It's not as simple as that. Greece is in a hole largely because tax evasion is the national sport. The "average Greek" should bear the brunt of it. He or she owes decades of back taxes anyway... The premium Greece will have to pay on it's debts won't go away with dropping out of the Euro.
Except that the loans in question were made to the Greek government, not the average Greek. The creditors should have taken into account the Greek government's inability to collect proper taxes.
Let's be honest, tax evasion is pretty much a national pastime in the US too -- the difference is that here the IRS will come after you if you cross the line.
Yes, whereas it's systemic in Greece - the government will call off tax inspectors in an election year!
The only way forwards I see is for the Germans to take over the collection of Greek taxes, and to control Greece's spending too, at least for a generation.
Yes well that was the problem - Greeks are happy to vote for high government spending, they even vote for high taxes - they just don't pay them.
I think we'll also see them sell their half of Cyprus to Turkey too, for a few billion Euros, once the austerity starts to bite. And the Germans have their eye on a few of the Greek islands too.
It was only recently that Greece stopped openly calling for enosis, enjoining Cypriots to overthrow their own government if necessary. They've been quieter about that crap over the last couple of decades, but Greece still clings to the territorial dispute to justify its overgrown military. It is quite accurate to say that Greece hasn't yet let go of Cyprus, and that doing so would save it considerable money.
To my knowledge, the U.S. has never encouraged Canadians to overthrow their government, nor do they use Canada as an excuse to justify an expensive cold war against, say, France.
It is not just the tax dodging though. The greek people are, at least in Europe, known for being lazy and many of them are in government positions where they get paid a lot but don't work a lot. That they dodge taxes on top of that is just icing on the cake.
The other issue is that Greece couldn't keep up with exports in terms of cost with other EU member states. It isn't able to keep up with other high export countries for the same goods.
All Greeks I've met that had a government job made it a point of pride of how little they worked and how they spent their days openly in leisure or working a second job on government time. The private sector employees envied and cajoled them. It was surreal. Maybe it was the alcohol.
This is a real problem, as far as civil services are concerned. If you want to go to some service to do some work, their opening hours are frequently 10am-1pm. It's ridiculous, and really makes things hard for the public. I'm not familiar with any service that stays open to the public after 2pm, post offices, hospitals, whatever.
Meanwhile, employees in the private sector work 11-13 hour days, 6 (sometimes 7) days a week, so calling Greeks lazy is unfair. Most of my friends are amazed and envious when I tell them I don't work on Saturdays.
I've heard that kind of boasting from Americans working at dysfunctional large corporations also. Get people over beers and they'll tell you about how in all of last month, what they did is played 5000 games of Bejeweled Blitz, made 3 bullshit Powerpoint presentations, attended a few bullshit meetings, and carefully tweaked their .vimrc while pretending to work. It seems to be the sort of culture that crops up when people are in dysfunctional settings and cynical about whether their job is actually doing anybody any good; kind of a coping-mechanism I guess.
