Richard M. Ebeling: The entitlement state and America’s fiscal crisis

  The Republican and Democrat Party Conventions are now behind us, but through all the cheers and jeers, hoopla and poopla, warnings of a dark and dangerous future or promises of a bright and beautiful shape-of-things-to-come, one of the most serious shadows hanging over America was hardly mentioned at all: the unsustainability of the “entitlement” programs of the welfare state.

  In fact, Clinton and the Democrats have proposed to both maintain and expand the redistributive state, and Trump has expressed his intention of not challenging Social Security or Medicare.

Ianta Summers: Working to stay poor

  I have a friend who works at Foot Locker—the successful international retail chain of more than 3,300 stores—who is struggling to make ends meet.

  He’s an assistant manager at a store in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He told me he earns $7.55 an hour for a 40-hour work week. In addition, he said he gets a twp percent commission on sales, discounts on in-store purchases, stock options, and health care. My friend does well, selling dozens of pairs of sneakers every pay period that cost as much as $250 each. But even if those benefits seem generous, when his check reaches his pocket, he doesn’t have enough money to support himself—or a family.

Scott Lilly: The choice Congress won’t face up to

  Back in college, I had a textbook entitled Decision by Debate. The underlying premise of the book was that if you had a good debate, you were likely to end up with a good decision. It strikes me that the inverse of this lesson – that if you have a bad debate, you’ll end up with a bad decision – may explain much of the problem this country is having with budget policy.

  Much of what is commonly being said about the federal budget – including the causes of the mismatch of  revenues and expenditures and the options we have for resolving that imbalance – is either mischaracterization or flatly wrong. When you slice through all the heated rhetoric, the budgetary choices we face may be painful, but they are actually much simpler to make than the debate would suggest.