The Greek government has spent too much for years. Markets became concerned about this in November after the newly elected Socialist government revealed that last year’s budget deficit was more than three times as large as previously estimated. The EU says Greece’s financial figures have been fudged for years.

With debt piling up to 113% of the economy, investors fear Greece won’t pay its debts, in the form of government bonds — or will need a lifeline from other EU countries to meet its 54 billion euro ($74 billion) borrowing needs this year.

Decades of irresponsible government have put us on the current trajectory. Program after program were put in place and structured in ways we cannot afford. Social Security, Medicare, the new Medicare drug program, Medicaid, and so on.

Barak Obama is perhaps, hopefully, at the tail end of this madness in spending. We surely can’t afford the health care bill he wants - and it looks like these new “reforms” will never be enacted anyway. The country’s #1 priority for the next decade should be to get our financial house in order - not coming up with extravagant new spending programs. This kind of reckless spending is so 20th century.

But there was another president, uh-hum, a President Bill Clinton, that some say did the best job of all in recent years. Economist Arthur Laffer gave his view back in 2007:

“… he became more Reagan than Reagan the day afterwards. He lost the House, he lost the Senate, he lost the governorships, he lost the state legislatures. And then he became more Reagan than Reagan: He got Nafta through Congress, against the unions, against his own party. He reappointed Reagan’s Fed chairman twice. He signed welfare reform, that you actually have to look for a job to get welfare. He cut government spending as a share of GDP by 3.5 percentage points. No president ever has come anywhere near him on that. He had the biggest capital gains tax cut in our nation’s history in ‘97. He got rid of the retirement test on Social Security. This guy was a great president and I voted for him twice.”

America needs to shut the path to illegal entry and employment while opening smoother and more rational routes to legal immigration.

If we take this at face value, this would mean that the NYT’s editorial staff supports a secure southern border. And a secure southern border requires a high, multi-layer fence along nearly all of the southern border. Do they mean this? No way. So what do they mean? You know - hire a few more border agents, provide more aid of some type to Mexico to get people to want to stay there, or add a few more guest-worker programs. Right, like these things will have any impact on illegal immigration.

You can be sure that this NYTs editorial claiming they want to “shut the path to illegal entry” is all lip service. They would never support the steps needed to actually “shut the path to illegal entry”.

I recall the last mass amnesty reform in the 1980s. There were lots of claims then about how border security would be tightened. That turned out to be a complete joke as illegal immigration then dramatically increased over the southern border. I guess we are all just supposed to ignore this piece of history and plow ahead with this latest immigration reform.

All amnesty proposals should be opposed until the southern border is first secured. Actually, this was sort of agreed to at the end of the last Bush term. A program was put in place to build a fence - to first secure the border - but then this fence building program was gutted once the limelight went away. The American political class, Democrats and also establishment-Republicans, really don’t mind the open border. They ignore all of the problems that illegal immigration is leading to over time - like increased inequality, increased crime, massive new urban welfare-ghettos, educational decline, more demands for socialism, more congested highways, and charges of American racism as evidence mounts that 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos are not moving up economically.

It’s really bizarre that we let about 500,000 people sneak illegally into our country each year, and our elites believe that there are no problems with this. Imagine if you sat in an airport and watched 500,000 people (1370 per day) sneak into the country each year. Wouldn’t you think maybe something is wrong with the security system?