They say that travel broadens the mind, but for any hardy soul who journeyed through the Memorial Day edition of the Washington Post to approximate that experience, they'd have to move through the A-section back to front. That's because the op-ed section featured Robert Samuelson going through his near-annual romp through that old Beltway refrain: The swelling entitlements, they will kill us all!

In fact, Samuelson maintains, the only way to permit any residual sense of dignity for the aged and infirm who haven't had the common decency to die already is to just let both Social Security and Medicare drift into bankruptcy. That way, he argues, stinking partisan Washington will man up and shove the wobbly-kneed oldster back out into the workforce, where they belong: "As health and longevity improve, when should people stop working and be entitled... to receive government retirement subsidies?" Why, much later than the Social Security limit of 60, that's when–since in 2008 life expectancy for men and women are 75.4 and 80, respectively, compared to the respective figures of 61.4 and 65.7 in 1940, six years after daft old FDR signed Social Security into law.

Unfortunately for the amateur actuaries in the pundit set, only Medicare is an entitlement in any real "crisis" to speak of-Samuelson's tired Cassandra act disingenuously mushes projected shortfalls in Medicare with far smaller projections for Social Security. Here's an admirable primer on how that trick is performed, by way of both Obsidian Wings and Michael Lind in Salon. The true Social Security shortfall works out to about 1 percent of GDP over the 75-year life of most projections.

What's more, Lind and other responsible economic thinkers note that such projections presume that taxes aren't assessed on future workers earning higher incomes to make up the alleged shortfall-the same way, you know, that the government pays for all sorts of other stuff-and that overall economic growth will be negligible, without any accompanying increase in revenues.

Not so in Samuelson's dark imaginings (which are reproduced in the current Newsweek). "The drain on the rest of government will occur invisibly," he incants nonsensically even as he quotes the government's own projections. "The inadequate trust funds will steadily diminish. The government bonds in these trust accounts will be presented to the Treasury for payment." At which point Samuelson will cackle gleefully, like the gangboss in Cool Hand Luke, and send out a new generation of seniors to break rocks and gather litter by the roadside.

Back here in consensual reality, though, Social Security and Medicare "are both great success stories," writes Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, in smartly dispatching Samuelson's latest outburst: "They do what they were designed to do in ensuring a decent standard of living for the elderly and the disabled. They are both more efficient than their private sector counterparts." The prospect of upgrading their fiscal standing "should get people about as scared as the fact that we will have to repave Interstate 95 sometime in the next years."

And the truly odd thing is that, leafing backward through the May 25 edition of the Post-in, you know, the quaint "news" pages–the shaken Samuelson reader would encounter a dispatch from the retirement community of Menton, France, bearing the dissonant headline "France's Oft-Derided Largess Insulates Many From Slump."

The story, by Edward Cody, is one entry in a quietly burgeoning genre of reports dialing back the unhinged campaign in the tech-besotted 90s to read France out of the tax-cutting clique of the new global economy.

With rare and refreshing candor, Cody notes this meme: "Denounced for decades as a millstone preventing growth and competitiveness, particularly by free-market advocates in the United States, the French government's dominant role in economic activity has suddenly found new favor at home and grudging respect abroad." To be sure, the French economy, like most all developed Western economies, is on the downswing, with up to 3 million new unemployed workers hitting the dole by year's end. "But the French economy is expected to shrink by just 3 percent, markedly less than in Britain or Italy, largely because of the country's traditionally high level of government spending."

Menton, Cody continues, is a case study of this trend-"a third of the population is retired and the largest employers-City Hall, the hospital and a municipal casino just off the beach-are government run." This is, indeed, Robert Samuelson's customized vision of hell; Mayor Jean-Claude Guibal notes that "the city has suffered no large layoffs in the economic crisis for the simple reason it has no factories to lose; service jobs catering to retired people have endured."

While Guibal has been forced to raise property taxes to contend with some revenue shrinkage, he tells Cody that government subsidies and official salaries have insulated Menton from "the fluctuations of the world economy." Further deranging to the Samuelson set is Guibal's status as a National Assembly member aligned with Nicolas Sarkozy's pro-U.S., pro-business government.

It's true that France, too, is pondering raising its retirement age-but only because, in an effort to curb deficits arising from efforts to fund other stimulus measures, Sarkozy's government temporarily reduced payroll taxes to pay for "France's version of Social Security." It's unlikely that any more severe spending cuts would be in store, though.

After all, "nearly a third of France's economy derives in some way from government-provided social protections, the highest proportion in the world" according to most estimates. And especially during downturns, that's money in the national treasury: "a stable pool" of more than 5 million workers "who have secure jobs and whose incomes continue to pulse through the economy."

Fancy that: An ocean of public-funded retirement plans, government programs and other benefits-and nary a fraudulent neoclassical argument, even from the Sarkozy government, that the layabout French are descending into the fiscal abyss. Instead, Cody leaves off his dispatch with an 85-year-old miner's widow, pondering "a cut-rate dinner at the subsidized miners' retirement home just up the hill from her rented apartment"-which she can afford, she explains, because "the mine's retirement system allows her to live rent-free in a company-provided home back in Alsace."

You know, I bet with that kind of time on her hands, she could write a column for the Washington Post. What the paper might lose in marginal Euro exchange rates would be more than made up by a colossal gain in credibility.

Previously:
· 'Time' Explains The Horrible Future Of The Working World
· 'Vanity Fair': Splitting Heirs
· Understaning How Obama Is Not Robbing The Rich For His Scary Social Agenda