If Gary Loveman ran America … plus the usual Trump mockery

That’s essentially the ‘what if’ scenario taken on by Las Vegas Sun columnist J. Patrick Coolican (virtually the only person left at the Sun who’s worth reading). He’s weighed the pros and cons of the Loveman Gang, er, Business Roundtable agenda for Medicare and Social Security. He finds a fair amount of merit in its nostrums, mostly with regard to tweaks in Social Security. “Some of the ideas, however, are terrible,” Coolican writes. Raising the Medicare-eligibility age, he argues, would backfire upon the rest of us in costly fashion: “Once we dump these people onto the private market, they’ll either work longer to keep their employer-based insurance, which will drive up premiums for that employer because the older worker is higher risk, or they’ll seek refuge in Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor and disabled, or one of the new government insurance exchanges, increasing the cost of those two programs. Meanwhile, Medicare’s own risk pool would skew older and therefore riskier, which means Medicare beneficiaries would have to pay higher premiums.”

What irks Coolican the most, though, is the Loveman Gang’s desire to ratchet up the Social Security-eligibility age to 70. This he dubs the “Work Grandpappy into the Grave Proposal,” a policy currently being test-marketed in Japan. (D0 you foresee Caesars Entertainment deploying 69-year-old cocktail servers onto its casino floors? I don’t.) Given where the entitlement cuts would fall the heaviest, Coolican concludes that the Business Roundtable’s plan was crafted mainly for the benefit of people like — surprise! — Gary Loveman. Considering the amount of economic damage wrought by Loveman’s Russian Roulette business strategies at Caesars, it’s not exactly “george” of him to want to claw back the benefits coming to Americans who — thanks to bunglers like him — need them the most. It’s a ‘rescue plan’ devised with all the detachment you’d expect from someone who’s flown from Las Vegas to Boston and back every weekend at shareholder expense. If you’re wondering where your Caesars IPO money went, just look overhead for the vapor trail of the corporate jet.

Which reminds me … considering that Loveman has admitted to living in fear — and probably not without reason — of physical retaliation from his workforce, is opening a Caesars-branded casino outside Boston such a hot idea? Its prospective workers would be in driving distance of Loveman’s Wellesley crib. Maybe it’s time to move, Gary. I hear Hawaii is nice this time of year and Boyd Gaming could arrange flights to Vegas … to say nothing of hotel accommodations.

If there’s one redeeming aspect of Donald Trump, it’s that he’s forever good for amusement value. Unlike Loveman, he always leaves us laughing.