Welfare State Spends Other Peoples' Money Until Everyone's Broke

Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post has this sobering thought in "The Welfare State's Death Spiral":

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

As Margaret Thatcher famously noted: "Socialism works until the state runs out of other people's money."

Americans dislike the term "welfare state" and substitute the bland word "entitlements." Vocabulary doesn't alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece's plight is usually described as a European crisis -- especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries -- and this is true. But only to a point.

The USA has a genuine eff-tard as its President and a Congress run by two senile perverted perps. A Botox perp and a Dirty Dingy old man Perp. Perverted in their fascination for taking money from hard-working people and giving it to layabouts and slackers and people of low moral stature, commonly known as Demo-rats.

The welfare state's death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession. By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day -- no one knows when -- doubt governments' ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.

If Obamanomics continues and we all expect a free lunch and lodgings and hospital stays, the USA will be a Third World shithole in the mid-21st century just like a bunch of Arab countries who were famously rich once upon a time---Iraq, Egypt, Syria---are now Third World hellholes.

Our weather might be better, but the American Dream is turning into a nightmare because the Demo-rats are turning the economy into a casino.