December 05, 2011
A newspaper that doesn’t fact check its news articles can hardly be expected to fact check its opinion pieces. This mean that Robert Samuelson can get away with just about anything he wants in his column.
Today it is a diatribe against the welfare state. He tells readers that the euro crisis is the grand reckoning of the welfare state. Now that the euro zone economies are growing slowly and have aging population, the welfare state is no longer sustainable.
If the Post had fact checkers, they would ask Samuelson why, if the problem is an excessive welfare state, the countries with the most generous welfare states appear to be doing just fine. If we just take the measure of spending relative to GDP, the leaders would be countries like Sweden, France and Denmark, all of which are surviving the crisis reasonably well. None of the crisis countries rate near the top of the list and Spain is an outlier in Europe for having a much lower than average share of government spending in GDP.
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.
The immediate problem facing the euro zone countries is too little demand, the exact opposite of the problem that Samuelson is blaming, which is too much demand and too few resources. (Lesson for reporters: the bloated welfare state story is too much demand chasing too few resources. The problem today is too little demand chasing too many resources, hence the mass unemployment. Remember this one and you are head of 99 percent of your peers.)
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