One of the most basic human experiences is of seeing something you want for sale, then realizing you can’t have it because you don’t have enough money. This applies to governments, too. Spending on schools, health care, and pensions come from revenues; revenues come from taxes on economic activity. If taxes are so high that people decide economic activity isn't worth it — or if people don’t pay taxes at all — revenues go down. Governments can borrow money to continue spending programs, but eventually those bills come due. If the government hasn’t collected taxes on revenue by then, the spending programs fall apart. If people rely on spending programs to be able to buy things, the economy falls apart, too.
I just gave you a patronizing macroeconomics lesson only because so few people are discussing the fundamentals of what’s happening in Greece right now. Greece may have been a victim of the 2008 financial crisis; it may now be a victim of overly-harsh demands for austerity by a country that has no business being harsh with demands. But crimes committed against Greece by outsiders are miniscule compared to the fiscal crime Greece has committed against itself: creating a generous welfare state and failing to collect taxes to fund it.
Yet on Meet the Press last Sunday, Bernie Sanders heaped praiseon Greek voters for demanding a bailout and rejecting further austerity in a national referendum. Framing the Greeks’ decision as a righteous one that would protect programs for children, the sick, and the elderly, Sanders didn’t mention the fiscal realities that are precisely reason those programs are threatened in the first place.
Sanders, an avowed socialist who is bizarrely running for the presidential nomination of a party he has never been registered with, wants to drastically expand the US government’s obligations to citizens: repealing Obamacare and replacing it with Medicare-for-all, free four-year college tuition for all, and much else. Like Greece’s socialist leaders, and, though their national circumstances are not so dire, the socialist leaders of France, Sanders is attached to the idea that the state must guarantee the economic well-being of all its citizens.
I’m on record as sharing, albeit to a lesser extent, the belief that the government must provide education, health care, and worker protections so that everyone has a chance to pursue happiness as they understand it. But Sanders seems to not notice that a country first must have a growing economy, and then tax it.
I hope that finding a way to pay for increased government spending would be top of mind for a socialist candidate. What with his perspective on the crisis in Greece, I doubt it is.