It’s easy to look at the protesters and the politicians in Greece ”” and at the other European countries with huge debts ”” and wonder why they don’t get it. They have been enjoying more generous government benefits than they can afford. No mass rally and no bailout fund will change that. Only benefit cuts or tax increases can.
Yet in the back of your mind comes a nagging question: how different, really, is the United States?
The numbers on our federal debt are becoming frighteningly familiar. The debt is projected to equal 140 percent of gross domestic product within two decades. Add in the budget troubles of state governments, and the true shortfall grows even larger. Greece’s debt, by comparison, equals about 115 percent of its G.D.P. today.
The United States will probably not face the same kind of crisis as Greece, for all sorts of reasons. But the basic problem is the same. Both countries have a bigger government than they’re paying for. And politicians, spendthrift as some may be, are not the main source of the problem.
We, the people, are.
We are no different. Once government gives you something, it can’t take in back otherwise the politicians loose votes. The system’s default is always towards bankruptcy.
I don’t completely agree. We the people did not ask for social security taxes to continue to increase the way they have, nor medicare taxes. But because they have, we the people expect something in return. Now we have medicare forced on us at 65. Now we have had to make social security part of our retirement plans, when it was never intended to be part of retirement plans of any but the poorest. We the people did not ask Congress to continuously borrow (steal?) from the SS Trust Fund for things other than what it was supposed to be used for. What we are seeing now in Europe and in the US are the long term consequences of liberal socialistic ideology and the demise of the work ethic and individual responsibility for oneself, which was the bedrock of our country. Unless we return to those ideals, we are as doomed as Europe.
Well, Id say that there is more than enough blame to go around. I tend to think that BOTH the government leaders and “we the people” who elect them are at fault. There is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle at work that’s very destructive, and because it’s entrenched in the whole political-economic system now, the system strongly resists attempts to change it.
Of course, the important thing isn’t to affix blame and find a scapegoat, but to find effective solutions.
And that requires widespread agreement on the nature of the problem and why it’s so severe. If articles like this help to crack peoples’ stubborn denial, and help persuade them that the comfortable assumption that [i]”It couldn’t happen here”[/i] is wrong, then there is hope. But until we come out of our collective denial, nothing is likely to happen.
Unfortunately, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” It’s entirely possible that what’s already happening in Greece could soon happen in Italy and Spain, and eventually the dominos would fall even in the good old USA.
David Handy+