Amid growing consumer unease at the mounting U.S. deficit, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas told a group of Chattanooga college students on Monday that the best way to fix the country’s debt problem is to reform skyrocketing entitlement spending.
Lucas himself receives $2,000 per month from Social Security, he said, even though he has a pension from his days as a a university professor and doesn’t need the money.
“I don’t need a safety net,” he said. “You need it for people who get injured or who are sick.”
But fixing the problem will require many students to vote against their own interest for the good of future generations, he said.
Most Americans agree that taxpayers should fund a basic welfare safety net, but expenses have ballooned because few systems exist to stop people from taking advantage of systems like disability insurance, he told students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.