“Barroso, like all members of the European Commission, is unelected and unaccountable, and his approach exemplifies much that is wrong with the European Union today, including a sneering disdain for self-determination and a callous disregard for public opinion,” Gardiner writes. “Barroso’s plan is big government writ-large on a European-wide level, stripping power away from national governments, resulting eventually in a dramatic redistribution of wealth from richer EU countries to poorer ones, with northern Europe overwhelmingly footing the bill for bank failures in places such as Greece, Spain and Italy. An EU banking union will do nothing to address the Eurozone crisis, but it will significantly advance the power of the Commission over nation states, and erode the ability of national parliaments to regulate their own countries’ banks as they see fit, giving unprecedented powers to an EU cross-border supervisor.”
National sovereignty is anathema to the supra-nationalists. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the avalanche of doomsday scenarios that have been predicted should Greece eventually leave the EU. Not because Greece’s economy, representing less than 2% of the European Union’s GDP, is particularly important, but because a financial meltdown there would likely be “contagious,” spreading to far larger economies like Spain and Italy, in turn leading to a continent-wide banking crisis or even an international one.
Thus, the banking community, from the ECB to the Bank of England and the U.S Federal Reserve had all promised to “take action” to stabilize financial markets in the wake of an “incorrect” Greek vote — meaning they were ready to inundate the markets with liquidity in all its Keynesian, delay-the-inevitable-debt-bomb glory. That flood may still occur if Greece fails to form a coalition government quickly enough to satisfy the markets. Massive amounts of future debt will be used to pay down existing debt, and despite all assurances to the contrary, the pressure to enact the kind of structural reforms necessary to break the cycle, will be eased. “Too big to fail” will remain the head of the spear for those thoroughly convinced that the reckoning of the socialist-driven, self-entitlement welfare state must be postponed virtually indefinitely.
The EU-philes and their financial enablers believe the Greek vote has bought them a reprieve. Yet a Reuters poll revealed that 35 out of 59 analysts across Europe and the U.S. expect Spain will need a “full-blown state bailout within the next 12 months,” and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicts France and Italy will need bailouts as well.
Yet these concerns are not just confined to Europe. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reveals where the United States is currently headed. “Under the assumptions leading to the most negative effect on GNP, debt would reach 250 percent of GDP by 2035. CBO’s model cannot reliably estimate GNP after debt reaches that amount, in the agency’s judgment: The assumptions about private saving and capital inflows incorporated in CBO’s model are based on historical experience, and if interest rates and the debt-to-GDP ratio rose to levels well outside of that experience, those assumptions might no longer be valid.” In other words, we’re 23 years away from our own date with incalculable fiscal chaos, courtesy of the same socialist-inspired hubris bringing Europe to it knees.
In the United States, we have been afforded the macabre benefit of seeing where the socialist end game is inevitably leading. Half the nation, ideologically speaking, refuses to believe it. It doesn’t get any more hubristic than that.
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