EVERY time Greece is in the news, I hear mutters about how Americans need to look hard at what happens, because if we don’t get our act together, we’re headed for the same fate.

Everyone who’s thinking about policy thinks in metaphors. You have to; situations are novel, and analysis will take you only so far. Eventually you have to fall back on past events to give you a framework for what will happen in the future. The danger, of course, is that you’ll grab the wrong metaphor. Saddam Hussein in 2002: Was he Hitler in the Sudetenland or Ho Chi Minh in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Obama really the second coming of Franklin D Roosevelt?

The first thing to note about Greece is that it has a lot of problems, many of which America simply doesn’t, and won’t for the foreseeable future. Let’s list them in order to get a sense of what I am talking about:

1. Small, underdeveloped economy

2. Long history of default and financial mismanagement that made lenders charge them high interest rates to borrow

3. Broad corruption

4. Inability to collect the taxes that are levied, both because of the aforementioned corruption, and because Greece does not have a strong civic tradition of tax compliance

5. Attempting to fix 1 and 2 by adopting an outside currency that hurt exports and left the nation with a monetary policy inappropriate to its business cycle, unable to continue its long tradition of inflating its way out of fiscal and economic problems, and vulnerable to massive capital flight if things fell apart

6. An unsustainable pension system

7. Massively unsustainable borrowing to deal with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6

8.The worst financial crisis in living memory hitting just as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 came to a head

Now, which of these problems does the United States have? Arguably both 6 and 7, though Greece had the extra-strength, prescription-only, highly addictive kind of pensions and borrowing, and the US is just on baby aspirin. I solidly believe that American policy as it currently stands creates a number of very worrying structural problems that need to be fixed now with some moderate pain, instead of fixed later with quite a bit of agony.

You will notice what I have not said: “America is not Greece because we borrow in our own currency.” That’s because this is a silly thing to say. “America borrows in its own currency” is not some sort of natural law that follows from our proud frontier spirit and the shapely unfurling of our coastlines; it’s something we earn by being responsible stewards of our currency.

If we start inflating the heck out of the dollar, then creditors could force us to borrow in some other currency, or demand unacceptably high interest rates in exchange for letting us repay them in American money. Moreover, borrowing in your own currency prevents one particular sort of financial crisis, but it does not mean that you are immune from equally gnarly forms of currency crises, banking panics and similar financial dramas.

So while we will never exactly replicate what has happened to Greece, we could end up in a place that was very like Greece. So people who grimly prophesy that a Grecian-style crisis might be somewhere in our future, they aren’t demonstrably wrong; they just haven’t been right yet. Someday,  like all great nations, America will fall, whether it be next year or a millennium hence. Whatever happens, we will have our own crisis, not Greece’s. — Bloomberg View

Megan McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist.

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on July 7, 2015.