I have been saying over and over that the USA is heading to Greece. I will post this story in two different posts. It should show us why the destination of European Welfare State is not a good one even though we are heading there fast under President Obama.
Flashing Red: European Debt Crisis Signals Collapse of Social Welfare State
By James Roberts and J.D. Foster, Ph.D.
August 16, 2011
Europe’s socialist (or “social democratic”) welfare state is collapsing under the load of unsustainable debt. There is no chance European politicians will ever make good on the many costly and unfunded entitlements they have promised their citizens.
The fundamental problem in the European Union is a monetary policy failure. In conjunction with the debilitating effects of the social welfare state, this has led to a broad economic collapse among the lesser states—notably the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain), but also some of the EU’s newer members—and it threatens to envelop the greater states.
For years, this collapse among the lesser states was disguised by debt accumulation—countries would borrow (at de facto concessionary interest rates) to overcome their inability to generate adequate income by producing and selling. The lack of actual and prospective growth combined with growing debt burdens has led to a long-term solvency crisis, which has been bubbling up of late into a series of liquidity crises.
The monetary and fiscal situation in the EU is increasingly unmanageable, as the debt burdens grow and growth prospects diminish further. To paraphrase an old saying: You can fool some of the credit markets all the time, and all the markets some of the time, but you cannot fool all the credit markets indefinitely.
The Ill-fated Euro Experiment
The vision of a “euro zone” was ill-conceived from the start. It is now increasingly acknowledged that Brussels’ lack of control over social spending, especially in the PIIGS, doomed it from the beginning. Agreements (e.g., the Maastricht Treaty)[1] to stay within EU member government spending targets were routinely flouted, even by the largest EU countries.
But the growing gap in competitiveness amongst EU members was far more important. Some, like Germany, tended to adopt policies like labor market reforms that built on their inherent economic strengths. The strong got stronger, while others, like Italy and Greece, stood still or even retreated on policies that would have sustained their international competitiveness. The focus today on shifting painfully to policies that can make these countries competitive is simply too little, too late.
And now, the instability is rapidly spreading to the pillars of Europe—first Spain, then Italy, and now apparently to France. Southern Europeans kept borrowing in low-interest-rate euros (which simultaneously inflated housing bubbles in their countries) until, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, their socialist governments “ran out of other peoples’ money!”[2] As a result, some of Europe’s large private banks now hold toxic quantities of sovereign debt issued by the PIIGS and are threatened with extinction through serial defaults—thus they are deemed “too big to fail.” Already there is growing worry over the solvency of France’s Societe General Bank because of this crisis, with several other major European banks likely to be in trouble if the situation is not resolved.
To reduce federal spending and prevent economic collapse, U.S. policymakers should follow The Heritage Foundation’s plan in “Saving the American Dream.”[8]
James M. Roberts is Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and Growth in the Center for International Trade and Economics, and J. D. Foster, Ph.D., is Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of Fiscal Policy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
The Daily Hatch 