There are three essential problems with Greece and it’s status. First, the political “lords” that ran the country for the past forty years...saw the revenue pot as unlimited, and just gave away the money. Second, salaries, benefits and pensions continued every year to climb at a unsustainable level. Third, people eventually learned how to get around taxes or just quietly walked away.
These are all issues which California faces currently. I think if you took a dozen political figures from California to Athens, Greece....for two weeks...they might actually see lots of comparisons in what went wrong there and how it relates to their own situation.
It is foolish to single out any state “as failed” when compared the federal government which really is failed. California is a piker in comparison. The whole country is on economic fire and people want to point to smoking California as the problem. That’s missing the burning forest for the smoking tree. The problem starts in Washington DC.
“...they might actually see lots of comparisons in what went wrong there and how it relates to their own situation.”
Actually, the only comparison they would be able to see would be that other people, mostly rich ones, are to blame for all of their problems and that high-taxes, big deficits, and huge public sector employee drains on the economy are not.