Greece- what went wrong?

I have not seen a country go bankrupt before. It would be interesting to see one happen but I wouldn't wish that on any one. It would mean that foreign creditors would grab what was owed and the infrastructure like power plants, roads, water supply would not belong to the Greeks any more. How sad!

Wait a minute! Isn't that what the NZ National government is wanting to do? Sell off our assets! But we're far from bankrupt!!! It just doesn't make sense! Our state owned enterprises generate hundreds of millions a year for the government; selling it off is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Quoting from UK's Telegraph on Greece:
Currently, tax collection is a bad joke. The self-employed systematically dodge taxes, and since they account for around 35pc of the workforce, and include many doctors and lawyers as well as a plumbers, Greece simply doesn't raise enough taxes to finance its bloated public sector.

NZ has the same problem although no where near Greece's extend. The NZ Inland Revenue Department released in a report saying that for every 100 million they spend on tax investigations, they recover 400 million tax dollars. You can imagine the amount of tax dodging that goes on even in this supposedly honest country.

I am about to embark on self employment; why on earth would I want more tax investigations on the self employed? First of all, I'll only be a small fish in a sea of sharks. Second of all, most of my friends and family are salary and wage earners who are not able to dodge any taxes. I am sick of the middle class bearing the brunt of the tax burden.

A Greek on the street of Athens was interviewed just a couple of days ago, saying "Apart from Tourism and a few Olive trees, Greece doesn't produce anything else". Why is that? The government of Greece has neglected the importance of development on their economy. From 2005-2010, Greece had only spend 0.6% of their GDP on Research & Development. This is far below the average of 2% for OECD countries.

NZ spend just 1.2% of GDP on R&D. Although much better than Greece, NZ is at only 60% of average. All OECD countries with at least 2% of R&D spending had economic growth of 2% or more.Only exception being Iceland because their financial system fell over during the global financial crisis.

The above graph is from an R&D magazine. NZ with its number of scientist and engineers should be spending at least 2% on R&D; that is 67% more than what we're spending now. I know so many scientist and engineers that are under employed, Phds who are only teaching secondary schools, etc. With an increase in R&D spending, we could fully employ these people to create innovations that'll bring us much better economic growth.

Well, if Greece really does fall over; let it be a warning on the importance of tax collection and adequate R&D spending.