This is either frightening or hilarious. The people in Washington who are trying to make America more like Europe are advising the Europeans to double-down on the awful policies that have pushed the continent’s welfare states to insolvency.
Here are some of the surreal details from a CNBC report.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will take the unprecedented step of attending a meeting of EU finance ministers in Poland on Friday. It will be his second trip to Europe in a week after he met his main EU counterparts at a G7 meeting last weekend. Obama said that while Greece is the immediate concern, an even bigger problem is what may happen should markets keep attacking the larger economies of Spain and Italy. “In the end the big countries in Europe, the leaders in Europe must meet and take a decision on how to coordinate monetary integration with more effective co-ordinated fiscal policy,” the news agency EFE quoted him as saying. Geithner is likely to urge euro zone finance ministers on Friday to speed up ratification of changes to their bailout fund and consider boosting its size, an EU source said. …Obama’s comments suggested that Washington is trying to nudge European governments toward closer fiscal union or a bigger bailout fund to recapitalize teetering banks but European politics, especially in Germany, make that difficult.
Your eyes are not deceiving you. Obama and Geithner want more bailouts, which will simply encourage more profligacy. And the President even endorsed more harmonization of economic policy, which will exacerbate the problems in Europe by leading to higher taxes, more spending, and additional regulation.
But you have to give Obama and Geithner credit. They support the same bad policies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Obama, however, is not fully consistent in his beliefs. During a visit to Africa, he said, “No business wants to invest in a place where government skims 20 percent off the top.” But I guess bigger government is okay in Europe, where the burden of government is already 50 percent of economic output.
