Pat Buchanan wonders how the Obama administration can dare to criticize Angela Merkel’s Germany for their successful trade policies.
Though Germany is smaller than Montana, with a population not a fourth that of the United States, she is the powerhouse of the European Union, makes some of the finest products on earth, and sells abroad one-third of all she produces. Her unemployment rate is only 5 percent.
Why is that not a record to be admired? And whom are the Germans supposed to emulate? Answer, if you can believe it, Obama’s America.
The Post and Krugman feel the Germans must shake off their habit of working and saving and start spending to get Club Med countries like Spain and Greece out of intensive care. The Post wants Merkel to embrace the Social Democrats’ idea of raising the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour, which was too rich even for the mayor of D.C.
The need, says Treasury, is for “rebalancing.”
Basically, what the globalists want is for prudent counties with trade surpluses to start running deficits to get money flowing, like transfusions, into the moribund economies.
Where as “Engine Charlie” Wilson reportedly said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” the globalists retort, “What’s good for the global economy is good for America.”
But is this true? From their behavior in recent decades, neither the Chinese nor Japanese nor Germans, proprietors of the second, third and fourth largest economies on earth, buy into this ideology.
