PARIS — Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on Tuesday called for closer coordination of economic policy among the 17 countries that share the euro currency and proposed that they enshrine in their constitutions an obligation to balance their national budgets.
Look, as with our states which mostly require kind of fake balanced budgets, it isn't necessarily (though I still think wrong) horrible as long as there is a central government which can step in. But absent automatic regional transfers during recessions, this is just a horrible horrible policy.