Ragnar, Sink that Relief Ship Going to Greece!

With our national debt of nearly $13 trillion, huge shortfalls looming for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, certain losses on GM, Chrysler, and many lending institutions, further losses for Ginny Mae and Freddy Mac, large losses for AMTRAK and the Postal Service, bailouts for many underfunded union retirement funds, and looming bailouts for U.S. states such as California, New York, and Rhode Island, the U.S. has recently guaranteed $56 billion of loans to Socialist Greece through our involvement with the IMF.

The loan guarantees to Greece are expected to be insufficient to save the Greek government from insolvency.  The Greek economy is only about 2% of the GDP of the European Union, but its insolvency has been a major threat to the weak economies throughout the EU.  About one-third of all workers in Greece work for the government.  They have retirement for hazardous occupations at age 58 and for women at age 50.  The hazardous occupations include musicians, news announcers, and hairdressers.  Greece worked its way into this insolvency by flouting the EU's rules on deficit spending and misrepresenting their indebtedness.  This was long recognized, but the EU did not enforce its rules, which have been widely violated in other nations in the EU also.  Portugal appears also to be on the verge of collapse.  Spain, with its wildly profligate spending on alternative energy, among many other popular socialist programs, is not far behind.  Italy and Ireland are also in sad shape and even the United Kingdom is in worse shape than the U.S.  We are likely to be expected to bailout all these countries whose socialist policies have brought them to the brink of failure through our contributions to the IMF.

The U.S. itself is near the brink of failure, if not quite as close as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.  This is because the Progressives have so long worked so hard and so successfully to transform the U.S. into their European ideal of a socialist state.  We are now driving ourselves even faster into irrecoverable insolvency by sending relief ship after relief ship to Europe.  Where are you Ragnar?  You are needed.

Real life is working very hard at replicating Ayn Rand's great novel Atlas Shrugged.