The Urban Dictionary defines busybody as… “the kind of person you just want to punch in the mouth for being so damb [sic] annoying. They have no life and way too much time on their hands. They frequently use their excessive amount of time to annoy and monitor others, taddletale [sic] for small meaningless crap, butt into everybody’s business except their own, and spy on people as if they think they are a cop or an important person or something.”

The United States has become the world’s biggest busybody. It monitors its friends and hands out truly terrible unwanted advice. Worse yet, U.S. taxpayers get stiffed for the cost of the meddling.

The Office of International Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Treasury has just issued its October 30, 2013 report on our major trading partners’ economic and exchange rate policies. This report is done twice a year so economists at Treasury have lots of work to do monitoring and criticizing others.

In the latest Treasury report it takes Germany to task for pursuing economic policies that have held back the other economies of the EU. It urges Germany to give up its policy of export-led growth and to increase its own consumption. This is akin to blaming Texas and its export-led growth for the pathetic U.S. economic recovery. What planet do Treasury’s economists come from?

Germany, it is worth noting, merged with an economically sick East Germany to become, in a few short years, the economic powerhouse in the EU. A rational bit of economic advice would be to ask Greece, Italy, Spain, and France to follow in Germany’s footsteps not the reverse.

U.S. economic policies brought the economy to its knees; created massive national debt, unemployment, and unsustainable entitlement programs; reduced national savings to near zero; and yielded trade deficits for the past twenty-one years. For the U.S. to give prosperous Germany economic advice raises chutzpah to a new level.