Fast Takes: How America enriches the old, the best college fix is passion and other commentary

The US entitlements system offers “support” to “senior citizens when they are most vulnerable,” notes Chris Pope at City Journal, but is “overdoing it” by redistributing “far more from young to old than from rich to poor.” Working-age Americans “are three times more likely than seniors” to face severe financial stress.Seniors even spend “less out of pocket on health care” than the young though they’re “admitted to hospitals roughly five times more often.” Social Security “redistributes substantially to seniors but in complex and contradictory ways,” frequently to the “benefit of affluent households.” With “younger Americans” being “much more exposed to income shocks,” the feds should help “younger adults by reducing their tax burden” by letting young workers borrow “from their own recent prior payroll tax contributions.”“Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention,” but “we’re really talking about passion” — or its lack, great-books-program professor Matt Dinan explains at The New York Times.

Teaching a class on “The Brothers Karamazov” was a revelation that we “need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab.We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.” “For Dostoyevsky, worldly common sense can make us unwitting fools”; similarly, “remaining a passionate student yourself may well feel ridiculous, nowadays, but it is ultimately nothing more than realism about what education requires.”“Before America can build the infrastructure needed to power” its future, argues Susan Atkinson at The Hill, “we must first secure the critical minerals that make those technologies possible.” “There is no clean energy transition without mining” for copper, lithium, ...