One might think that the mass unemployment caused by the collapse of the housing bubble might lead people to be concerned about restructuring the financial sector: not at the Washington Post. Robert Samuelson tells us that the meltdown shows that the welfare state is no longer viable. Actually, he has a pretty good case. With Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial sector siphoning off an ever larger share of the country's output, we may not be able to afford much of anything in the future. If the financial sector's share grows at the same rate it has been growing over the last three decades, the rest of us will have to learn to get by on less.
--Dean Baker