FINANCIAL SECURITY
47 million uninsured
HEALTH CARE AND RETIREMENT SCARE YOU? YOU'RE NOT ALONE
Ronald Reagan uttered another line in that 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter that has entered the history books: "There you go again," he chastised his opponent. What's less well remembered is what that was in response to. Carter had been making the case for national health insurance and said Reagan had once opposed Medicare. Reagan objected that Carter was misrepresenting his position — he had simply opposed a particular Medicare bill. But Carter was absolutely right that Reagan wasn't for universal health care — or for any other government effort to socialize risk.
In the seminal PBS series Free to Choose, which aired in 1980 and may have helped set the mood for Reagan's victory, economist Milton Friedman argued that economic freedom was just as important as all those freedoms written into the Bill of Rights. This went on to become perhaps the most consistent theme of the Reagan economic era: giving Americans the freedom to succeed or fail on their own economically was a good thing. And it is probably a good thing. But not an unmitigated good. Economic security matters to Americans too. And finding ways to offer more of it may be the basis of the next big economic-policy revolution.
Economic changes over the past three decades — many the result of government decisions — have "left working families up and down much of the income spectrum living with fewer economic protections, bearing more economic risk, chancing steeper financial falls," writes Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Gosselin in his new book High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families. This Great Risk Shift from governments and corporations to individuals, as Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker labeled it in the title of another book on the subject, has become one of the defining economic realities of our age. Some aspects of it are still in dispute: economists can't seem to agree on whether jobs really have become less secure than they were. But others are undeniable. "No one argues that Americans aren't shouldering more of the risk on health care and retirement than they used to be," says Hacker.
That you're-on-your-own ethos is already beginning to change — a little. In 2006 Congress passed a law that has brought positive changes to the 401(k) savings plans that for many Americans have replaced pensions. But the majority of private-sector workers in the country aren't offered a 401(k) or a pension, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. All three candidates have talked of creating a new system of portable retirement accounts for those who don't get one through employers, with Obama's plan the most ambitious.
In August 1970, Gabriel Geismar leaves home for college, not a moment too soon for this disaffected son of a New Orleans rabbi. A puckish twin brother and sister, Marghie and Danny Hundert, worldly seniors, take him under their wing. When he meets their parents, Hungarian émigrés exuding Old World gravitas and New World intellectual cachet (Gregor Hundert is a renowned physicist, onetime colleague of the godlike Oppenheimer at Los Alamos), Gabriel is convinced that this is the family he was intended for. As charmed by the attentive Southern boy as he is by them, the elder Hunderts enfold Gabriel, who becomes more their natural heir as the years go by than the children nature gave them.
Marghie loves Gabriel, but to no avail, since Gabriel loves Danny, while Danny, slipping into psychological meltdown, is devoted to the tragicomic destiny he has created for himself as a martyr to the cause of protesting the war in Vietnam. War and peace, the fracturing of generations, the sexual revolution and its casualties - with irony and pathos this beautifully written novel treats the defining themes of an era, filtered through the restless, eccentric intelligence of a striking cast of characters.
Even as a teenager, mathematics prodigy Gabriel Geismar finds ways to cope with life; he distracts himself from what is base (such as seeking sex in a men’s bathhouse) by thinking of numbers, and he finds a new family after a hateful standoff with his rabbi father. As a 16-year-old freshman at Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel is approached by fraternal twins Danny and Marghie Hundert; both fall in love with him, and he reciprocates these feelings physically with Danny. An unexpected bonus is the twins’ father, the renowned physicist Dr. Gregor Hundert, who, along with his wife, envelopes Gabriel in familial love, then guides his budding career. Tragedy ensues, as the Vietnam War causes Danny to follow his principles to extremes, while his father suffers dementia. Losses aside, Gabriel—with a doctorate and associate professorship in astrophysics—finds solace in his concept of the universe, from multiple galaxies to the smallest insect. A beautifully written and keenly intelligent novel, set in a context of cosmology, this is in turn humorous, almost unbearably moving, and comforting, as it points the way to Gabriel’s “perfect freedom.” — Michele Leber
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