European "Socialism" and the Stuck PIGS

A recent article over at the American Thinker (oxymoron that it is) claims that socialism is to blame for economic troubles in Europe, specifically high levels of debt.

I have to laugh when I read that the same people who gave us crippling debt here in the USA by giving tax cuts to the wealthy, two unpaid for oil wars and a token prescription drug assistance to the elderly -- all unpaid for, all adding massively to our debt -- are now blaming socialism for Europe's debt to income ratio, or at least that of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

How short a memory that we might be fooled AGAIN by the conservative minions. The true culprit in Greece is that they bought massive amounts of fraudulent debt instruments from us, from US banks. These same instruments, the mortgage backed securities, brought our own economy to its knees. And when the light of day was cast upon the ponzi scheme run by America's biggest banks and investment houses and the whole fraudulent house of cards came crashing down, some European countries were less able to weather the economic storm and find themselves now having to pay for their foolish trust in American Capitalism.

I do not foresee so many Europeans taken in by the Capitalist shell game in the future. It may take them a decade to dig themselves out of the hole we put them in but it is the US that will emerge poorer for it.

"Ireland's economic peril is part of a global economic downturn caused by the creation of a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US that triggered an international credit crunch leading to an international banking crisis. This crisis has been exacerbated in Ireland by a switch from an export-led economy to a property-led economy in the early 2000s, with the banks competing to over-lend to developers as land and property prices spiralled ever upwards, with the government and financial regulators doing little to intervene in poor banking practices. As the property bubble burst, the over-exposure of the banks became apparent and the resulting crisis led to a contraction in the wider economy with the drying up credit, markets and tax, leading to a huge hole in the public purse, rising unemployment, collapsing house prices, and so on. In other words, the story is one of, on the one hand, an unfortunate trigger that was beyond Ireland's control (the global crisis), and on the other, poor economic management."
( Source )