We're All Greeks Now

But while this may maintain an existing population size, immigrants from the Maghreb, Middle East, Caribbean, Latin America and South Asia, on average, lack the language, technical skills and educational levels of native-born Europeans.

The same is true in the U.S., where peoples of European descent are expected to drop to half the population by 2041. Hispanics will grow from 15 percent to near 30 percent of the U.S. population, and their absolute numbers from 50 million to 135 million by 2050.

Yet, again, Hispanics and children of Hispanic immigrants have not, as of yet, reached close to parity in educational achievement with Americans of East Asian or European ancestry.

People equate today's immigration with the immigration of 1890-1920. But another major difference is this: We erected a Great Society over 50 years that did not exist in 1920.

In Washington in the 1950s, a city of 800,000, half black and half white, food stamps had not been invented. Families fed themselves. Today, in a District of Columbia of 600,000, one in five are on food stamps. Nationally, a program that did not exist in 1964 feeds one in seven Americans, 44 million people, at a cost of $77 billion a year. And that is but a small fraction of our new Great Society.

We are entering a new "age of austerity," said British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2009.

The halcyon days are over. Government payrolls, as is happening from California to New York to Washington, D.C., will have to be slashed. Pension and health care benefits, not only for seniors, will have to be reduced. Retirement ages will have to be raised. From food stamps to foreign aid, programs are going to be capped and cut.

The left believes it can get the money from the wealthy. But the top 1 percent of Americans in income already carry 40 percent of the federal income tax load, while the bottom 50 percent of wage-earners ride free. This, too, will have to end.

We are either going to man up and radically reduce government at all levels in the United States, or the bond markets are going to do it for us, as they are doing it today for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

We're all Greeks now.