The Washington Post's Megan McArdle has a very good column out on one of the sleeping giant problems in American life and policy that nobody wants to talk about because it seems so daunting: long-term care.

The column opens with a heart-pinching sentence: "I hope you will understand when I say that I am grateful my father died of pneumonia just before we had to give him the crushing news that he couldn’t go home."

McArdle goes on from the story of her father needing day-long assistance to a broader discussion of the gigantic costs of caring for the very old and the infirm. She goes through the options, and none of them are good.

"A lot of people have a vague notion that we could save money and improve the lives of many seniors if we could just care for them at home, rather than sticking them in an expensive nursing home bed," she writes, but goes on to say that the reason people send seniors to nursing homes is because they need the kind of high-touch care that cannot be provided on an ad-hoc basis at home. "A study showed that before admission, new nursing home residents had been getting an average of 27 hours a week of help, mostly informal care from friends or family. Admission to a nursing home is often a sign that 27 hours a week wasn’t enough; half of new admissions required assistance with three or more “activities of daily living” such as eating, dressing or using the bathroom. […] It requires many man-hours to see to those needs when it’s needed. Nursing homes use that labor more efficiently than home care."

The math is simply brutal.

Note that European welfare states, with their stagnant growth, obese public sectors, and even worse "demographic kebabs," are even worse placed when it comes to solving this problem.

If there is an argument for increasing birth rates, it's this, but even if we were to do that successfully it wouldn't help the current generation of elderly. It is also an argument for increasing immigration, particularly low-skill immigration. That can't be dismissed out of hand, but nor should we, simply out of political correctness, ignore the many scandals involving immigrant carers brutalizing elderly patients.

We wish we had a magic bullet.

There are only two recommendations we can think of right now: implement, now, a long-term care insurance system and automatically enroll everybody starting at the age of 40, on the model of 401(k)s and other tax-advantaged retirement schemes. And find some way to accelerate research into humanoid robots and other tech solutions (Japan is doing this). Maybe this could be part of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

Policy News You Need To Know

#LawAndOrder — Today is the first day of Daniel Penny's trial in New York. You may recall, Daniel Penny is the veteran Marine who restrained Jordan Neeley, a crazy homeless man who was threatening passengers, and put him in a lock, after which Neeley died. Multiple witnesses have said that Neeley was threatening and that Penny was attempting to restrain him until police arrived. The Free Press has more.

#EnergyPolicy — Apparently, there exists a Turkish company that converts cargo ships into floating power plants to lease the power to third world countries. The company claims they have 7 gigawatts of installed capacity, which is a very large number. This business model actually makes a lot of sense: given how dysfunctional many of these countries are, building power plants on-shore, and the infrastructure to go with it, is a very risky proposition. We bet that the company gets paid on time and on budget because it can, literally, sail the power plants away. Yet another reminder of the importance of good governance. Some countries get abundant cheap energy. Others are so broken that the only way anyone will sell them any is if they can sail away at the first sign of trouble.

#EnergyPolicy — Speaking of overseas lessons on energy policy, here's an interesting op-ed by Jean-Baptiste Vaujour, professor of green finance at EM Lyon, a highly-ranked French university. The gist is this: it seems that the incoming European Commission is moving to quietly defang its carbon-pricing initiatives. Why? For the obvious reason that raising the price of carbon entails raising the price of lots of things that people enjoy and consume daily, like energy, fuel, housing, and food (you know, frivolous things), and that is really unpopular, and even the highly undemocratic EU Commission must, sometimes, eventually, face political reality. If even the EU's highly bureaucratic and unaccountable administrative state can't gin up the ability to price carbon, why believe that the US government ever could?

#EnergyPolicy — Speaking of speaking of, China and India are burning record amounts of coal, reports Bloomberg's Javier Blas. In short: they are growing less carbon-intensive sources of energy, but their energy demand is growing even faster, so they are still burning more and more coal. Given the amounts of carbon that these countries are spewing, and will continue to spew, why should the US destroy its own economy to reduce its carbon emissions, which are already very low per unit of production?

#LGBT — The father of a top trans athlete and trans activist has been convicted of distributing child rape images, the essential outlet Reduxx reports. The details are even more chilling: this man had already pleaded guilty to the kiddy porn charges when he became involved with LGBT and other organizations like the ACLU. These organizations, at best, are recklessly negligent when it comes to their pedophile problem. The author Hannah Barnes has reported that children referred to the infamous Tavistock "gender clinic" were ten times more likely to have a parent who was a registered sex offender.

#TaxPolicy — Speaker Johnson has spoken out in favor of extending the Trump tax cuts next year, and ATR is here for it.

#VotingRights — Michigan's voter rolls list 8.4 million registered voters, nearly 500,000 more than the eligible voting population, reports Bridge MI.

#Chyna — Popular Chinese drone maker DJI is suing the Pentagon to overturn the DoD's designation of them as a "military company." The company pleads that it sells only "consumer and commercial" and not military drones. Be that as it may, drone technology is dual use, and we've seen from Syria to Ukraine that consumer drones are indeed military technology, whatever the manufacturer's stated or real intent.

#AI — AI is now selecting the next generation.

#AI — Speaking of AI, apparently congressional leaders are negotiating a potential lame-duck AI regulation bill. Stay tuned. Watch this space.