The point was pretty obvious - high social spending does not lead to indebtedness.
The point is obvious in and of itself. As the graph makes clear none of the countries comes close to even half their GDP on social service spending. With so much else in the budget of those countries one shouldn't really expect to see a correlation between any one slice of the budget and bond rates which measure investors' confidence in the entire debt structure of a country.
I found the more telling point of the article the connection between the lack of a sovereign currency and risk of high bond rates.
The lesson here (missed by the authors IMO) is not about the applicability of Greece to the US, but applying the example of Greece (and the other PIIGS) to the individual sovereign states of the US. The miserable credit ratings for CA and IL are indicative of and in large part due to some of the same factors plaguing the PIIGS. Improving the rate of growth of business and reducing the rate of growth of entitlements (also noted in the article) are the real issues facing both the S. European EC members and the over-indebted states.
