I didn't claim Greece doesn't neet to make any changes, I just said that depending on 2+2 equaling 5 will not help them.

I honestly don't know.

I don't know how to cure the common cold either. I DO know that drinking a bottle of drain cleaner is not a good answer to a cold.

I also know that austerity is NOT a good answer to Greece's problem.

I said debt service.

I posted a link to the paper as well. It's only natural that the right isn't going to talk about one of it's more embarrassing screw-ups.

There is a difference between making needed changes and austerity. If you don't know that, then you're in no position to judge someone else's knowledge of economics.

I never said they didn't need to make some changes. I just said austerity isn't the answer.

Read the paper and the many follow-on papers. Austerity CAUSES the debt spiral. It's like selling your seed corn to make today's payment.

I absolutely agree that Greece has a real problem. No matter what they do, they need to balance their budget (not the same as austerity). That's the thing, the demand wasn't cut back, the demand is full on austerity. It's a demand from people who've got the religion and don't care if the math says different.

It may be that the Euro is not in their best interest. In many ways, this is a truly unique situation. Because they are on the euro, they are denied a few important tools that have traditionally been used to get out of situations like they are in.

Read the paper. Read the other links. It's in there.

Acknowledged that Greece has limited options, but austerity is likely to contract their economy to the point that debt service exceeds their GDP.

You'll need to do some googling, I can't teach a full econ class here. But the TL;DR version is that every country that tried austerity has recovered more slowly than every country that didn't. That and the entire justification for austerity was in that one spreadsheet that turned out to have a glaring error.

But few have been demonstrated to be an artifact of a spreadsheet error like austerity and then shown to be a failure in practice as well as in theory.

If you are a contractor and have a bad month, selling off the tools of your trade isn't a good way to recover.

So you consider the actual paper that destroyed the argument for austerity and showed the spreadsheet error to be a poor reference?

It doesn't help that Greece was forced into an austerity plan in their last bailout. Essentially that kicked off a death spiral. Austerity has already been well discredited (see here, here, and here. Original paper here) yet it keeps being foisted off on citizens everywhere.

I'm not suggesting that Greece should spend money like a drunken sailor on leave, but following a faith based economic theory even after it has been disproven (even to the satisfaction of the writers of the original paper) is not the answer.

Find the jackass playing the cello on the beach and arrest him.

Many employers have inventing a reason down to a science. That's why there are so many rules in the workplace. It makes it easy to find an infraction for nearly anyone they want to get rid of.