This is going to be very difficult to pull off without a massive cultural change. The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without social welfare. I just can't see Americans taking care of their retired parents, nor can I see the parents being OK with depending on their children.
> I'm also in favor of greatly expanded parental choice in education so that families with children have the power to shop to help children gain good primary and secondary educations that launch the children into adulthood with a reasonable chance of employment.
This is also untenable in most of America due to the lack of good public transportation and the low population density. In fact, such a system already exists (to a degree) in NYC, the one place where population density and public transportation infrastructure is quite similar to Asia. But in most American cities, the good schools are in the suburbs, which are usually in separate counties from the city.
And the minute that you try to make the schools children attend unrelated to where they live, the wealthy parents will simply pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools instead (we saw this before with forced busing). And without the well-off students as their peers in the public schools, the poorer students won't improve, no matter how much money you throw at the situation.
In fact, I saw this problem in the (good) public suburban school system I was in. Despite it having a desegregation program that brought poor black students from the city (by way of a 45-minutes-each-way bus ride) to my school, I almost never interacted with them in the classroom because of separate tiers of education for gifted students starting in the 7th grade.
And don't forget that once the wealthy have pulled their children out of the public schools, they'll vote for ballot initiatives and candidates that reduce funding for public schools. The poor, who care less about the quality of education their children are receiving, won't bother to fight back.
> the parade of horribles that some people claim will happen if parents gain more choice has NOT happened in Minnesota over the last quarter century
You're ignoring the fact that Minnesota has one of the whitest populations of any state in the country. I can assure you that an undercurrent of socioeconomically-associated racism still exists in large swathes of the US where there are significant black and Hispanic populations. While most people don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children from the ghetto. And for the most part, the kids follow their parents' lead. At my school, there were some children of African and Hispanic immigrants, whose parents were highly educated and had jobs in engineering, medicine and science and kept their children on the straight and narrow (usually much more so than the white parents did). They were treated exactly like any of the white children, and often used as examples of how racism had been "eradicated" from the school system. But in reality, people wanted nothing to do with the students from the ghetto.
This is the reason why charter schools have become so popular in Minnesota, but remain politically untenable in so many other parts of the country. And I don't know how it is for those students in your school district from the 41 other districts, but the poor students in the ghettos where I grew up don't even have 1 car in the family, let alone gas money for the long daily trip to a good school.
> I'm in favor of a big boost in the minimum age for all kinds retirement benefits (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as the only possible way to keep taxation for those programs from crippling the opportunities of my children.
I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.