Sharing the pain

by Russ Roberts on August 23, 2011

in Uncategorized

A number of people objected to my mentioning in this post the need to “share the pain” to get the economy on the right track. I wrote:

Our biggest challenge as a nation is our political system. We have overpromised and a democracy that ignores its Constitution isn’t very adept at taking away goodies from the masses. I am very worried about how that is going to turn out. We need to share the pain very widely and that too is not the strong suit of democracy.

What I meant is that the Ponzi scheme called Social Security and the demographics of Social Security and medicare are going to require a lot of people to get a lot less than they are expecting. That’s what I meant by sharing the pain. My point about democracy is that politicians hate dashing expectations. See Greece, riots in the streets of.

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