A fate worse than debt

My goodness, at long last the Gray Lady has taken notice! Writes Landon Thomas in his prominent story in the NYT this morning:

LONDON — When interest rates soared last week on Irish government bonds, it served as a grim warning to other indebted nations of how difficult and even politically ruinous it could be to roll back decades of public sector largess.

Mr. Thomas has mostly European governments in mind, of course, but he does have a sense that it's not just Ireland, Greece, Spain, and California--that we are all Europeans now:

International concerns about the high budget deficit in the United States, and Washington’s seeming willingness to print money rather than tackle tough debt-cutting measures, help partly explain the recent anti-American criticism from countries as diverse as Brazil, China and Germany. Countering those critics may be one of the biggest tasks for President Obama in Seoul, South Korea, this week at the Group of 20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies.

I'm not sure that Trillion Dollar Barack is the best man we could deploy for this task. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford