Employ­ment hasn’t been recov­er­ing at a high enough rate sat­isfy any­one. Return to full employ­ment will likely take more than a few years. Many have been com­plain­ing about this, so here are a few rad­i­cal ideas to cre­ate jobs. I don’t think there’s any ques­tion they’d work for that pur­pose. But I can antic­i­pate a lot of opposition.

  1. Require that busi­nesses shorten their aver­age work week by a min­i­mum of five hours, set­ting the Amer­i­can “stan­dard” work week to 35 hours. Pro­vide tax incen­tives for going beyond that, by as much as an addi­tional five hours, low­er­ing the work week to 30 hours.
  2. Remove the age require­ment for Medicare, to allow all Amer­i­cans to get on a single-​​payer health care sys­tem, and allow employ­ers to drop all insur­ance coverage.
  3. Lower the retire­ment age for Social Secu­rity to 60. Encour­age Amer­i­cans to retire earlier.

It may not be obvi­ous how these mea­sures could cre­ate jobs. They could lead to full employ­ment, vir­tu­ally overnight, give a jolt to the econ­omy such as Amer­ica has never seen, make us all health­ier, and give us a lot more free time. Let me explain. (more…)