic Policy Analysis.