The European lesson: Will we heed it?
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Opinion Page
American liberals pining for the “social justice” of Europe soon will be rushed into treatment for shell shock. For their role model is proving to be what history and fundamental economics dictate — unsustainable.
“Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirement, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism,” reminded The New York Times on Monday.
But all those supposedly great lifestyle designs of leftist governments since the end of World War II have been exposed by a combination of the debt crisis, demographics and simple economics.
In particular, such socialistic spending has left Europe with higher taxes that led to both lower tax receipts for the governments and, with ever more money being sucked out of the private sector for entitlements, lower rates of economic growth.
A textbook case of how to bankrupt a country has come back to slap Europeans.
Sadly, it’s a lesson liberals in Washington are either missing as they continue to embrace European socialism or are whistling past the graveyard. Either way, they and the American people are in for an ugly object lesson about what economic model is more “harsh.”