The essential liberal problem

Stand back and take the long view and one realizes that liberals have in fact already achieved most of their dreams. With Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance, student loan programs, food stamps, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health) regulations, and myriad other federal programs, liberals have, since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, managed to put in place most of the social protection programs they wanted.

The central liberal problem is that, having put them in place, we have discovered that we can't pay for all of them.  We are short by about a trillion dollars a year. We have papered over the problem for the past decade or so by borrowing extravagantly from the world, and more recently by simply printing money (sorry, the current euphemism for printing money is "quantitative easing"), but anyone can see this can't go on indefinitely.

So liberals face an unpleasant choice - either raise taxes substantially (like doubling them), or cut benefits substantially (like halving them).

Europeans, who got to the liberal dream faster and more completely, are of course now in dire straits financially. Hence the endless Euro zone crises.  But they face the same problem.  All the liberal social programs cost a lot of money, and the only place to get that money is from taxes, and if one raises taxes high enough, businesses and entrepreneurs quite naturally begin to leave and go somewhere else with lower taxes, thereby making the problem progressively worse.  Europe's long history of lower productivity and entrepreneurial stagnation shows what happens when one makes the business climate unfriendly enough.

That is not to say the conservatives are in any better shape, as they wander in their self-created right-wing religious wilderness.  But it is to say that liberals, having gotten what they wish for, now have to figure out how to pay for it.