[AnotherUnixGeek]

The only way to finance a big European-style state is to have it paid for by massive taxation of everyone, mostly the middle class.

No, that won't do it either. There simply is no way any nation can generate the revenue needed to finance the kind of welfare-state wonderland that liberals want. Disband the military, tax all workers at an 80% rate, borrow money from any idiots willing to buy worthless debt obligations - doesn't matter, there's no way all of us can live on someone else's money.

[lentulusgracchus]

There simply is no way any nation can generate the revenue needed to finance the kind of welfare-state wonderland that liberals want.

They have only the liberal "Watergate class" of 1974 in Congress to thank for their predicament. They loaded down Medicare and Social Security with so many new claimants and types of claims, they broke it. The illegal fix in 1981 (it was cooked in an unconstitutional rump session of the Congress at a Virginia resort hotel) could only kick the can down the road, it couldn't -- nobody could -- fix what the grasping, chum-strewing Democrats had done.

That, by the way, is the same crowd who terminated "civility" in the Congress by taking committee seats away from the GOP minority and patronizing all of them as known social and political pariahs -- the Left's revenge for Dick Nixon's 49-state victory in 1972, and (really, if truth be told) his conviction of Alger Hiss.

Then they sniveled, whined, carped and bitched about GOP "incivility" when Newt Gingrich stood up to them and started giving it back to them.