Hey, let's stimulate the economy by spending more on Medicare

It’s not the WPA, but all this health-care spending creates the kind of “middle-skilled” jobs we have to push now in lieu of assembly lines. Many high-school grads — or those we may euphemistically say have “credentials short of an associate’s degree” — earn more than those with college diplomas. Thanks to entitlements being out of control, there is still at least one way into the middle class.

All this also has a Keynesian-type effect to make up for the way state and local governments keep cutting back spending. This was the first recession where we responded by cutting public-sector jobs. Government employment has fallen to its lowest level since 1968, Bloomberg’s BGOV Barometer shows. The cutbacks forced by balanced-budget clauses in many state constitutions only hold back a real recovery…

Health care is our King Coal. If we were Russia, it would be our Gazprom. If the U.S. is in a “controlled” depression, Medicare spending is doing the controlling, keeping the bottom from falling out of the economy. McDonald’s Corp., Wendy’s Co., Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), General Electric Co., even Caterpillar Inc. in a way depend on the consumer spending from millions of Americans who only have jobs because entitlements are out of control.

Medicare may even make the U.S. more globally competitive.