"We Don�t Need Fewer Entitlements For The American Middle Class. We Need More."
From Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard, former Treasury Secretary and former economic advisor to President Obama, writing for the Washington Post : Few economic virtues are more universally applauded than thrift. Going back at least to Ben Franklin, Americans have equated greater thriftiness with greater worthiness. Progressives decry the limited saving and wealth accumulation of middle-income families ... Conservatives applaud thrift as an aspect of self-reliance and propose ideas such as health-savings accounts to help families prepare for emergencies. Moderates believe universal social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which they label as entitlements, should be modest or even curtailed out of fiscal prudence. In the current economic context of extremely low interest rates, however, these views are more wrong than right. The federal government should provide more, not less, social insurance. If it did, the result ...