EUROPE’S PENSION RECKONING APPROACHES: Winter is coming for the blue social model in Europe as well the United States. Today’s Wall Street Journal offers a bracing look at the tenuousness of government pension guarantees in countries across the Continent, from Spain to Germany to Poland. “The global decline of the blue model stands to inflict even more pain on Europe than on the United States. Europeans are worse at making babies than the United States, worse at integrating immigrants, worse at saving money to pay boomer retirement bills—but no worse at making promises to voters that they will be unable to keep.”

Politicians told lies to gain power. When the bill comes due, they’ll try to find someone to tax to pay for the lies they told, and if those people don’t want to pay the bill for the politicians’ politically motivated lies, they’ll be called greedy.