wpegg: I'd have sympathy for this view, and indeed I personally believe we should be supporting more economic parity (not necessarily through aid, but "yes" when appropriate). Unfortunately you're making it in context of an institution that still railroads the Euro into poorer economies that are actively harmed by it. No plausable amount of aid would grant the benefit that Spain or Italy could elicit by being allowed to inflate their currency a bit. Those high fences come in different forms, and the richer Eurozone countries are definitely holding one up towards the poorer countries.
Spain and especially Italy are kind of average in the wealthiness ranking I think. While poor countries like Poland and Hungary still have their own curency and could devalue.
There are economic theories of optimal single currency areas. They have advantages (bigger market, less risks of variable exchange rates, easier travelling and paying cross border) and disadvantages like no devaluation. Especially problematic is a missing fiscal union but that is not what many people want anyway. Having the single currency probably doesn't make much sense if not at least there is some sort of fiscal union (which means something like I have a say in how much you can spent as long as you have financial problems). It's a really long way to go there.
But I don't want to blame the single currency only. Look for example at the public debt to GDP ratio. Even for the UK with its own currency the debt has gone up a lot. The exact responsibility for this 40% increase of debt to GDP ratio within 8 years (you better not try to convert this to billion pounds or you might get really angry at someone) is still a bit unknown or not really followed (hint: It probably wasn't Brussels this time.)
I'm the first to admit that austerity was wrong and I never voted for it, but the second focus on long term control of deficits sounds reasonable to me. I would have traded short term deficit spending by long term financial stability reforms and I'm sure it would have worked for everyone but Greece who would have additionally needed a much stronger cut of the debt and more reforms more quickly.
But Italy and France also did not do much until it was very late. Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Hollande are all not known for their great economic strategies.
And I'm also for a temporarily, higher inflation target for the Euro. After all we are very close to deflation and that is even dangerous and unemployment is just too high. From economics we know that higher inflation results in lower unemployment (Phillips curve), so we should have done that but then the eurozone is also very inhomogenous economically so this all probably means it just isn't an optimal single currency area. If only we had known this in 1992 but who knew then how everything would develop.
Actually there is something you can do even with a single currency. It's called internal devaluation. What you do is increase taxes on consumption and decrease taxes on labour. However, this works best if the other side matches it with reciprocal actions.