[jyl]

I agree Greece and Greeks need to undergo beaucoup pain to fix that country. But I think the media is missing a big part of the story. The easy media story is that Greece's problem is too many direct and indirect benefits and that cutting spending (austerity) is the sole solution. That is the story that Germany and other Eurozone powers want to tell. The under-told story is that Greece has a revenue collection problem which is at heart a high level corruption problem. In 2009, Greeks concealed EUR28BN of income which is about EUR11BN of tax revenue lost, which is IIRC larger than Greece's budget deficit was at that time. The primary tax evaders are the higher income and highest income Greeks (business owners, professional class). That happens to include much of the Greek parliament. I wonder why the Greek govt has not acted more forcefully to collect taxes?

Greece is a real time experiment. Can austerity alone fix that country? So far, not working. Actually it is simply plunging that country into an extremely deep recession, pretty close to a depression, and causing the budget deficit to explode.

The reason the country is doing that experiment is because, as I explained above, the Eurozone's primary goal is not actually to fix Greece.