Posted by
Defend America on Sunday, February 28, 2010 7:04:32 PM
February 27, 2010 7:00 A.M.
When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay
Welfare always breeds contempt.
While Barack Obama was making
his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement
at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to
riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on
a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story.
It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at
the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is
farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead
that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One
(the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to
Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter
Seventeen or Eighteen.
What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so
very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has
run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable
boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing
over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage
in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw
over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just
over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten
grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree
is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the
point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain
and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean
Europe.
So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the
most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector
retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four
grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult
life loafing around?
By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece
to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of
California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a
generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of
years ago, when I wrote my book America Alone, I put the then–
Social Security
debate in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected
public-pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8
percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent: in other words,
head for the hills, Armageddon outta here, The End. Since then, the
situation has worsened in both countries. And really the comparison is
academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn’t going to
have a 2040 — not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.
http://article.nationalreview.com/426405/when-responsibility-doesnt-pay/mark-steyn