If you ever start thinking no place could suck harder than the good ol' U.S.A., just look to the glory that is Greece. The Greek government is responding to its self-inflicted debt crisis by doing just about every single thing wrong.
That might not be clear from most of the media coverage. To comprehend any of the popular descriptions of Greece's public debt problem, you need to be a yes man as mindless as the guy whose job it is to keep saying "Certainly, Socrates...You're quite right, Socrates..." in the Platonic dialogues.
The New York Times blames the investment banks that held a gun to the crowned heads of Europe and forced governments to take on more debt. The Guardian says it was deregulation and privatization of state enterprises that caused public spending to, um, increase? (Just go with it.) Greek tax collectors say the problem is that tax collectors need to be paid more. And because he knows that being able to print your own money always encourages fiscal responsibility, Paul Krugman says it's because Greece went off the drachma too soon. (That problem may be working itself out faster than anybody planned.)
But the beauty of Greece's looming default is that it is a totally straightforward story of uncontrolled public spending and the determination of governments to run up impossible debts. In this case, as the above Times article spells out, those debts were run up in duplicitous ways that in fact violated the public debt rules of the EU from which Greece is now trying to get a bailout. Your worst nightmare of a wastrel American politician -- call him Barack Schwarzenegger -- would have a hard time mismanaging state finances this badly.
