Mark Steyn laments the G20’s inability to focus on the real problems afflicting western economies: demographics and spending
After surveying the post-G20 summit landscape, Mark Steyn finds world leaders shirked their responsibility to use the economic crisis to “reverse the combination of unaffordable social programs and deathbed demographics that make a restoration of real GDP growth all but impossible in many European nations.” Instead, they focused their attention on “irrelevant scapegoats,” like shuttering tax havens and erecting a global regulatory regime that hampers economic growth. “A serious G-20 summit,” Steyn argues, “would have seen France commit to the liberalization of its economy; Germany to serious natalist incentives; Britain to a reduction of the near-Soviet size of state spending in Scotland and Northern Ireland; and the United States to allowing its citizens to keep more of their hard-earned money and thus reduce both the dependency on ludicrous asset inflation as the only route to socioeconomic improvement and the risk of a Euro-style decline in birth rate caused by the unaffordability of kids.”