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Check this page for what's new on the site, what projects we've begun and completed, what message forums have been added, etc.
We will also highlight news stories and other items of interest!
Please enjoy your stay!
Will Liberals Learn From Greece?
Posted 05-16-2010 at 07:46 AM by webixi
Will Liberals Learn From Greece?
Hail Greece, 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 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.
Source:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ce_105601.html
--------------------------------------------------
Europe's Lack Of Discipline
WASHINGTON -- When Chancellor Angela Merkel decided that Germany would pay part of Greece's bills, voters punished her party in elections in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. How appropriate.
The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, ratified Europe's emerging system of nation-states. Since the end of the Thirty-One Years' War (1914-1945), European elites have worked at neutering Europe's nationalities. Greece's debt crisis reveals this project's intractable contradictions, and the fragility of Western Europe's postwar social model -- omniprovident welfare states lacking limiting principles.
Greece represents a perverse aspiration -- a society with (in the words of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan) "more takers than makers," more people taking benefits from government than there are people making goods and services that produce the social surplus that funds government. By socializing the consequences of Greece's misgovernment, Europe has become the world's leading producer of a toxic product -- moral hazard. The dishonesty and indiscipline of a nation with 2.6 percent of the eurozone's economic product have moved nations with the other 97.4 percent -- and the United States and the International Monetary Fund -- to say, essentially: The consequences of such vices cannot be quarantined, so we are all hostages to one another and hence no nation will be allowed to sink beneath the weight of its recklessness.
Recklessness will proliferate.
"The coining of money," said William Blackstone more than two centuries ago, "is in all states the act of the sovereign power."
But the EU is neither a state nor sovereign enough to enforce its rules: No eurozone nation is complying with the EU requirement that deficits not exceed 3 percent of GDP.
The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring. The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction -- that "Europe" has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. The bills depict nonexistent windows, gateways and bridges. They are from ... nowhere, which is what "utopia" means.
Read the rest of the article:
http://townhall.com/columnists/Georg...cipline?page=1
Related:
Hail Greece, 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 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.
Source:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ce_105601.html
--------------------------------------------------
Europe's Lack Of Discipline
WASHINGTON -- When Chancellor Angela Merkel decided that Germany would pay part of Greece's bills, voters punished her party in elections in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. How appropriate.
The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, ratified Europe's emerging system of nation-states. Since the end of the Thirty-One Years' War (1914-1945), European elites have worked at neutering Europe's nationalities. Greece's debt crisis reveals this project's intractable contradictions, and the fragility of Western Europe's postwar social model -- omniprovident welfare states lacking limiting principles.
Greece represents a perverse aspiration -- a society with (in the words of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan) "more takers than makers," more people taking benefits from government than there are people making goods and services that produce the social surplus that funds government. By socializing the consequences of Greece's misgovernment, Europe has become the world's leading producer of a toxic product -- moral hazard. The dishonesty and indiscipline of a nation with 2.6 percent of the eurozone's economic product have moved nations with the other 97.4 percent -- and the United States and the International Monetary Fund -- to say, essentially: The consequences of such vices cannot be quarantined, so we are all hostages to one another and hence no nation will be allowed to sink beneath the weight of its recklessness.
Recklessness will proliferate.
"The coining of money," said William Blackstone more than two centuries ago, "is in all states the act of the sovereign power."
But the EU is neither a state nor sovereign enough to enforce its rules: No eurozone nation is complying with the EU requirement that deficits not exceed 3 percent of GDP.
The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring. The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction -- that "Europe" has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. The bills depict nonexistent windows, gateways and bridges. They are from ... nowhere, which is what "utopia" means.
Read the rest of the article:
http://townhall.com/columnists/Georg...cipline?page=1
Related:
Greek PM Says US Banks Victimized Greece, Calls For Regulation
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-...?mod=rss_Bonds
Greek Tragedy Not Necessarily U.S.' Fate
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...cessarily.html
US Stocks Tumble As Concerns Over European Solvency Rattle Market
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-..._Global_Stocks
US faces same problems as Greece, says Bank of England
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance...nk-of-england/
In Greek Debt Crisis, Some See Parallels to U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/bu...leonhardt.html
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