And the award goes to… the Brits, naturally:

The euro has many flaws, but its weakest link is Greece, whose fundamental problem is that for years it spent too much, earned too little and plugged the gap by borrowing in order to enjoy a rich man’s lifestyle. It flouted EU rules on the limits to budget deficits; its national accounts were a moussaka of minced statistics, topped with a cheesy sauce of jiggery-pokery.

Brilliant, that.  Meanwhile, let’s all celebrate the death of the world’s most bogus currency and the death of the world’s worst idea — the Union of Soviet European “Republics.”  Goodbye, good night, and — with hope! — good riddance. The best thing that could happen to Europe is that the “Union” falls apart, and the European countries remember who they are again, before it’s too late.

A gray beard and a 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics go a long way to establishing a fellow’s credibility in discussing the current situation in Greece and how it relates to the U.S. economy.  In his May 13 New York Times op-ed piece, “We’re Not Greece,” Paul Krugman gives us permission to breathe a collective “there-but-for-the-grace-of-Zeus-go-we” sigh of relief. “America’s fiscal outlook over the next few years isn’t bad,” Krugman calms.

No one can deny the soft-spoken economist’s brilliance nor his passion. Nevertheless, one can’t help thinking: what if Paul Krugman is wrong?

Like a good Socratic dialectician, Professor Krugman lays out the opposing point of view at the top of his essay before assailing it:

The crisis in Greece is making some people — people who opposed health care reform and are itching for an excuse to dismantle Social Security — very, very happy. Everywhere you look there are editorials and commentaries… asserting that Greece today will be America tomorrow unless we abandon all that nonsense about taking care of those in need.

In Krugman’s words of would-be reassurance, “America is not Greece.” No, not yet. But is it really true that our current fiscal road doesn’t eventually lead directly to Athens? More Krugman reassurance:

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Robert Samuelson long ago distinguished himself as one of the best things about the soon-to-be-late Newsweek. Here he is on a subject nobody in the administration wants to talk about: the coming collapse of the social-welfare democracies — including, alas, our own:

WASHINGTON — 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.

The demographics are brutal, and have been for some time: the western world is gradually committing suicide through a combination of low birthrates and widely available abortion, without so much as a thought as to where the next generations of taxpayers — you know, the ones named Peter we’re fleecing today to pay Paul — are going to come from. One second thought, maybe they have: mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, is meant to hide the decline.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” The 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.

Budget deficits and debt are the real problems; and these stem from all the welfare benefits (unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, health insurance) provided by modern governments.

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Another stunning rebuke to Barack Obama: Armenian American groups have for decades sought Congressional recognition as genocide of the murder of just under two million Armenian Christians by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Last week, they cleared an important hurdle in getting this recognition: the House Foreign Affairs Committee, over Obama’s opposition, approved a resolution calling the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians a genocide.

The Islamic supremacists haven’t infiltrated as deeply as they thought. As long as Turkey was secular, we pretended it wasn’t genocide. And now Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once said that “there is no moderate or immoderate Islam, Islam is Islam and that’s it,” is taking on the secular military in Turkey. Traditionally, the secular army kept Turkey a “moderate” secular Muslim country, but with the election of the devout Muslim Erdogan, Turkish secularism is on the ropes. And now that Turkey is returning to the dark side, we don’t have to lie for jihadis anymore.

The Turks were furious over the Foreign Affairs Committee vote, and withdrew their ambassador to the U.S. Turkish President Abdullah Gul issued a veiled threat: “Turkey will not be responsible for the negative results that this event may lead to.”

Turkey threatens…what? Another genocide? (more…)

The great Victor Davis Hanson, over at his blog, Works and Days, in the peroration from yesterday’s column, “Where Did Our Real Wealth Go?”

Why am I not too optimistic right now? Our President, who submitted the largest deficits in recent memory, and who is on track to nearly double the national debt in record time, continues to blame Bush — not just for Bush’s lamentable deficits, but for Obama’s own new unsustainable ones. I think his weird logic is: “Bush’s bad deficits made me trump them by a factor of four.” When the Commander-in-Chief expects the populace to believe that, or drops real unemployment figures and talks instead of theoretical jobs saved, or flip-flops on everything from evil Wall Street bankers now suddenly good, or bad nuclear power now vital, then we have about as much hope as we would have under Jimmy Carter.

Remember January 2009? In the era of Democratic supermajorities in Congress, a new JFK in the White House, and a media proclaiming Obama “a god,”  we were all grass-roots saints, who threw out the Bush bums and had at last a great workable Congress and White House — and were a daring electorate eager for hope and change from a non-traditional president. Yes, life was good and we, in the pre-tea-party age, were the salt of the earth that earned an Obama. (more…)