Well that's true but really it's more about how fundamentally unsound Greece is. You got all these guys blaming Austerity or Teutonic discipline or Capitalism---but all those things worked to lift the other PIIGS countries out of the recession. While Spain still has another 18+ months before it's back to pre-2008 heights, it's been growing faster than any of the other large EU economies and is poised to get their
8th consecutive quarterof growing faster than even the UK.
But socioeconomically Greece isn't really like the rest of the EU. We've all seen how the Greeks could've paid off a full third of their entire debt load if they had just done the basic
governmental job of collecting taxes. But if you listened to the socialists the Greeks persist in putting into office, they've been taxed into destitution over the last four years.
In fact, the Greeks pay less taxes than many of the Northern Europeans. The Greek corporate tax rate is 26% (vs. 30% in Germany and 33% in France) and their individual tax is 42% (vs. 45% in both Germany and France). Their VAT tax, a major sticking point in the last round of negotiations, is lower than Denmark or most of Scandinavia. But really, those tax rates are only important if you have a government that wasn't a puerile sociologist's fan-fiction version of a contemporary utopia, because a functional EU state wouldn't produce outcomes like this:
That stray-dog-o-meter is probably spot on when contemplating the Greek disposition regarding their civic institutions. As "predatory" as those bond movements may seem, remember that Ireland and Spain have gotten similarly bitter medicine, but
medicine it was. With Greece, though, the leftist press like to claim it was a poison pill, but actually it's more like the patient was a chronic recidivist and was too far gone.
If anything, those lenders have shown extraordinary leeway by lending to Greece at all, given what they know about it. Recently, a lot of economists have been pointing out that Greece should have never been allowed in the Euro. That's because most people don't realize that Greece has been in a state of fiscal default or bankruptcy for
HALF ITS EXISTENCE as an independent state. Furthermore, although its economic history under three centuries of Ottoman rule is blurry (the Ottomans accepted children as tax payments), the fact is the previous incarnation of Greek self-rule---The Byzantines---also fell apart largely because of economic mismanagement. And THEY got chumped by their Venetian creditors too.
Basically the last millenia or so of Greek history has been a fiscal clownshow of the same cripple falling down the exact same flight of stairs for about a thousand years.
