American taxpayers must be the most generous people on Earth.

Not only did they bail out Wall Street, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the world’s largest insurance company (aig), the world’s largest automobile manufacturer (General Motors), multiple credit card companies, and a host of other companies including Caterpillar, Harley Davidson and MacDonald’s, but now, taxpayers are at it again.

For these generous-hearted stalwarts, no bailout seems too much. Swamped with debt, rising unemployment, and a higher cost of living, taxpayers are now helping bail out big-spending Greeks, and Portuguese too. And that is not all.

This recent stealth bailout is coming via the International Monetary Fund. The imf is 17 percent financed by the United States. When it cuts a check, the Federal Reserve gets the bill—and taxpayers ultimately pick up the tab.

Only in America will you find people so willing to give money to others so they can live larger than themselves. Wages in Greece, for example, have gone up over 100 percent over the past decade. Wages growth in America over that time? Zero. Adjusted for inflation, wages are probably negative. Retirement age in Greece is 58. In America retirement age is 65, and the government recently increased it to 67.

So off to work Americans go (those who have jobs), working longer, for less money, so they can send more of it to people they don’t know and will never meet.

It is one thing to bail out your family member or neighbor, but why are Americans bailing out a wealthy country located thousands of miles away across the Atlantic?

America has its own money problems. Congress is locked in an epic—and losing—struggle to get its spending problems under control. Doesn’t it have something more important to spend its money on than bailing out a nation notorious for evading taxes? What about all the people in America who are losing their homes?

You want to know why America is spending billions bailing out Greece when it can’t find enough money for its own people? It is not because we fear an olive shortage. It’s all about the big banks.

As it turns out, American banks didn’t just invest in risky subprime mortgage debt—but they sold “insurance” on risky sovereign debt too.

If Greece defaults, American banks will be on the hook for $41.4 billion, according to Bank for International Settlements data. But U.S. banks are dangerously undercapitalized. Where are they going to get that kind of money from?

And it gets worse. If Portugal collapses, American banks would be forced to pay up an additional $46.5 billion, according to Kash Mansori at The Street Light blog. If Ireland goes bad, they would need to find another $105 billion.

In dollar terms, American banks are just as exposed to a European meltdown as the Europeans are. “[F]inancial institutions in the U.S. have roughly as much to lose from default as those in France and Germany,” says Mansori.

Making the situation all the more dangerous is that nobody knows just how exposed individual American banks are. Who is solvent and who isn’t? It is the stuff of credit crunches and crises.

Who will be the next Lehman? Bank of America? JP Morgan? Goldman Sachs?

And to top it off, ratings agency Fitch recently warned that U.S. money market funds are very heavily exposed to European banks. About 30 percent of total assets are European bank paper, according to Fitch. Those nice conservative money market accounts so many banks promote may actually be financial death traps.

In announcements reminiscent of 2008, U.S. banks are reporting massive withdrawals of money from their European exposed money market funds—$85 billion worth just last month.

The bailouts continue, but the crises keep coming. Meanwhile, taxpayers get asked to dig deep once again to bail out the big banks.

The reason the world continues to suffer is because it avoids fixing the root cause of its troubles.

Economically speaking, you cannot fix a problem caused by too much spending and debt by adding more spending and debt. Yet this is exactly what America and Europe continue to do.

With each subsequent bailout loan given, the problems at best get postponed. But the cause actually worsens because debt levels rise.

There is only one remedy for a debt crisis of such magnitude: total wipeout. Debts need to be destroyed. Either they get paid, or written off. Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland show that they will not be paid. Thus, worries are spreading to Spain, and Italy.

So why is America bailing out Greece? Because the Greece bailout is really a Wall Street bailout. If Greece goes, America risks a Lehman-style collapse at home too.

Thus taxpayers are asked to put out more to temporarily prop up a system that is not being fixed.

Debt collapse looms.

But beyond unsustainable debt, there is an even more fundamental and basic cause of the economic crisis facing this world: broken law. Read this article to see what I am talking about.