3/8/2023

My dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            What are you up to today? Your public schedule is empty, so I assume you are working behind closed doors. Finalizing your budget proposal, perhaps?

            Budgets can be mind boggling. Revenue & expenditures often do not co-occur so you have to decide whether to get temporary credit to spend today what you expect to receive in a few weeks. Of course, you have to pay some interest to account for the risk involved. I’m afraid this fundamental idea is poorly understood by most Americans.

            Poor financial literacy may bring us all down as most Americans also do not understand that Social Security is unsustainable in a country of baby-boomers. When you are 92, Social Security’s main trust fund will run out of $$ because we’ll have too many elderly folk getting benefits & not enough younger folk paying into the system.  By 2033, Social Security will cost more than everything else in the federal budget combined. We might have to follow France’s lead & try to raise the retirement age.

            You are the perfect person to start advocating for that. You are way past 65, working full time & thriving. The other remedy that you can suggest is maintaining our population of younger adults by opening our borders. We can continue to prosper if we can depend on the working folk to pay into the system. Plenty of able-bodied, ambitious individuals are pounding our doors to help us out.

            Of course, this plan requires some big picture, systems thinking. Americans aren’t great at that, but you could help teach us.

            As you work on your budget, please include more $$ to the UN to help with Burma & all the other places in the world where conflict is rife. Please invest in food not bombs.

            BYBS,