How Close is the U.S. to being Greece?

look close- how much is he worth?Greece’s Prime Minister George Papandreou is planning to drastically cut spending and raise taxes. As a response, the Greek people are staging a walkout strike for 24 hours. Schools, hospitals and (gasp) tourist sites will close. The thing is, both sides make sense, you know? The Greek deficit is something ridiculously high, the number doesn’t even mean anything. Suffice it to say that their deficit makes ours look like an interest payment. They owe the farm and we owe a horse.

But we are supposed to only owe a pig or two, get it? So how far away from being Greece are we, this is my question…

The Senate just passed a $149 billion jobless aid bill. Last year we did an $863 billion stimulus bill. Last year California was doling out IOU’s and this year State governments are talking about hard times. Congress is practically paralyzed by the growing deficit and the huge debt we have- it’s even making China have second thoughts about us as a good treasury bond investment, and nobody quite knows what to do about getting jobs back here…

Sort of sounds like what’s going on in Greece. Greece is a country going through what Wall Street went through in 2008, but the difference is that the EU is not bailing them out the way that the U.S. government decided to bail out Wall Street.

Instead, Greece is raising taxes while cutting civil servant incomes and freezing pensions. Wow. Of course Papandreou will be demonized, and I would be beyond upset if I were a Greek civil servant- but also, he’s doing what needs to be done to get things under control- he’s making the hard decisions.

"Workers will raise their fist and shout with one voice: We won't pay for the crisis. No one, nothing is going to terrorize workers," said a statement from the private sector union GSEE. But who will they raise their voices to? Who are they protesting against? Cuts in government money? The government may have been the steward of their money, yes, but the only reason they have the salaries and the pensions they are angry about losing is because that government went and invested it in crazy Wall Street schemes.

The whole world is addicted to this kind of thing- we are an economic model that requires consistent growth and everyone wants a growth spurt to be perpetual. But life doesn’t work that way.

How far from being Greece are we? I would say not as far as we think. Our own deficit is growing and no one seems to know what to do about it. We are throwing money at everything when there is a problem and that’s all we can think to solve our nation’s problems with- but the problem is now we can’t throw our own money at the problem of being in debt.

And that’s right where Greece is at. And they are cutting salaries and raising taxes.

Will the U.S. cut salaries and raise taxes? Not until we can’t get a loan from the IMF or something. Which may happen- that’s basically what Greece is looking at…

Photo Credit: kevindooley (via Flickr under CCL)