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

Fairness watch: How America Enriches the Old

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.”

Ed desk: The Best College Fix Is Passion

“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.”

Energy beat: Mine, Baby, Mine!

“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, graphite, nickel, cobalt, rare earth elements and uranium. Washington hasn’t yet moved with the necessary “urgency to develop the mineral supply chains” new technologies require. “Today, developing a new mining project can take well over a decade,” a big reason why “China dominates much of the world’s processing and refining of critical minerals” — ”a national security vulnerability.” Time to admit that our “clean energy future does not begin with a battery, a solar panel, or a wind turbine. It begins beneath the ground.” 

Midterms beat: ‘Double Haters’ Are Key

A new Fox poll on the Michigan Senate race highlights “a phenomenon that Democrats worry might be repeated elsewhere: that the ongoing conflict between the party’s moderate and progressive wings will diminish otherwise loyal Democrats’ desire to support party nominees in November,” observes the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. The poll found “Republican Mike Rogers leading Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialists of America-adjacent Democrat, 51%-47%.” Dems are hoping Michiganders’ “deep disapproval of President Trump” will rally them to El-Sayed. But they also fear voters may find El-Sayed’s positions “too extreme.” Indeed, “among those with an unfavorable opinion of Trump, 35% said they had such concerns about El-Sayed.” These “double haters” may well “determine who controls the Senate” next year. 

CentComm chief: Thank you, Military Families

“The true foundation of American sea power isn’t measured in steel, nuclear reactors, high-tech aviation or surface platforms,” notes Adm. Brad Cooper in The Wall Street Journal after his Saturday visit aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln: “It is measured in human endurance, character and the strength of the American military family.” Yes, the strike group “engaged in arguably the most intense combat at sea the Navy has seen since World War II,” but troops chatting with Cooper “spoke not of headlines or high-level strategic maneuvers, but of missed birthdays, first steps captured on video calls, high-school graduations and the quiet sacrifices unfolding thousands of miles away back home.” So, “to their loved ones who continue to wait, pray, and hold down the home front: Thank you. Your strength makes their service possible, and your wait is coming to an end.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board