http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-N...dline-approaches/7041437854348/?spt=sec&or=tn
They can't see anything other than steal, steal, steal.
They can't see anything other than steal, steal, steal.
-
Features
Greece still doesn't want to behave
- Thread starter Loren Pechtel
- Start date
untermensche
Contributor
The beauty of capitalism in action.
Jayjay
Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2002
- Messages
- 7,173
- Location
- Finland
- Basic Beliefs
- An accurate worldview or philosophy
Greece should make up its damn mind already. If it wants to go with the Eurogroup's plan, do it. If not, get the fuck out. But don't just hang halfway in between, that's worse than either option.
untermensche
Contributor
Those damn Greeks that oppose the destructive plan being forced down their throat.
If only capitalists knew how to make an economy grow they might get the Greeks to one day pay their debts.
But all they know how to do is exploit misery, not cure it, some much better than others.
If only capitalists knew how to make an economy grow they might get the Greeks to one day pay their debts.
But all they know how to do is exploit misery, not cure it, some much better than others.
Jayjay
Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2002
- Messages
- 7,173
- Location
- Finland
- Basic Beliefs
- An accurate worldview or philosophy
There was an alternative on the table - Varoufakis's plan - but the Greek government voted for it anyway and fired Varoufakis. You can argue that they should have chosen differently, but now that they have made their choice, what can they achieve by dragging their feet?
untermensche
Contributor
Again, if only capitalists knew how to grow a collapsed economy.
All they seem to know how to do is make a bad situation worse.
Try again. It's socialism that crashed the Greek economy.
You're blaming the capitalists for refusing to continue to throw money into an infinite pit.
- - - Updated - - -
The problem is the Greeks want to continue their overspending ways. Who wouldn't want to live on other people's money?
Ford
Contributor
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2010
- Messages
- 8,141
- Location
- Freedomland
- Basic Beliefs
- Just don't knock on my door on a Saturday Morning
Greece still doesn't want to behave
Well they've been enduring "austerity" measures in exchange for bailouts, but as one of the articles linked in the post you provided points out, the "austerity for prosperity" experiment has failed miserably.
Well they've been enduring "austerity" measures in exchange for bailouts, but as one of the articles linked in the post you provided points out, the "austerity for prosperity" experiment has failed miserably.
tupac chopra
Veteran Member
What did they steal?
Did you guys ever pay the original inhabitants of America for the land? Or did you steal it?
Toni
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2011
- Messages
- 22,778
- Basic Beliefs
- Peace on Earth, goodwill towards all
What you mean is that Greece isn't behaving the way that YOU and Angela Merkel wish them to behave.
Whether they are being wise or not in how they are behaving is a different matter. Frankly, I think the plans they were 'offered' were very unwise.
Whether they are being wise or not in how they are behaving is a different matter. Frankly, I think the plans they were 'offered' were very unwise.
DBT
Contributor
'Greece' isn't composed of a single mind or singular will. The ordinary workers of Greece, for instance, did not bring about the GFC. So they probably feel that they are bearing the brunt of a failure in management, they suffer while those who were most to blame for causing the crisis, the big end of town, the big fish, the bankers and the lenders, hardly suffer at all.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
And yet most of Europe has similar social plans and are able to support them. The problem in Greece is the same problem that has destroyed economies through history.
They couldn't get the rich to pay their taxes.
Greece is very lax in enforcing its tax code, cheating is rampant.
In the US we have built up our national debt by lowering taxes on the rich. This is because nearly half of the voters in the US believe like you do that we should be increasing the national debt in order to be increasing the incomes of the rich.
Where the Greeks and the most of Europe believe that the national income should be used for things like pensions, education, health care and infrastructure, this near majority in the US including you believe that the national income should be used to increase the income of the very rich by minimizing the incomes of everyone else.
I don't know why you believe this. Why do you believe that it is somehow more noble to run up the national debt in order to increase the income and the wealth of the already rich than it is to run up the national debt to provide pensions, education, health care and infrastructure?
What is better about your profligate debt building than the Greek's profligate debt building?
Prosperity depends so much on rich people?
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Greece is behaving in the only sensible way to behave at this point in time. We have established that the way that the Germans want to resolve these debts won't work. Austerity is doing nothing but digging the hole deeper and punishing without mercy parts of Greek society that didn't profit from the run up in the debt before 2008.
Running a budget surplus won't ever be able to pay off this massive amount of debt. The surplus reduces private savings and increases private debt. It reduces demand in the economy and reduces GDP faster than it is capable of paying down the public debt. The public debt is going to have to be reduced and the interest rates reduced, this has largely happened, and the terms of the loans stretched out.
The Germans are very proud of the fact that they paid off their debt from the two world wars. But both debts were reduced by the holders of the debt and the Germans took 90 years to pay off the World War I debt, using the best thing for paying off a national debts, inflation over time. The Germans paid off a lot of their World War II debt using funds from the Marshall Plan.
After the second World War the German WWI debt was sliced in half for the second time and the Germans were given thirty years to pay it off. The Germans took about double that, sixty years to pay it off.
The Greek and other PIIGS's debt is now owed not to little old people's pension funds but to the troika, the IMF, the ECB and the EC through the ESM mechanism. These are essentially large central banks. The Marshall Plan was devised not by banks but by the US State Department. It wasn't a bank plan to satisfy debt, it was an economic plan to rebuild Europe.
We need someone in Europe to say that the PIIGS have been punished enough, that it is time to let the economies to rebuild themselves, it is time to restructure the debt into something more manageable, "haircuts" and long term, low interest debt, like the Germans faced. Debt that will be reduced by inflation until it is laughably small and easy to pay off out of a robust, growing economy.
They're going back on their agreements.
If they won't honor their agreements what's the point in making agreements with them in the first place?
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Taxes have to be collected primarily from the rich because by definition the rich have the money.
When you allow the rich to escape paying taxes, whether through tolerating cheating by the rich as Greece did or by convincing the gullible and the stupid that the economy will grow faster by giving all of the real growth in the economy to the already rich like in the US the results are always the same, huge public debt and loss in growth and potential in the economy because of reduced demand.
If you could expand your questions and occasionally state what your understanding is of these matters I can more precisely answer you.
Like all of the questions in economics a lot of the answers depend on what the current situation is in the economy at any point in time. Whether prosperity depends on the rich (having more money, I assume) is one such a question.
I can tell you that the tendency in our economy is for the rich to have money is increasingly unimportant to the economy. This is because of a number of factors. The stock markets have become almost useless as a means of raising capital for investment. Meaning that the role of the investors is non-existent in deciding winners and losers in the economy. And the investors are by and large the rich once again by definition. Virtually all of the business investment in the US is done through a combination of corporate retained earnings, corporate savings, and loans.
Our economy is increasingly demand lead, not supply lead. There has to be demand before there is investment. The investment decisions aren't made by the stockholders of the company, the rich investors. The investment decisions are made by professional management in the companies, relying on sophisticated and involved studies of the relevant questions surrounding whether to invest or not.
The stock markets have been relegated to be a cross between a zero sum gambling casino and a Ponzi scheme, increasingly dependent on the stupid or, more politely, uninformed investor for profits. Stock markets are increasingly unimportant to the questions of investment in the economy of making goods and services for consumption that 99% of the population depend on for their livelihood. These are not things that I would put into my quarterly report to my stockholders, but they are never the less true. The rich don't want to hear that they are becoming less important than their current status of not being very important at all. Especially when you reach the obvious conclusion that it won't impact the economy at all to heavily tax the rich and that it will instead improve the economy because it will redistribute money from the relatively useless investments in paper money like things like stocks and bonds and instead convert it into demand.
It is equally easy to see why the economy is currently demand lead and is becoming even more demand lead every year. The agrarian economy of the classical economists, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, etc. was supply constrained in England and Europe because capital was land and there was only so much land. But today in the industrial and postindustrial economy capital is only money. And the economy creates money, it is not by any respects a limited, scarce resource.
The rich don't want to hear this. And the rich are the ones who determine the economics that is taught in the universities because the rich are the ones who endow academic chairs and the rich are the ones who hire the economists that the universities produce. So we are stuck in a kind of limbo where our academic economics is supply side lead economics trying to describe a demand side lead economy. The only possible result of this inherent conflict is bad policies. Such as distributing too much of our available income to the rich and too little to everyone else.
The current mainstream economics goes all of the way back to the classical economists to find a supply side lead economics that is pleasing to the rich. Hence it is called neoclassical economics.
Possibly this is TMI. But unless you try to make your questions a little less enigmatic this is the best that I can do, a kind of shotgun blast hoping that I answer you.
Toni
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2011
- Messages
- 22,778
- Basic Beliefs
- Peace on Earth, goodwill towards all
Were the agreements they were forced into making reasonable? Ethical? Was it possible for Greece to fulfill their end of the bargains? Were the bargains fair and balanced? Were the conditions fair? Just? Realistic?
As SimpleDon pointed out, Germany faced some very harsh penalties after losing WWI. Also, WWII. Fortunately, better reason prevailed, as well as mercy and common sense and Germany was able to fulfill its financial obligations by using a great deal of time and also a great deal of the largesse of the countries who defeated it.
Greece has not started any wars, has not invaded its neighbors or dropped bombs and isn't gassing anybody that I am aware of. Maybe a better plan could be reached to show Greece a bit of the mercy that Germany enjoyed, and to recognize that it is hardly a union if one member is made to starve while the others grow fat with profit.
You should read your own OP link.
It says quite clearly that Greece is currently implementing the latest agreed upon terms.
That's part of it. Things like retirement at 55 cause problems, also. The other European countries don't retire that early.
Get your facts straight.
The avg Greek retirement age is 61.9 (in 2012) which is higher than France (59.7) and slightly lower than Germany (62.1).
http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/ageinga...atisticsonaverageeffectiveageofretirement.htm