Greece still doesn't want to behave

[Tammuz]

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.

This. Very much this.

 

[untermensche]

They couldn't get the rich to pay their taxes.

Prosperity depends so much on rich people?

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

 

[ksen]

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.

This. Very much this.

They did make up their minds. Tsipras accepted the deal and the greek government is implementing it.

All you're doing now is spouting memes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Prosperity depends so much on rich people?

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

You persist in thinking people are hoarding money. "Hoarding" is the standard leftist scapegoat for explaining fucked economies--and it's never the actual cause.

1) That's not the case. The wealthy don't store money in mattresses, they invest it or at least put it in the bank--and the bank turns around and loans it out.

2) If they were simply sticking it in their mattress then the government would simply respond by making more so the right amount was in circulation.

 

[DBT]

The super wealthy create bubble economies within their own stratospheric layer on the top of the heap, mansions, luxury cars, goods and services, with only a small trickle down effect.

 

[Togo]

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

You persist in thinking people are hoarding money. "Hoarding" is the standard leftist scapegoat for explaining fucked economies--and it's never the actual cause.

1) That's not the case. The wealthy don't store money in mattresses, they invest it or at least put it in the bank

Or invest it in a fixed asset. In another country. Which is why we see an economy with low circulation of funds, and asset bubbles.

Does rich people extracting wealth from the system and investing in, say, the London property market, help the Greek economy? Because if not, I'd say untermensche has a point.

 

[untermensche]

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

You persist in thinking people are hoarding money. "Hoarding" is the standard leftist scapegoat for explaining fucked economies--and it's never the actual cause.

1) That's not the case. The wealthy don't store money in mattresses, they invest it or at least put it in the bank--and the bank turns around and loans it out.

2) If they were simply sticking it in their mattress then the government would simply respond by making more so the right amount was in circulation.

Not paying taxes and instead investing in places like China is not the least bit different from hoarding.

The "invisible hand" was mentioned once in Smith's 'Wealth of Nations'. He used the term when he described the effects of allowing a person to accumulate unlimited wealth. He basically said that the rich man will spend his money locally and invest locally, because in Smith's day there were not trains yet, it is pre-Industrial Revolution, and a person could only travel so fast and so far. The rich man had to look over their affairs. Their affairs had to be fairly close to them. So by allowing a person to accumulate unlimited wealth you would like an "invisible hand" help the areas near to that rich man because they would spend and invest locally.

But the invisible hand is dead with the introduction of modern transportation and communication.

The rich man in Greece avoiding taxes, being under taxed, is investing in a Chinese sweatshop, not Greece.

Since the invisible hand is dead it is up to governments to ensure that at least some of the money the rich make in one country isn't invested in another. This is done with taxation.

 

[Will Wiley]

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.

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?

The point is to loan them more than they can pay back and then loot their assets when they can't pay

This might well happen in Ukraine too.
1. Loan them money
2.Oligarchs take the money, or money goes to pay banks.
3.Loot the country when debt is not repaid

 

[dismal]

Prosperity depends so much on rich people?

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

 

[Togo]

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

Only as a poor second to a more even distribution of resources in the first place.

 

[untermensche]

An economy depends on the flow of money.

If a few hoard most of the wealth created or if most do not have any expendable income then you do not have a functioning economy.

Is this news?

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

It isn't the only way. Another way is by reducing profits and pay and perks to executives and increasing pay to workers.

But the masters in control of these little top down dictatorships known as corporations won't do that.

 

[SimpleDon]

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.

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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?

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.

The problem is the Greeks want to continue their overspending ways. Who wouldn't want to live on other people's money?

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.

That's part of it. Things like retirement at 55 cause problems, also. The other European countries don't retire that early.

I understand that you believe that the purpose of an economy is to make the rich richer. You wholeheartedly support this in the US and around the world. And I understand that you oppose social democratic programs because they stand in the way of guaranteeing the maximum flow of a nation's income to the very wealthy.

But there are a lot of us here who believe that the purpose of the economy is to take care of the entire population of a country, not just the wealthy. And that the economy can only do one of the two.

Yes, the Greeks could retire early, although the only Greeks that could retire at 55 were soldiers, policemen, firemen, government workers etc. analogous to what happens in the US.

But the Greeks worked longer and harder than any other country in Europe, about the same hours that we in the US work in a year but much more than the Germans, French, etc. work.

You forget that I worked in Germany. We didn't have any workers older than 60 in the company. There is a real push in Germany to retire people early, at 60. It is an all round benefit to the economy as a whole. It allows the company to get rid of a high salary and to replace it with a lower one of a younger person. It benefits the younger person who advances into the retiree's position earlier and it obviously benefits the retiree.

Whenever we talk about the need to raise the incomes of the 99% those of you that support raising just the real incomes of the 1% invariably tell us that raising the incomes of the 99% will do nothing more than speed up the loss in jobs to automation, implying that this will wipe out the benefits of the higher wages across the entire economy. Putting aside the obvious fact that this has never happened in the considerable history of automation, this is one of the ways that this is done, by working fewer hours in a week, by working fewer days in year and by retiring earlier.

My company worked 36 hours a week, got 38 days a year of combined vacations and holidays and retired at 60. Sick leave wasn't limited with a mandatory recuperation period after a serious injury or illness of one month.

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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.

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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?

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.

The problem is the Greeks want to continue their overspending ways. Who wouldn't want to live on other people's money?

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.

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

Loren is immune to facts.

 

[SimpleDon]

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.

This. Very much this.

It is very much more than this simple moralizing. The very design of the European Community favors a country in the community going into debt. But it doesn't provide for any less destructive way than what is happening to Greece and the rest of the PIIGS to get out of debt.

The ECB will loan money to any member of the EC, except now for Greece, at very low interest rates. Since tax increases are politically unpopular but government spending is very popular virtually every government in the EC has run up large national debts like Greece did. In fact Germany had a larger debt than Greece did going into the GFC&R of 2008, relative to GDP.

The only reason that Greece suffered much more than Germany wasn't because of the national debt levels run up from overly generous social programs, the idea that Loren is trying to peddle here, but because Germany has very strict regulations about home mortgages that prevented them from the neoliberal disease of deregulation that sunk the PIIGS by allowing the financial sector to run wild with their mortgage backed securities and their shadow banking.

The debt that is crushing Greece and the rest of the PIIGS is the debt run up from bailing out the financial sector, the banks, from the disaster that the financial sector caused because they didn't have any adult supervision. This arguably should have been done not by the countries involved but by the ECB because they are the ones charged with the stability of the banking system, the only rational reason to bailout the banks themselves, to protect the banks and the financial sector from its own folly.

What is happening to Greece will spread through the EC, to the rest of the PIIGS and possibly to the Netherlands, Finland and even to the giants, Germany and France. This is a problem that they have to solve, how to discharge this debt without destroying the country. And they are not doing it. And by not facing the problem, that the design of the EC erodes the fiscal responsibility of every country in the EC, not just Greece and the rest of the PIIGS, they are guaranteeing that the countries will continue to fail.

We know and we understand that the single currency and the idea of the EC is a political invention and that it is and always has been a very shaky economic proposition. But it is a very useful political invention. The individual countries would have much less economic clout than they have as a member of the EC. It might be the answer to the desires of every ethnic, cultural and religious group in the world to have their own country and yet still not to be such a small country that they are tramped by the large ones, economically.

 

[SimpleDon]

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

We aren't saying that the key to prosperity is to tax the rich. That is your idea that you are trying to impose.

We are saying that the prosperity that we have should be distributed more evenly throughout the members of the society. Currently in the US all of the growth in real income is going to the 1%. This is not because it is "natural" or because the 1% deserve the money but because of specific fiscal policies that direct all of the real growth to the rich. Taxation is only a part of it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You persist in thinking people are hoarding money. "Hoarding" is the standard leftist scapegoat for explaining fucked economies--and it's never the actual cause.

1) That's not the case. The wealthy don't store money in mattresses, they invest it or at least put it in the bank

Or invest it in a fixed asset. In another country. Which is why we see an economy with low circulation of funds, and asset bubbles.

Does rich people extracting wealth from the system and investing in, say, the London property market, help the Greek economy? Because if not, I'd say untermensche has a point.

Investing in a fixed asset is investing.

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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?

The point is to loan them more than they can pay back and then loot their assets when they can't pay

This might well happen in Ukraine too.
1. Loan them money
2.Oligarchs take the money, or money goes to pay banks.
3.Loot the country when debt is not repaid

Yeah, Ukraine has major corruption problems.

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But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

Only as a poor second to a more even distribution of resources in the first place.

Thus with no rich people to tax your economy falls apart.

 

[dismal]

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

We aren't saying that the key to prosperity is to tax the rich. That is your idea that you are trying to impose.

I quote:

The problem in Greece is the same problem that has destroyed economies through history.

They couldn't get the rich to pay their taxes.

Not a problem. The Problem.

 

[ksen]

Sounds more like your problem if you're having trouble comprehending basic english.

 

[Togo]

Or invest it in a fixed asset. In another country. Which is why we see an economy with low circulation of funds, and asset bubbles.

Does rich people extracting wealth from the system and investing in, say, the London property market, help the Greek economy? Because if not, I'd say untermensche has a point.

Investing in a fixed asset is investing.

That's great. Does this particular form of investing help the Greek economy?

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

Only as a poor second to a more even distribution of resources in the first place.

Thus with no rich people to tax your economy falls apart.

You're not making any sense. You have to tax people with money. If all the money is concentrated in a few rich people, then you tax them. If the money is spread over more people, then you can spread the tax burden over more people. Most income tax systems manage this automatically.

What's happened in Greece is that the money has gone to rich people via corruption, and to Germany via sharing a common currency, which acts to raise prices in Greece and lower them in Germany. The EU's plan was to use the extra borrowing and fact of EU membership to stimulate growth to make up the difference. Unfortunately it didn't work.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Investing in a fixed asset is investing.

That's great. Does this particular form of investing help the Greek economy?

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

Only as a poor second to a more even distribution of resources in the first place.

Thus with no rich people to tax your economy falls apart.

You're not making any sense. You have to tax people with money. If all the money is concentrated in a few rich people, then you tax them. If the money is spread over more people, then you can spread the tax burden over more people. Most income tax systems manage this automatically.

What's happened in Greece is that the money has gone to rich people via corruption, and to Germany via sharing a common currency, which acts to raise prices in Greece and lower them in Germany. The EU's plan was to use the extra borrowing and fact of EU membership to stimulate growth to make up the difference. Unfortunately it didn't work.

Once you have attained that liberal utopia with the assets redistributed who are you going to tax to fund it?

 

[bilby]

That's great. Does this particular form of investing help the Greek economy?

But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.

Only as a poor second to a more even distribution of resources in the first place.

Thus with no rich people to tax your economy falls apart.

You're not making any sense. You have to tax people with money. If all the money is concentrated in a few rich people, then you tax them. If the money is spread over more people, then you can spread the tax burden over more people. Most income tax systems manage this automatically.

What's happened in Greece is that the money has gone to rich people via corruption, and to Germany via sharing a common currency, which acts to raise prices in Greece and lower them in Germany. The EU's plan was to use the extra borrowing and fact of EU membership to stimulate growth to make up the difference. Unfortunately it didn't work.

Once you have attained that liberal utopia with the assets redistributed who are you going to tax to fund it?

Who the fuck was talking about complete redistribution of all assets? Togo was talking about simply having progressive taxation. Only a lunatic would equate this with the total redistribution of all assets so that everyone has the same.

You are aware, I presume, that it is possible for a little of something to be better than none, while a lot is not better still?

If not, then I suggest that, as a little salt in your food is essential to life, you should be trying to subsist on a diet of nothing else.

Or perhaps we should ask you, when you attain that capitalist utopia where one person finally has all of the money, with whom is he going to trade?