The future is Greek (unless we shape up)

America is not Greece. For us that is certainly a good thing.

Greece is currently embroiled in a debt crisis that is testing the very existence of the euro.

Many other members of the European Union aren’t doing much better. Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain all have debts that are making investors squirm, and the prospects for these countries will get worse if Greece’s crisis goes unresolved.

Does the risk of governments defaulting in Europe mean the United States is about to pay for its growing debt? This probably will not happen anytime soon. But it should be a sign to our lawmakers that they need to come up with a serious long term plan to make our debt more sustainable.

Greece owes its debt problems partly to a bloated public sector and a flawed tax system but mostly to deceitful accounting practices that allowed the country to hide its unpaid bills. The financial crisis helped expose all this, and after the Greek government announced a budget shortfall last October equal to 13 percent of the country’s GDP, everything started to unravel.

There is likely to be some sort of bail-out from the rest of the European Union, but its details remain a mystery, as some countries likely to foot the bill feel such a bail-out would only encourage more reckless budgets from other member countries.

Either way, the movement to save Greece from its debts shows that the piper does come eventually to collect on countries that keep their spending unsustainable for too long. The risk is that these debt problems will blast the world economy again just as it is starting to recover from the recession.

Fortunately, investors don’t seem nearly as worried about our government debt as they have become about Greece’s.

But that doesn’t mean everything will be all right as Social Security and Medicare spending continue to rise while we continue without any plan to pay for it.

There is no reason lawmakers can’t work on a long-term plan to reform these two programs even while maintaining the current deficit spending necessary to shore up the economy in the midst of a recession.

Unfortunately, most politicians are more likely to rally against earmarks and pork than our budget’s long-term structural problems.

No one likes to talk about increasing the retirement age or cutting Medicare benefits. Voters certainly aren’t in the mood to hear about future tax increases when times are as tough as they are now.

But countries like Greece probably wish they had made hard decisions when they had the chance.