On November 4, 2014, ARI fellow Don Watkins gave his talk “End the Debt Draft: How the Welfare State Is Exploiting Millennials” to the Capitalism and Global Supply Chains class at Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, you’ll hear my recent talk “End the Debt Draft: How the Welfare State Is Exploiting Millennials.” I also explain why we’ve missed a few episodes and when we’ll return to our regular schedule.
If nothing is done, the bill for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will bankrupt Millennials and their children. But support for these programs is strong among the elderly and the young alike. In this talk delivered as part of ARI’s Road to a Free Society tour, best-selling author Don Watkins argues that this support is based on a handful of myths, and that if Americans knew the truth about the welfare state, they would not want to save it — but abolish it.
It's really a shame that we let Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapse. We could have kept it going for a long time had we forced people to pour more money into it.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Romina Boccia, the Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, on Social Security and how it affects Millennials.
Michael Tanner: “[M]ore than one out of every three Americans live in households that are now on welfare. Looked at another way, America’s welfare state now has nearly three times the population of the largest actual state. . . . And none of these numbers include the middle-class social-welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security. Counting these programs, more than 153 million Americans, nearly half the population (49.5 percent), are living in households now dependent on government for a significant portion of their income.”
Steve Simpson interviews ARI fellow Don Watkins about his new book, RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance, and about the myths surrounding Social Security.
You may have heard about “inversions,” which have become a hot topic of debate in the wake of Burger King’s acquisition of Tim Hortons. Megan McArdle provides some much-needed context for that debate (although my jaw dropped when I got to her line about “what you owe the government that raised you”). Cato Institute scholar and Debt Dialogues guest Dan Mitchell has more.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Cato senior fellow Jagadeesh Gokhale on America’s entitlement-fueled debt problem.
