America is Europe

David Brooks is the only conservative columnist at the NY Times and I'm guessing he isn't real well liked around there....but is probably too well known for them to get rid of.

In this article he clearly is saying that America is just like Europe...probably worse when it comes to our finances....but we simply do a better job of hiding it...so for now the confidence in the U.S. financial system keeps holding on.

But how long might it be before the world starts focusing again on our nasty balance sheet and our nasty gridlock in Washington?

We Americans cherish our myths. One myth is that there is more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. That’s false. Another myth is that the government is smaller here than in Europe. That’s largely false, too.    

The U.S. does not have a significantly smaller welfare state than the European nations. We’re just better at hiding it. The Europeans provide welfare provisions through direct government payments. We do it through the back door via tax breaks.        

For example, in Europe, governments offer health care directly. In the U.S., we give employers a gigantic tax exemption to do the same thing. European governments offer public childcare. In the U.S., we have child tax credits. In Europe, governments subsidize favored industries. We do the same thing by providing special tax deductions and exemptions for everybody from ethanol producers to Nascar track owners.

These tax expenditures are hidden but huge. Budget experts Donald Marron and Eric Toder added up all the spending-like tax preferences and found that, in 2007, they amounted to $600 billion. If you had included those preferences as government spending, then the federal government would have actually been one-fifth larger than it appeared.  

See here;  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/brooks-america-is-europe.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1332518470-4XwuGTMMYcZd9QOaxqfA6g#   

If America is Europe...then California will be our Greece.  Who is going to bailout CA when they go bust...and the CA pension plan (largest pension in the world) starts paying out less than promised...and the unrest of the welfare state created there spills into the streets?