A new International Monetary Fund report nails down the biggest threat to international fiscal stability. Here’s a hint: It’s not defense spending. “Rising spending on health care is the main risk to fiscal sustainability, with an impact on long-run debt ratios that, absent reforms, will dwarf that of the financial crisis,” the report said.
Surely more government regulation is the way to thwart catastrophe, right? “More competition among insurance companies for consumers was the best but not only way to cut health care costs.” What’s needed is the opposite of regulation: the free market.
It’s hard to imagine a more concentrated manifestation of out-of-touch policy than ObamaCare. As the developed world suffocates in its health-care largess, the president and his liberal partners in Congress moved to finish us off in one unprecedented legislative sweep. Consider this: “The burden of health care in 2008 averaged 7.0 percent of GDP in developed countries, with the United States close to that and France more than eight percent. Twenty years from now, health costs will grow another three percentage points of GDP in all the countries, and five percent more in the United States.”
Liberal lawmakers might as well start rioting now. The only difference between demanding more statism from a broke government via legislation and demanding it via graffiti is cosmetic. Both are rooted in the same anti-logic and neither has much of a future. What Europeans call “austerity” American simply call math, and it’s making an inexorable comeback.
