In attempts to 1) be responsive to Beyond Labels participants who prefer to know each week’s topic so they can come prepared and 2) motivate Court Haight to join us tomorrow, we chose “Russia” as the topic of the week.
Sorry about the short notice! And see you tomorrow.
For next week, we plan to turn our attention to Europe to consider the questions raised in the following New York Times article: The Questions That Could Reshape a Worried Europe in 2017.
Although there are lots of questions, we felt that it might be best to come prepared to discuss all of them–based on the premise that some might not be fruitful enough for two hours’ discussion and we might thereby suffer from more “topic drift.”
See you next week!
During last week’s session, we spent a bit of time on the above topic, but agreed that we weren’t in a position to discuss this complex topic “off the cuff,” without the benefit of some background reading.
I offered to provide some evidence of why I’m concerned about the fiscal status of the various social programs, and backup to my statement that, without changing the programs I am concerned that they are not sustainable—in the sense that young workers contributing today cannot reasonably expect to receive benefits comparable to what today’s eligible recipients get.
Here is some reading for the holidays (remember, the Library is closed for the next two Mondays–and we have another topic already selected for our January 9, 2017 meeting). Continue reading “Fiscal Status of US Social Programs—The Long Version”