Every time Greece is in the news, I hear mutters about how Americans need to look hard at what happens, because if we don't get our act together, we're headed for the same fate. And every single time, I think "No, that's really not quite right." I could dismiss the muttering, but this time it's louder, including from Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal: "Greece will happen here if we do not change course. Anyone who disagrees with this is a 'math denier.' "
So this is where I tell you why it's really not quite right, why the parallels you see are not the only important ones, or even the most important ones.
Everyone who's thinking about policy thinks in metaphors. You have to; situations are novel, and analysis will take you only so far. Eventually you have to fall back on past events to give you a framework for what will happen in the future. The danger, of course, is that you'll grab the wrong metaphor. Saddam Hussein in 2002: Was he Hitler in the Sudetenland or Ho Chi Minh in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Obama really the second coming of FDR? If you squint, you can always find reasons to choose the metaphor you want — but you will always have to overlook some important differences.
The first thing to note about Greece is that it has a lot of problems, many of which America simply doesn't, and won't for the foreseeable future. Let's list them in order to get a sense of what I am talking about:
1) Small, underdeveloped economy.
2) Long history of default and financial mismanagement that, among other things, made lenders charge them high interest rates to borrow.
3) Broad corruption.
4) Inability to collect the taxes that are levied, both because of the aforementioned corruption, and because Greece does not have a strong civic tradition of tax compliance.