All I want for Christmas this year is a better damn press corps!
Robert Samuelson acts out all the roles in the breathless morality play “OMG! Social Welfare is Killing Europe!” Trouble is, there aren’t really any facts to support that morality play. It’s ideology masking as Very Serious Journalism.
A fact checker would have reminded Samuelson that the crisis came about because out of control lending by bankers who somehow could not recognize the huge housing bubbles in the United States and much of Europe that created the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. This is a story of a broken private sector and/or too little government regulation.
Paul Krugman points out, with data, that there is really no correlation. At all. Not even a little bit.
There’s no relationship; some high-spending countries, notably Sweden and Denmark, have very low rates, while as Dean says, Spain was a relatively low spender.
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