May 15, 2010
Will Liberals Learn From Greece?
By Jay Ambrose
Hail Greece</SPAN>, the final denouement of the liberal project, the welfare state in all its subsidy-happy, business-stifling, nation-ruining glory and the direction in which the United States</SPAN> is headed just as fast as it can go. The evidence is not hard to find.
Just look at the federal deficit for April, a reported $82.69 billion that was four times as high as the deficit in April of 2009. An anti-recession stimulus tax cut and stimulus spending along with bailout spending obviously had something to do with what turns out to be a new record, but don't figure on this being a one-time deal that will go away when the recession goes away.
Another recent report tells of how the Congressional Budget Office has been refiguring the cost of the health-care remake and has added $115 billion to the cost over the first 10 years, meaning that the total for that period will be more than $1 trillion.
Even that $1 trillion is misleading -- we have a four-year stretch before most benefits kick in -- and the cost of the next 10 years is more likely to be something like $2.2 trillion. The craziness here is that this new entitlement comes on top of existing welfare-state entitlements -- chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- that by themselves threaten to wreck our economy minus substantial restructuring.
One huge demographic issue, as Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron reminds us in a New York Times blog site, is that life expectancy is increasing while birth rates aren't. The result: Ever fewer people are going to be paying forever more recipients in programs for the elderly. And so what happens in 20 years? Kerwhamm! Or, as David Leonhardt of the Times puts it in a front-page piece, we will have a debt that is 140 percent of gross domestic product, compared to the 115 percent debt of Greece today.
Not to worry, says Times columnist Paul Krugman. He thinks Obama will fix everything, and there you have it: eternal bliss. But, of course, most of what threatens us could and should have been fixed decades ago in ways much easier than what's available to us today, and what the Obama administration has done so far is to make everything twice as bad. It is precisely to spur us to get moving that many people every bit as sophisticated in economics as Princeton Professor Krugman are issuing their warnings.
My own solution is fairly simple - elect people like Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Faced with the worst deficit of any state, he has already cut billions through a spending freeze and is taking on teachers' unions and all sorts of other special interests in an effort to effect substantive, long-range reductions, saying that if the voters want to get rid of him after his state-saving work is done, so be it.
He is refusing to do what liberals want - solve all problems with the kinds of tax hikes that have already caused businesses to flee his state, shut down, reduce operations or stay away, helping to cost tens of thousands of jobs in the private sector. Liberals tend to think that major tax hikes are the most important answer on the federal level, but first off, they cannot begin to pay for entitlement increases unless exorbitant to the point of utter economic collapse, and second, they inhibit growth in even smaller doses.
You've got to hack spending. Or, in other words, you have to do what the left chiefly dreads, drastically reduce the welfare state we already have, return this society to a greater resemblance of self-reliance, support instead of cripple businesses and keep in mind what happens if you don't: Greece.
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Will Liberals Learn From Greece?
By Jay Ambrose
Hail Greece</SPAN>, the final denouement of the liberal project, the welfare state in all its subsidy-happy, business-stifling, nation-ruining glory and the direction in which the United States</SPAN> is headed just as fast as it can go. The evidence is not hard to find.
Just look at the federal deficit for April, a reported $82.69 billion that was four times as high as the deficit in April of 2009. An anti-recession stimulus tax cut and stimulus spending along with bailout spending obviously had something to do with what turns out to be a new record, but don't figure on this being a one-time deal that will go away when the recession goes away.
Another recent report tells of how the Congressional Budget Office has been refiguring the cost of the health-care remake and has added $115 billion to the cost over the first 10 years, meaning that the total for that period will be more than $1 trillion.
Even that $1 trillion is misleading -- we have a four-year stretch before most benefits kick in -- and the cost of the next 10 years is more likely to be something like $2.2 trillion. The craziness here is that this new entitlement comes on top of existing welfare-state entitlements -- chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- that by themselves threaten to wreck our economy minus substantial restructuring.
One huge demographic issue, as Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron reminds us in a New York Times blog site, is that life expectancy is increasing while birth rates aren't. The result: Ever fewer people are going to be paying forever more recipients in programs for the elderly. And so what happens in 20 years? Kerwhamm! Or, as David Leonhardt of the Times puts it in a front-page piece, we will have a debt that is 140 percent of gross domestic product, compared to the 115 percent debt of Greece today.
Not to worry, says Times columnist Paul Krugman. He thinks Obama will fix everything, and there you have it: eternal bliss. But, of course, most of what threatens us could and should have been fixed decades ago in ways much easier than what's available to us today, and what the Obama administration has done so far is to make everything twice as bad. It is precisely to spur us to get moving that many people every bit as sophisticated in economics as Princeton Professor Krugman are issuing their warnings.
My own solution is fairly simple - elect people like Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Faced with the worst deficit of any state, he has already cut billions through a spending freeze and is taking on teachers' unions and all sorts of other special interests in an effort to effect substantive, long-range reductions, saying that if the voters want to get rid of him after his state-saving work is done, so be it.
He is refusing to do what liberals want - solve all problems with the kinds of tax hikes that have already caused businesses to flee his state, shut down, reduce operations or stay away, helping to cost tens of thousands of jobs in the private sector. Liberals tend to think that major tax hikes are the most important answer on the federal level, but first off, they cannot begin to pay for entitlement increases unless exorbitant to the point of utter economic collapse, and second, they inhibit growth in even smaller doses.
You've got to hack spending. Or, in other words, you have to do what the left chiefly dreads, drastically reduce the welfare state we already have, return this society to a greater resemblance of self-reliance, support instead of cripple businesses and keep in mind what happens if you don't: Greece.
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