While much attention has been focused on Greece’s mounting debt and structuring potential emergency solutions, the Greeks have actually already reduced the deficit by 5% of their GDP. Though this means that Greece is still far from being anywhere near out of the woods, it is a significant number in any modern economy, let alone the bleeding mediterranean nation. But when you look at how that 5% was made up, it looks as though the Greeks have reverted back to Hellenistic Era medical techniques, leaving the patient to bleed out his disease without replenishing the blood. Or, as the President of the Hellenic Chamber of Commerce in Athens, Konstantinos Mihalos, put it, “You can not keep on milking the cow without feeding it.”

Prime Minister George Papandreou has recently received a vote of confidence from his cabinet to implement a radical financial policy that would demand fiscal austerity and further bleed a dying Greek economy. Papandreou is proposing tax increases, wage cuts, and the selling of Greece’ crown jewels of national pride to raise funds equivalent to 12% of GDP. Selling the postal bank, national railway system, Greek Telecom, the national lottery, prime Mediterranean real estate, and the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki. Greece has long prided itself in being a socialist state and would have to inherently change their nature as a government, a people, and a culture to take these measures to save their shirt.

And while the people of Greece may be ardently against cutting wages, raising taxes, and selling off national crown jewels, they have to agree on some sort of fiscal responsibility, because a bail out and debt restructuring can’t do it alone. And while wage cuts and tax increases only continue to stifle the the rock bottom economy, selling off national assets would privatize them and insert money into the economy by creating private businesses. Neither solution is perfect, but some serious thought should be put into cutting wages and increasing taxes (maybe just increase taxes?) before completely writing off the sale of sovereign property.

But if Greece has already entered into a debt trap, where the government has to take out loans to pay the interest on other loans, then these measure will definitely not be enough on their own, and a huge bailout and restructuring would be necessary. A further recession at that point would be inevitable, as Greece’s participation in the European Central Bank, as part of the euro zone, prevents them from devaluing their currency or cutting interest rates. This means that the Greek government can possibly only use cuts in their budget and increases in taxes as tools to make up ground.

The most important part of reviving the Greek economy now is that it needs to start running a surplus before Greece’s debt can even be restructured and rescheduled, before even paying off any interest. I will be hard to do that though, with about a quarter of the entire Greek population being state employees, and a huge slashing of the budget, tens of thousands of people are posed to lose their jobs and forced to enter into the private sector and work for companies like IBM or digital satellite. And it becomes painfully clear that the rescue mission for Greece’s economy is looking a lot like privatization and the end of the Greek Socialist state.