So, it’s really easy to criticize… Anybody can sit here and write/complain about entitlements, child care, peoples attitude, climate change, the war In the Middle East, etc… so here are my humble solutions to the problem: As with many government entitlements, they start out with good intentions and devolve to the downside of Gladwell’s inverted U… I’m a product of the 60’s and, at the time was a great believer in LBJ’s Great Society… like many liberals we all thought “helping the poor” is a necessary idea…but the consequences have been. disasterous.. I remember working in “projects” when I was a freshman in college at St. Louis University in 1965, thinking that it was so wonderful that the government was building 15 and 20 story “projects” for people who really couldn’t afford them… 10 years later they were tearing them down because they deteriorated beyond repair… and we are now in our second, and the third generation of people who expect the government programs to take care of them… The idea, for instance of unemployment insurance for people while they are looking for a job seems reasonable to most people, especially those who are gainfully employed… it appears to be the empathetic thing to do… the key is while someone is looking for a job… it turns out, as Gladwell would site, that unemployment insurance prolongs unemployment… the number of unemployed people who find jobs within 90 days after their unemployment expires is staggering… unemployment insurance becomes a hindrance rather than a help.. so the first thing we should do is decrease the amount and the time people receive unemployment… you would be shocked at the number of people who tell me that they don’t want to go on an interview because they can make more money on unemployment than working the job I present to them… not good.  Instead of “unemployment” benefits the government should give tax credits to companies for hiring people who have been out of work for more than six months or a year… get rid of the word “benefit ” and describe unemployment as the “tax” it is and make it clear to people who receive “unemployment insurance” they are really receiving “other people’s money”…A novel idea would be to “assign” one working person to sponsor another individual who is receiving unemployment insurance and make it mandatory that the recipient of the unemployment insurance report to their “sponsor” every week when they receive unemployment as to what they are doing to get a job… to make it even more personal we could assign a “sponsor” for this who paying into the system about the same amount that the recipient is receiving… as though the employed person is personally “sponsoring” the unemployed one and is demanding accountability More next week………….