[krrrh]

There are so many automatic stabilizers built into the US economy which move wealth from some states to others when economic disruption occurs (stuff like unemployment insurance, military spending, federal minimum wage laws, social security, Medicare, DOE transfers, etc) that you rarely see explicit bailouts of failed states in the USA because they're mostly unnecessary. The EU simply has nowhere near the fiscal integration of the US, so member states can really go off in their own direction despite all the supposed safeguards such as Maastricht.

I get that you're pointing out that culturally Finland has less in common with Greece than Oregon has with Louisiana, but that was not always the case. The US just has had the benefit of a couple of hundred years of deep integration since the Louisiana purchase. Cuba is not part of any political association with the US, so naturally it can't be compared.

Also... The US did bail out the Mexican government and save it from default in the 1990s, quite quickly and decisively. The fact that most people don't even remember that, and yet so much ink has been spilled and so many teeth gnashed over whether, or how, or whether to break up the union instead says a lot about the fragility of the EU (to be expected of course, it's still such a young institution). The integration and benefit to the states in the US has been enormously successful. Many would like to see the EU get there but it is still more correctly analogous to NAFTA which even though it was only a few years old and much less ambitious, played a big part in justifying the Mexican bailouts.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_economic_crisis_in_Mexic...