It is very hard for the Democrats to forswear the cult of complexity. But they can’t become the majority party if they continue to make everything too complicated. For example, I actually like Kerry’s program on health. But I doubt anyone but the New York Times’ Paul Krugman can explain it.

Labor law reform? Trade? Education? And these in a country where the people the Democrats want to vote for them don’t even read a newspaper.

At times, John Edwards seems to get it. In his campaign for president, he put out one or two very big ideas, like one free year of college. Being a former trial lawyer, he knows in his gut he has to keep it simple.

And yet Democrats have a big, Reagan-like idea, their version of “Star Wars,” something simple that everyone will understand: a single-payer national health insurance program like Canada’s.

Democrats really have no choice. Aside from needing a simple idea like that to win the election, if they win they will face two big problems that could destroy a Kerry-Edwards administration. First, it seems that even in a boom, U.S. employers now cringe at adding jobs. (In June, the figures for new jobs dropped back again.) Second, boom or no boom, they cringe at coughing up to pay for health. So in the future, we will have fewer and fewer jobs, at least the kind that pay benefits — jobs with bells and whistles. And as for health coverage, more of us will be underinsured or totally uninsured.

It is instructive to look at which countries around the world have solved this problem and which have not. In a way, the so-called free-market United States has much in common with the social-market Germany. Normally, these two countries are seen as opposite social models, but both of late have had to struggle to add jobs. America and Germany have the same labor market mess, in which employers have to pay for health, which can amount to 18 to 20 percent of the payroll. It’s not just the huge absolute cost but the uncertainty as to what future costs will be — even a little uncertainty can paralyze a boss who wants to hire.

But look at Canada to the north. Or Great Britain, Germany’s rival. Neither has this problem: In Canada and Britain, it’s not the employer but the state that pays. So it’s not a big deal to add extra jobs. Or look at other countries that are close to the single-payer system, such as the Scandinavian nations and Australia. What might be called the “single-payer difference” is only going to grow larger. In years ahead, as new drugs appear, as we beg for our lives from the drug company gods, the cost of healthcare for one Fortune 500 company could dwarf what is spent for health in most of Africa. Put it this way: General Motors in the United States will tremble to add a job at the margin; General Motors in Canada will go blithely ahead.

Maybe the best single predictor of a country’s ability to add new jobs is how close it comes to single payer. In Norway, Sweden and Finland, despite huge tax levels, it seems to be relatively easy to add jobs. In Australia, which has a mix of single-payer and employer-paid healthcare, the record on jobs is mixed — it’s better than in the United States, France and Germany, but not as good as in Canada, Britain, Finland and Sweden.

The difference is not a left vs. right split. It has to do with whether the state pays or the boss pays. In Europe, some social democracies, such as France and the Netherlands, where the employer pays, struggle to add jobs. Other social democracies, like those in Scandinavia, do not. It is ironic that of all countries, America and Germany, despite being rival social models, would end up in the same labor market mess. It’s also ironic that Germany may be having trouble adding jobs not because it’s too socialist but because, in rejecting a single-payer system, it’s not socialist enough.

No doubt, at this point, some readers are spluttering: “But Germany’s unemployment is far worse than America’s.” Is it? Yes and no.

Since it’s more fun to be contrarian, I’ll focus on the “no.” (See the Wall Street Journal’s editorials for the “yes.”) No, it’s not worse, at least if you’re a college grad. The reason is that in Germany as in the United States, the employer has to pay for health insurance. Since in Germany employers have to pay for health for everybody, they might as well go upscale and do it for blue-chip human capital. The result is that in Germany, it’s not people like you and me who go jobless — it’s the people with no skills. Because U.S. employers don’t have to pay for every employee’s health insurance, they invest in freelancers, part-timers and people with low skill levels. In fact, if you’re a college grad, you’d be better off in Germany, at least in getting a true college-type job.

Here’s one eerie glimpse of America’s future: Since March 200l, the employment rate for college grads has dropped at the same rate as that for high school grads. And once unemployed, a college grad now has a much harder time finding a new job, much less a good one. He or she is not just less likely to be employed, but more likely to be among the long-term jobless. In other words, America may wake up one day to find that for college grads, there is actually some “structural” unemployment. Such a thing would be simply inconceivable in Europe.

What’s worse, I suspect the statistics understate the actual unemployment of college grads. With so many people in “sales” and “working from home,” it’s pretty hard to say who really has a job. Many people with college degrees can say, “I’m self-employed,” or “I’m a salesman.” For example, Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” delirious on his deathbed, would still have told the Labor Department, “Yes, I have a job.”

More important, a huge percentage of college grads in America have settled for “non-college” jobs — something many Europeans would find odd. About one out of five of these grads is doing the equivalent of selling ties at Macy’s, according to the last big Labor Department study in the 1990s. Although some economists think that percentage will drop, the scarier thing is what we in America define as a “college” job. Ready?

Claims adjuster … cop … I’d add salesman, or car salesman, but probably only a college grad could put up with listening to all those self-help tapes from Kinko’s.

In Germany no college grad would consider “cop” as being a college job, and none would end up selling ties at the equivalent of Macy’s. Not one in five anyway. And German grads sure don’t do much manual labor.

But over here? When I deal with the ironworkers or carpenters who come to see me as a labor lawyer, I now assume that some of them are college grads. A good friend of mine, a blue-collar worker in construction, has a J.D.

And they are the lucky ones. They could have “college” jobs as claims adjusters, and at least in this type of manual labor, they probably have health insurance. Under Bush, job growth, even for college grads, has predominantly been in industries that offer no health insurance. I have clients who have B.A.’s and are fathers but have no health insurance, or they have the kind with a deductible of $5,000 or more.

So why is it that college grads in Germany from time to time whine, “Oh, if only I were in New York or London, then I’d make some money.” If only I were out of here I’d be Donald Trump. Sure. The great thing about being in Germany is that, unlike in America, one can fantasize this way about being an Ubermensch, or free-market Superman. As Americans, you and I know how far-fetched this is. You and I know, at this point in our lives, that we will never be, and never could have been, at the top of Lazard Freres. But in Germany, many people like us go on thinking, “Oh, I could have been a contender!”

But is employer-paid health really holding us back? In the United States, the situation is a bit more complicated than in other countries. It’s best to think of the United States as a spectrum of health systems. At the highest level, in the top 10 percent, the incomes are so huge that healthcare costs a relative pittance. Those people might as well be living in Canada or Sweden. In the middle, i.e., where you and I are, it’s like Germany or France — the employer has to pay for health. But it’s in the middle where, like Germany, America struggles to add jobs.

In the lower middle, i.e., among the poor (to be blunt), America has a system that from an employer’s point of view is better than single payer — no payer. New hires may have no choice but going out on the street to die. Think of our 44 million uninsured and millions more underinsured. If U.S. employers had to pay for their health, how many parking valets and maids would still have jobs? If we had employer healthcare like that in Germany or France, our unemployment rate might be much higher than theirs. Imagine the murder rate in Chicago, New York or Detroit if we had universal, employer-paid health insurance. And worse, who would be left to ring us up at Wal-Mart?

It’s fine for Democrats like Kerry to rail about “outsourcing” jobs abroad. But what’s killing college grads in this country is outsourcing at home — into jobs that don’t pay healthcare and that college grads don’t want.

So what should Kerry do if he is elected? At first blush, what he proposes — picking up the uninsured by expanding Medicaid and providing relief to employers if their premiums rise too high — seems to make some sense. To employers, Kerry’s promise is: “I’ll insure you against the cost of health insurance.” And to my shock, though the idea seems far too expensive, I find myself agreeing with what he wants to do.

Still, without a single-payer system, the Democrats get into a deeper trap. The more they try to shore up the employer-payer system, the worse it is for jobs. On the other hand, if they create a single-payer system that picks up the cost of healthcare only for the working poor, then they reinforce investment in the lowest-skill jobs. Without a full single-payer system, the more outsourcing there will be — not just to overseas workers but to the working poor at home.

The Germans and the French, of course, have the same problem. And their barrier to creating a single-payer system is also the same: Too many people have a stake in the existing setup. In the United States, it is the whole conglomerate of health insurance interests, with their lobbying slush funds and TV ads. In Germany and France, it may be the simple fact that employers (and unions) like to staff up the bureaucracies of national “sickness funds.”

While businesses in all three countries have every reason to go to single payer, they consist of people who in their real lives like the way things are. For that reason, I disagree with those who think that one day, over the rainbow, businesses in America will opt for single payer because it’s so rational and is in their interest. Business people have outside lives as rich people, and rich people detest single payer. So even in Canada or the U.K., where single payer has been so good for business, I’d bet that if CEOs had a say, they’d vote to get rid of single payer; as rich people, they simply hate it.

So how do we get there? Well, here are three possibilities: 1) Against all odds, business will put in single payer. 2) Labor will come back, and labor will do it. 3) There will be a big depression, and thanks to an experiment in cloning, we will get FDR to come back and do it. But it’s unclear whether even FDR could do it now. In 1935, the great reformer Sen. Robert Wagner actually proposed national health insurance, and it almost got through Congress, with no one paying much attention.

But back then, the cost was not heart-stopping. Back then, in 1935, DNA decoders James Watson and Francis Crick were still kids, and there were no antibiotic drugs. Now, every time we see a story about a breakthrough in stem cell research, it means the cost of moving to single payer is only going up.

So what is to be done? Here’s my unsolicited advice to Kerry: First, the Democrats have no way out. If they really want our country to stop struggling to add jobs as health costs go up, then, somehow, they have to move to single payer. They have to remove that payroll add-on for each job of 18 to 20 percent, which could rise to 30 percent if medical breakthroughs keep coming.

The Democrats have to stop pretending there is some other fix. There isn’t. Even the German left has begun to realize it has to move to single payer. Although I love Kerry’s current plan, the most it could do is stop the cost for employers from reaching the skies. In the long run, we have to move the cost, all of it, onto the federal government.

Second, the Democrats have to creep up on this. Yes, I’d like to shoot Niagara and leap over to the Canadian system. Yes, single payer is not so outlandish, even in cost. Even now, the federal government is already three-fifths of the way to paying for the equivalent of single payer if you add up the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, all the other aid to hospitals, the National Institutes of Health and the subsidies to drug companies that sell cheap to those damn socialist countries but turn around and gouge us here. And why not add in the health component of the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs?

We can afford it, but we can’t get it. Why? The vested interests are too powerful. People out there rattle easily; they don’t understand it.

So Democrats should start with something very simple that does not attack the vested interests too directly and that the people who vote for Kerry will understand: Pay for the deductibles — the first $l,000 per year for every man, woman and child, insured or not.

Wouldn’t that be expensive? You bet. But so is Kerry’s current plan. Wouldn’t employers and insurers just raise the deductibles? There are ways to discourage this; for instance, one could institute penalties. But, in a way, I hope that this is what employers and insurers try to do. If they raised deductibles, it would clear out more territory for an even larger guarantee. The government would just raise the $1,000 to $1,500. In 10 years, it might be up to $2,000. In other words, if insurers kept raising the deductibles, they’d end up liquidating themselves.

And people would not be worse off. Indeed, what people need more than coverage for their big bills, which are devastating but largely uncollectible, is the freedom to see a doctor before they get too sick. The real problem is the little bills: not the $25,000 for a hospital stay but the $1,000 deductible that could have prevented it. For we live in a country in which half of families have practically nothing in savings — a few thousand dollars, often less. So Mom or Dad holds off on a visit to the doctor’s or a blood work-up until the situation becomes catastrophic.

Isn’t it time people really got something back for their taxes? FDR, if we ever do get him back, would tell us: We can’t get any big change past these dreadful Republicans unless everybody in the country can see it, understand it and think, Hey, I would benefit. Or unless we take a tip from some Germans, who are trying to figure out a similar way, step by step, to move over to single payer. They would call it “citizen insurance.” Democrats should do the same.

The hard truth is that we won’t cure our employers of their paralytic fear of hiring until we figure out a way to move to single payer.

Consider this nightmare: In 2005, a President Kerry goes to the Republican Congress and tries to get a tax hike. Meanwhile, the Fed is raising interest rates, with Americans deep in debt. And he wants to raise taxes. Could anything be worse? (Yes, housing prices could be falling, as well!)

Better for Kerry to hang on in Iraq, and go to Congress, not for a permanent but a temporary tax: a “surcharge,” a war tax. Call upon the country’s patriotism. Doesn’t the right wing pride itself on that? And if Congress gives him such a war tax, take it — and let the Europeans pay.

This may sound like a bait and switch. But who would object? The Europeans might, but should not. If our deficit goes down, the dollar may stop falling. Or at least not fall to $2-to-a-euro. Even some of the Republicans would be relieved. (After President Clinton raised taxes, with every Republican senator voting no, one was famously quoted, “Thank God it passed!”)

If there’s a President Kerry, let’s consider his big problems: cutting the deficit. Creating jobs. Fighting terror. It may just be that all of these are related.

Cutting the deficit.
Being a superpower is similar to being a Broadway producer: Rule No. 1 is to use other people’s money. So Europe, the Middle East and East Asia should be paying us, at least for Iraq. Just in Iraq, the bill due could be up to $200 billion, in the next five to 10 years. And that’s just reconstruction.

The point is: The allies should pay. As they paid for most of the Gulf War, with Bush I. Or Kosovo, with Clinton.

If only because Bush II fails to grasp this lesson that his father applied in the first Iraq war, he demonstrates he is unsuited to be president.

I have no doubt Kerry could get them to pay this much. But would they pay more? For example, the European Union might now kick in for the entire cost of our bases in Europe. It may be true that the Europeans are already paying their “fair share.” About 72 percent to our 28 percent. But life isn’t always “fair.” Let them pay it all.

But what about South Korea, Japan, India? They should be defraying our costs more. And if they think we’ll act more sensibly, and multilaterally, they may.

The only country that is doing enough is of course China, which, at some financial sacrifice, is buying the Bush bonds that no one else wants to buy.

Creating jobs.
If our allies (or ex-allies) are willing to pay more than for Iraq, Kerry could use the “surcharge,” or the temporary war tax, to create jobs. His cover with Congress? To fight the war on terror.

Here he has the Clinton model to follow: Whenever there was an earthquake, or a fire in California, Clinton would announce a relief program and then money on some public works program he thought desirable on other grounds. So the same rule should work with the war on terror.

Indeed, it seems to me Kerry is sensible to say, “Bush isn’t doing enough on terror,” precisely to give him cover to start creating jobs. Recently James K. Galbraith wrote a wonderful piece explaining that the real “American model” is using federal and state taxes and tax breaks to create private-sector jobs in health and education. It’s what he called “Soft Keynesianism.”

By “Soft Keynesianism,” we give tax money, credits, loan guarantees, to hospitals, universities and other “quasi-public” institutions. It’s in this “soft” sector, not in manufacturing, where America is now best at creating new jobs. If we have a jobless recovery, it’s partly because we’re cutting back, not paying out to the soft sector.

Or put another way, we are priming the wrong pump. At the federal level, we are creating a huge deficit, so we can go on making transfer payments to individuals. But in adding new jobs fast, these payments have a weak indirect effect. And while we have a war, we’ve got a lid on the size of the armed forces, so we get fewer jobs.

Indeed, as mandatory entitlements explode and Bush’s tax cuts bite, we’ve got no choice at the federal level but to cut away at jobs in homeland security and defense. And when the states now ask Bush for help, he says no. What he doesn’t grasp of course is that it’s state and local government, not the federal government, directly, that is on the front line of creating jobs.

The answer?

President Kerry should seek a war tax for a labor-intensive war on terror. Educate and subsidize the hiring of more nurses, of all kinds. We have a shocking national shortage. Spend for new hospitals, since there are shortages in urban areas. Spend more on teachers, to teach languages, language skills.

Forgive or cancel student loans, to keep more kids in college, so colleges in turn will go out and hire more.

None of this should be done at the federal level, where the Republican Congress can quibble over it: Just give it to the states, in the name of national security, with broad guidelines as to how to spend it.

Fighting terror.
Here the problem is to reconstitute our alliance, which is in shambles, thanks to Bush. Yes, it’s true, I’m a Democrat and inclined to think badly of him. But even I have difficulty grasping the scale of the damage to what used to be our alliance, to what should be our effort on terror.

First, he’s metastasized al-Qaida. Thanks to Bush, it’s now potentially everywhere. After 9/11, it would have been a great thing to track down bin Laden. Bring him to trial.

Decapitate al-Qaida. To most of us, including me, it still would be a great thing. But there’s no longer much hope it can end al-Qaida. Cutting off that head now won’t kill the body.

Why? Look at the polls. A recent Pew poll, surveying foreign opinion, comes as a shock. Suicide bombings in the U.S.? In Turkey, a NATO ally, 31 percent sympathize with the suicide bombers. With poll numbers like this, al-Qaida will live forever. A few years ago, we could have wiped it out.

Second, Bush has run a foreign policy that he thought would let us divide and conquer. Not our enemies: No, divide and conquer our own allies! We’d play off the Europeans. We’d have our favorites. We’d show them who’s boss.

The result? Now al-Qaida can divide and conquer us. “Let’s see, we’ll target Spain.” Is Britain next? Now al-Qaida can take advantage of the disunity Bush has sown. The terrorists are doing more regime changes than we are. And who let this happen? Bush.

Somehow a President Kerry has to stop this and restore the alliance. Here’s how.

Since the Madrid bombing March 11, the Europeans have started to do what they have failed to do since the Treaty of Rome: seriously attempt to build up an EU security component. There is talk now of an EU “security council,” even an EU CIA. Indeed, it now seems certain, with Spain’s Prime Minister Aznar gone, there will be an EU constitution, based on some type of one person, one vote. (Spain and Poland had objected.)

Much better than an EU security council would be an EU prosecutor, and an EU court, to try terror cases. That, too, may come.

Even if it doesn’t come, Kerry should make clear, in a dramatic, visible way, that he favors an EU-wide approach and dealing directly with the EU as much as possible. NATO is fine, of course, and we have to retain it. But if the EU acts, then every European country has cover.

It is not “Spain,” or “Italy,” or “Britain,” Bush’s poster children in the “coalition of the willing.” Rather, it is the EU as a whole, the entire 340 million of them. Under Bush, we did not use NATO, even after it was offered for the war in Afghanistan, but a “coalition of the willing.”

Indeed, we bragged about it: We don’t need alliances anymore.

In fact, in the long run, we not only need alliances, like NATO, but we need to look beyond this to a new way of mediating between America and Europe. Not by committees and councils where different foreign governments jockey with each other. Not even by NATO, as much as we may need it for now.

We need to recognize the EU, and relate to it more directly, not in lieu of NATO, but in addition to it. After Madrid, the EU rejected, for now, setting up a single super CIA. But it’s remarkable it was even on the table.

Events are moving fast. With Aznar gone, it’s now much easier to have a single EU approach on terror.

The neoconservatives, of course, don’t see it. Nor do they want it. Our neocons loved Aznar not only because Aznar gave us a small amount of help in Iraq, but because Aznar was blocking an EU constitution, a stronger and more united Europe.

In tossing him out, the Spanish voters did not “vote for al-Qaida.” They voted out Aznar because they had always hated his support of Bush. Then after the attacks, Aznar and his party lied to them.

All Aznar had to do was tell the truth: Say it was al-Qaida. And it seems likely his party would have won, maybe in a landslide. To some neocons, it’s a shock that voters might toss out a party like Aznar’s for lying as it did. Would we reject Bush if he lied about Iraq?

Our neocons don’t seem to grasp that the dynamic works differently in Europe.

If the Spanish voters could have done one single thing to help the war on terror, it would have been to remove Aznar, who almost by himself was blocking an EU-wide constitution, and as a result, a more effective EU-wide approach on terror. Ironically, in the long run, because a stronger EU is now possible, it may be that nothing could have helped the war on terror more than the defeat of Aznar’s party.

And it will help if a President Kerry makes clear that, with Bush gone, he will also support a more centralized EU-wide approach on terror. Help Europe get stronger: Don’t mock it, belittle it, at the same time trying to play off one European ally against the other, or even worse, winking at those trying to block a stronger EU.

That’s what Europeans, and others, would get for their money: an America that is committed to uniting and not dividing them — and a renewed Western alliance. We might, also, by the way, make the world safer too.