GREECE FINANCIAL CHAOS IS COMING TO AMERICA SOON; PRELUDE OF WHAT IS TO COME IS CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED BY IRRESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT SPENDING

Greece at one time ruled the world, for those of us who remember our high school world history class. Now it is a struggling entitlement laden country of 11.5 million people who are on the verge of bankruptcy due to its $400 billion public debt.

If you were to start mathematically calculating the debt that Greece is struggling with, its debt is relatively equal to the US debt, which is 30 times its population size and equal also in dollar terms, about $12 TRILLION.

So what is the difference between Greece and the USA? Well, on a fiscal basis, none, except that the USA is not part of the European Union ( EU) which can dictate fiscal policies to member countries, and therefore has spared the USA of being a fiscal pariah like Greece is now in the EU zone.

There are of course other factors that create the appearance of fiscal strength on the part of the USA, but they are illusions compared to reality and are based solely on the reputation of the USA, rather than actual financial condition differences.

If Greece collapses financially, which it will and must, nobody outside of that country really cares, and some banks and the various other lenders/creditors/bondholders involved will have to write down the value of those holdings, but the rest of the 6 billion people could care less.

Greece suffers from a malady that we in the USA have now been infected with: "entitlements" that will eventually absorb the budget and everyone living here, in the next generation or two. America will be Greece by 2040-2050.

Currency speculators will be betting against the dollar and selling it, while buying the Yuan or the Rupee! The dollar will be just another battered currency and the country will be one slugging along burdened by unsustainable debt, trading at a deep discount to face value, since it will never be able to pay off that debt, therefore technically a bankrupt state, unable to ever pay its obligations.

Recent news releases have stated that about half of the US population pays no income taxes and a great percentage of the non-payers also actually get a REBATE of someone else's taxes instead! " Let' the rich pay," is a common shout---hello.... the top 25% pretty much pay more than 90% of the taxes already should they pay 100% now, to be fair? What happens when there is nobody left to pay?

Never in the history of this great country have the politicians been as ignorant about fiscal policy, fiscal restraint and spending as now, and this spending spree is being funneled by the least informed Congress who does not even read 2,400 page bills that it passes, knowing nothing of its full contents or implications!

Greece was a former world power...a long...log time ago...it's in the history books, and its fall long ago was for the SAME policies as its fall is today!

America is now Greece, and oblivious to the history lessons from its long ago fall as well as its current fiscal destruction.

Advice, buy and hold the Yuan and get a Yuan dominated Visa account at one of the international banks account...it will only gain in value as the dollar must inevitably decline. The unsustainable deficits, new unsustainable entitlement programs and anti-business administration is the beginning of the fiscal destruction of America.

This is the Greek tragedy.

In ATHENS, Greece, civil servants staged a 24-hour strike Thursday against austerity measures and expected job cuts by Greece's crisis-plagued government, and the EU's statistics agency said the country's budget was even worse than previously thought.

The strike disrupted all public services, shut down schools and left state hospitals working with emergency staff. Protesters from a Communist-backed trade union blockaded Athens' main port of Piraeus, disrupting ferry services.

Eurostat, meanwhile raised Greece's budget deficit in 2009 to 13.6 percent of gross domestic product from its earlier prediction of 12.9 percent, while the ratio of government debt to GDP stood at 115.1 percent, the second highest in the European Union after Italy.

In comments that are sure to rattle markets, the statistics agency also expressed "a reservation on the quality of the data reported by Greece." It also said Greek's 2009 figures could be revised further, to the tune of 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points of GDP for the deficit and 5 to 7 percentage points of GDP for the debt.

Markets were shocked last fall when the government announced that the previous conservative Greek government had issued misleading financial data for years.

About 3,000-4,000 protesters marched through central Athens, carrying banners reading "tax the rich" and "Don't take the bread from our table." Scuffles broke out when about 150 demonstrators challenged police lines near the city's central Syntagma Square, and police responded with tear gas.

Greek airports remained open, however, after air traffic controllers suspended their participation in the strike because of the travel chaos caused by Iceland's volcanic ash cloud.

Labor unions fear deeper cuts after the Socialist government began talks this week with the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission for a three-year rescue package aimed at easing the country's acute debt crisis.

"The IMF has the same cookie-cutter solution for different economies ... Now they are making a European cookie cutter," said Spyros Papaspyros, head of the civil servants umbrella union, ADEDY.

News of the revised figures sent Greece's borrowing costs shooting up to new record highs. The interest rate gap, or spread, between Greek 10-year bonds and German ones - considered a benchmark of stability - widened to 5.29 percentage points minutes after the announcement, from 5.03 percentage points earlier in the morning. The spreads translate into prohibitively high interest rates of more than 8 percent, more than twice those of Germany's.

Athens said its target of reducing its deficit by at least 4 percentage points in 2010 remained unchanged despite the revision.

"The government has already adopted all the necessary measures in excess of 6 percent of GDP to ensure the achievement of this objective," the Finance Ministry said.

It said the new figures showed the scale of Greece's financial troubles, which it blamed on mishandling by the previous, conservative government.

Greece is struggling to cope with a debt of euro 300 billion ($406 billion) and needs to borrow about euro54 billion this year alone. It has a projected public debt of more than 120 percent of gross domestic product through 2011.

On Tuesday, the government shaved its May borrowing requirement by raising euro95 billion ($2.62 billion) in a 13-week treasury bill auction that was oversubscribed. The public debt management agency said Thursday it had accepted an additional euro450 million in noncompetitive bids for the treasury bill auction, which has a settlement date of April 23.

Comparing the Greek debt to the US, the parallels are almost identical.