Brent D. Gardner, CLU, ChFC

The House of Representatives has just passed a statute it represents as “repealing and replacing Obamacare.” This legislation, now awaiting what promises to be major challenges in gaining the Senate’s approval, does amend certain aspects of the Obamacare setup, but all in all the changes are less than earth-shaking, and the previous system will continue in important regards even if the House version should gain approval in the Senate.

I have an interesting meeting next week. A young woman in my community is working very hard on a set of policy suggestions for environmental measures, and she wants a libertarian perspective on the ideas she has drawn up. So we’re going to get together over coffee and talk about her plan and about what I think libertarians might think of it.

But I don’t want to write about her plan today.

I want to write about her invitation to talk about it.

As someone who works around a lot of economists in Washington, DC, I am privy to a lot of big talk about the problem of retirement policy. The overwhelming consensus among the learned is that Americans, as a group, aren’t saving enough money for retirement, and that if we can gather sufficiently clever people in a room, we can figure out a way to coerce, trick, or otherwise induce workers to be more responsible with their incomes.