It’s all Greek to U.S.

March 4, 2010 by Matthew Jarzen 

Our massive debt and continued spending could land us in Greece’s shoes

Today, our headlines are dominated by a few important stories.

Anyone who follows the news (and not the Daily Show) will realize that I’m speaking of the battle over health care reform and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.

And if you ever get to catch any clips of financial news, you may have heard of what’s going on in Greece.

To make a long story short, Greece is on the verge of collapse and is rapidly spiraling out of control.

Why? Simply because Greece has done what we’re about to do here in the United States — spending itself into oblivion.

Because of the massive amount of spending, the Greek government is no longer able to sustain itself and has created a veritable financial crisis that could possibly spread to other countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland.

Such a collapse would mean one big European bailout.

In order to prevent a European meltdown, the EU parliament has stripped Greece of its voting privileges and its financial sovereignty. In addition, the EU demanded that Greece make drastic cuts.

The austere measures that the socialist Greek government has been forced to impose is designed to cut spending.

This would mean cutting what the government spends to baby their citizens — most notably the tremendous benefits their public service employees receive as opposed to their private-sector counterparts.

Because of this, public employees that are now out of work because of spending cuts have taken to the streets of Athens to riot against these measures.

They aren’t willing to budge even in the face of financial Armageddon.

For years, the Greek government hasn’t been able to make any progress because of the entrenched labor unions.

In fact, Greece is almost eerily reminiscent of another entity that went bankrupt because it could no longer afford to operate as it was forced to pay out huge salaries and benefits to unionized employees who weren’t willing to budge when it came time to choose between the life of the entity and the employees.

I’m speaking of General Motors or Chrysler. These two corporations are a model of what is going on in Greece.

GM had to make drastic cuts when their quarterly reports were printed exclusively in red ink, but the United Auto Workers were not willing to budge.

So what happened? The federal government bailed them out.

In fact, what’s going on in Greece could also translate to what’s happening all across the country with cities and states having to make drastic cuts to prevent themselves from collapsing.

But public sector unions seem to be at the front of the line trying to put a stop to such cuts.

Beyond union intrusion, we can learn another lesson from Greece — the dangers that arise when the socialist welfare-state runs out of other peoples’ money.

California is the perfect example of this.

California is literally on the precipice of bankruptcy. They’ve been paying out IOUs to contractors that service the state. They’ve taxed virtually everything that can be taxed and they’re still in a $20 billion hole.

The problem with California doesn’t come only from unwilling unions and politicians, but also from the citizenry who’ve sucked off of California’s welfare for years.

These people don’t want to see the thousands of state programs cut as it affects their dependent livelihood.

It may come to the point where Washington will have to happily play the part of the EU and potentially bailout California.

If this happens, we might as well go really European and strip California of its sovereignty as a state until it pays back all the money.

The situations in California and Greece are warnings for what is facing the United States. We now have a national debt of over $12 trillion. Our deficit, which liberals loved to groan about under former President George W. Bush, is now more than a $1 trillion.

The second largest holder of our debt, Japan, is on the verge of collapse as well.

By 2015, Medicare will be completely bust with an unfunded tab of about $80 trillion to pay up. Social security will be totally bankrupt by 2020.

On top of all of that, President Barack Obama wants to create the largest entitlement program in the history of the United States — government-run health care that will end up costing us over $2 trillion under this plan.

The entitlements that our fellow citizens suck off of will have totally bankrupted this country. You constantly hear pundits and politicians telling us that these people are robbing their children and their grandchildren.

Well guess what — that means they’ve been robbing you too. When we get out of college and if we are lucky enough to find a job, our generation will have to pay for this enormous mountain of debt.

Sure, you may think that this won’t affect you now.

But everything that’s coming down the pike is eventually going to have to come out of your wallet. Socialism is great, until you have to foot the bill for everyone else.