Surprised you would reply with a comment like that to my text but no I'm not against taxing the rich higher, my point is a country should live within its means so once you have collected all the tax etc that is the pot of money you get to spend. Otherwise you just burden future generations with poverty as they have to pay off our debts which is incredibly unfair to them.

i dont know any country that went broke because of social benefits.  the whole western debt debacle is a taxation problem, and our bad growth too.  the debt has risen because the tax for the 1% was lowered and lowered.  the uk had 95% income tax for the top 1% till the 70s, now they have 50% and a lot of loopholes...

It's 1% to blame they control the banking cartel which in turn own the oil companies...which our whole economy is based a zero sum gain energy system throw in the fiat currencies that banking cartels implemented. The system is flawed and designed to fail, so new world order can be formed. 

The whole western debt debacle is about huge disproportion between end-use consumption and actual wealth being created. Quite often you may find out that the same countries that have enjoyed excessive hikes in consumption at the same time didn't have comparable hikes in industrial output or even degraded quite strongly in that regard. The most prominent examples are well-known, one just basically defaulted, but this was tiny one there're bigger whales waiting in line. Wealth redistribution across the globe, printing press and debt accumulation have been working quite nicely to cover those disproportions, as long as cheap energy was here. Well, here're the 'news', it's not anymore. Fiscal problems like debt are merely visual representation of the systematic problem. Besides it's not necessarily about government debt, that's only a tip of an iceberg for the most part, so taxing the rich is hardly a solution.

Not so long time ago I did a tiny review of EU's consumption vs. production based on Eurostat, measured in toe's (the further we go the more laughable GDP figures as a measure of productive work appear to me, so I had to look for alternatives), as flawed as it might be it nevertheless listed PIIGS at the bottom. But again it's not about Greece or PIIGS in general, those're just early symptoms.

BTW my 'congrats' to Greeks. Decades of literally eating into the future generations wealth might eventually leave you without future at all. Not the last one to go that route though, if that sounds comforting. As for the long-term prospects: no pensions, no social payments of any sort, retirement age to the max, work harder for less, crime rate hike, no gas for you -- use wood, infrastructural degradation will finally catch up with industrial degradation, back to the agricultural economy, that understandably won't be able to support current population density, i.e. no work for the masses, as a result rampart emigration -- pretty picture for a generation or two. At least you have a good climate.

why do  we have a disproortion betwen consume and wealth creation? ohh right, because the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.  how do you change this trend? higher taxes for the rich and more redistribution of wealth.

toe are totaly useless because energie consumtion doesnt scale with productivity or wealth creation. 

and last but not least, energie is cheap atm, realy cheap, same goes for transportation(the BDI is realy low, i mean realy realy low...)

HSBC has laid out all likely paths from tomorrow, in nice flow-chart form: http://www.businessinsider.com/hsbc-greek-banks-will-not-open-next-week-2015-7

Use cut paper of your favourite kind to measure those if that makes more sense to you... won't make GDP a good indication of productive activity anyway. If US GDP is halfed tomorrow does that mean they've lost half of their economy? No, it means it never been there. Bogus numbers they are.

Really? Or you mean when measured in cut paper? Well, that's a problem of pricing model that needs to be corrected, but doesn't mean that energy is actually cheap. Peak oil (equivalent of peak energy for our world) means expensive oil, expensive to produce when production costs measured in the same oil naturally (or toe's, kJ's, whatever), that's what I meant. Expensive energy means expensive everthing in the long production line of goods, which at the next iteration makes energy production is even more expensive, which in turn means even less oil produced and so on and so forth -- death spiral (add to that declining demand). That's why your peak oil doesn't mean middle road of oil production, but beginning of an end, more like jump from a cliff -- our system is designed for cheap oil, expensive oil means huge restructurization of an economy reminisent of its destruction. Maybe we won't fight for can of tuna, but smth very much Mad Max'ian is possible for... certain regions :D

BDI being low is nothing to brag about, it just really shows how unhealthy world trade currently is.

Maybe I'm not quite getting your thought here? If wealth creation is located elsewhere, I'm not sure whom you're going to tax? And what you're planning to achieve with that? In most developed countries population is a huge debtor as a whole. Even over here it's a net debtor, in other words all individuals as a whole owe more than they lend, even though it's a vey modest minus so it's safe to say the balance is around zero. While in the US similar balance in multi-trillion red zone. Tax who?

90% of the population are in debt to  the other 10%.   

and there will be no peak oil, the oil industrie is fine with 100$/b and the world is able to pay that price.

and the consumtion could decline in the next 20 years. europe is slowly starting to use power-to-gas, and china will follow soon. green energies need storage, and H² or other gas fits that needs well.

oh and back to topic, greece has defaulted to the ecb too...
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/eurokrise/griechenland/griechische-schuldenkrise-ezb-untersucht-470-millionen-kredit-der-athener-notenbank-13681641.html

greece defaulted on an old loan, and now the ecb is investigating if that was legal or not(because it was a loan to the greek central bank and state financing isnt allowed for central banks in the eu)