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There's an interesting new public policy chat room on the Net. It's newtalk.org, which features different public policy experts on various topics. Yours truly was asked to participate on the most recent forum: Can we afford our entitlement promises?

My views, and those of the many other more distinguished participants, are displayed on the site. Needless to say, resolution of the impending entitlements-driven fiscal problem is key to avoiding a major future economic/financial crisis (much worse than the one we are currently experiencing), and to securing a sustainable growth path.

A lot of hand-wring over the notion of Americans "losing their homes" may be hype if this couple is typical:

As the foreclosure proceeds, the Mitchells have rented a house in Longmont, west of Platteville toward Boulder, Colo., that is nicer than the one they had owned. It's also less than five miles from Brian’s job as a project manager. Although the rent is more than their former mortgage payment, Brian, 43, said that, with gas savings, they are still coming out ahead. The move into town is allowing the couple to downsize to just one car.

“It was a tough decision for us to decide to let the house go into foreclosure, but I’ll tell you what, once we made it … it was very liberating, actually,” he said.

This article fits in with something Bob and I discussed: higher gas prices will reshape American lifestyles, and probably for the better in many ways. The people getting hurt aren't the neo-homeless, because the larger lesson of the housing bubble is that the ownership/renting ratio became unbalanced. But there are plenty of families that in some sense "should" be homeowners, who played by the rules, got good fixed-rate mortgages, but are going to suffer for the choice of buying in the exurbs. Those home prices are probably heading south permanently, and there is nothing fair about it.

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Loyal reader Michael Martin commented on a previous post that gas prices are likely to have another effect: entertainment hubs like Vegas are likely to see a drop in cross-country visitors. But will this mean lower spending on entertainment goods? Or will we just see shifting to local and electronic forms? This is an an interesting question, actually: what are good counter-cyclical entertainment sectors? Maybe the Olympic broadcasting deal is sweeter today than when it was negotiated.