From the Wall Street Journal.
Excerpt:
In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones.
[…]What is now happening in Europe isn’t so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it’s a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.
And then Italy will go Greek. Europe’s crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America’s economic woes will lap on Europe’s—a two-way tsunami.
America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, “Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression.” The “fiscal union” that’s being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won’t stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.
What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it’s not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It’s a long, likely parade of horribles.
Wow… things really are bad in Europe. And here, too.
Check out this editorial in the Washington Examiner.
Excerpt:
[A] congressional report released last week added another layer of explanation for the abject failure of Obamanomics since 2009. Along with the explosion of federal spending, Obama directed his appointees at key federal departments and agencies to embark on an unprecedented expansion of bureaucratic regulation. Thousands of new bureaucrats were hired at places like the Department of Heath and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and legions of costly new regulations soon poured forth.
The report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., took aim at Obama’s “regulatory tsunami” and concluded that the pace and scale of new regulations threatens the ability of the government to fulfill even its most basic regulatory functions. Here’s how the congressional panel summarized its conclusions:
“The Obama Administration has created a regulatory environment that is suffocating America’s entrepreneurs’ ability to create jobs and grow businesses, … This regulatory tsunami has caused job creators to lock down at a time when we need them to expand. The committee has found that the problems created by this regulatory tsunami goes far beyond the cost of the regulations themselves, but also include breakdowns in the regulatory process itself that is having a severe impact on large and small businesses alike.”
Specifically, the panel found at least 219 “economically significant regulations in the pipeline, which if finalized, will impose costs of $100 million or more annually on the economy.” That’s a minimum of $219 billion in added costs to do business in this country over the next decade. Even worse, the panel found the Obama bureaucrats have already imposed 75 major new regulations that are projected to add another $380 billion in costs.
The Issa panel concluded that, as a result of this flood of new rules, “the regulatory process is broken” and that it is “being manipulated and exploited in an effort to reward allies of the Obama administration such as environmental groups, trial lawyers and unions.”
All we have to do to screw up this economy is do what the Europeans are doing – and we are.
WINTERY KNIGHT 