No mention of the Welfare society that is crippling Greece right now.
Well, that's a nice way to put it...
Yeah, that's right. They were "forced" to borrow to provide benefits that they could not pay for out of taxes. Is that why the US is borrowing to pay for benefits too? Because we were "forced" to?
Greece needs to depart the Euro Zone and get back on the drachma as does Spain and probably Italy. They never had the strength of economies to enter the EU in the first place. The Euro Zone is going to break up its just a matter of what moment in time. Nigel Farage is right when he says they all need to be trading partners and work together but not try to be the USA.
One other difference between Greece and Germany -
Greeks are a nation of tax-cheats and non-payers, whereas Germans actually pay their taxes.
That’s why Germany has money and Greece doesn’t.
Is Greece interested in solving that problem?
Nope, it’s easier just to shake down those rich Germans again.
Greece is doomed - by their own actions (and inactions).
Since the death of Demosthenes, it’s all been downhill for Greece
This recent Greek problem started when a government employee in Athens saw a satellite photo of Athens. He noticed that there were many built-in swimming pools at homes. You have to purchase a permit to build an in-ground swimming pool in Athens. No one had bought a permit.
There is the problem with Greece. They don’t pay their taxes so they can have the money to build home swimming pools. Then, they want someone else to pay their taxes. They want the public services, but they don’t want to pay for them. I don’t feel sorry for the freeloaders.
“Let them eat swimming pools.”
I don’t like SYRIZA because they’re a fringe left party, but I appreciate them having the decency of ending the game of charades with the Eurozone.
We’ve been calling this for years already, just let the monstrosity die already.
So Townhall has become a communist mouthpiece. Noted.
A single language permits workers to go where the jobs are, whereas most Greeks and Italians are stuck where they are born. New Yorkers’ taxes subsidize public works, health care and the like in Mississippi through the federal government in ways the European Commission cannot accomplish."
This flaw in the EU structure was obvious from the beginning of its foundation. The EU is nothing but an attempt to do away with the nation state and the history, language and traditions of its various people. Every European is to be considered a mindless worker drone, laboring for the benefit of his EU overlords. All sense of national and racial and religious identity is to obliterated.
Let's not forget that Greece lied and cheated its way into the Eurozone, with the generous (chortle) help of Goldman Sachs. They didn't even come close to meeting any of the criteria then, and they sure as hell don't now. But they wanted a place at the Euro trough and greedily feasted at that for many years. FUG.
A Townhall article blaming Greece’s socialism-induced problems on Germany? Greece could leave the European currency zone and its corrupt, tax cheating, socialistic, and environmental extremist economy would still flop.
I am no economist (I have this belief in honest work for honest wages which probably disqualifies, lol) but it is not difficult for me to imagine that economists would argue that when and wheree wages are lower in a free trade economic system, that the system can be expected to respond by shifting production to that region. In Greece’s case, production factories should have moved from Germany (high wages) to Greece (low wages), and nothing in EU should have prevented Greece from thus determining their own economic destiny, i.e., the people of Greece could reap the economic rewards of working hard. What happened? Their government and culture contained too much collective inertia, and politics combined with overly easy lending policies led them over the cliff(?)
Personal anecdote: I was in Greece in 2010, and the most visible problem was exploitation of foreign workers from the Balkan countries. Greece had a relatively high minimum wage, which enticed many foreign students to go work there to work in tourist shop retail sales. However, payroll often falls behind (or at least, so I was told), and as a result, the foreign workers often work for little or nothing and their livelihood is often at the mercy of the locals.
This is why I no longer frequent the Townhall website.
I’m going to object to the premise of the article. From the inception of the European Common market (EEC) in the 1950s, there was opposition and concern, about admitting poorer countries from the South.
The fear was of eventually having to subsidize them.
That fear has been borne out, and the common currency is NOT the cause of problems in Greece.
The article alludes to ‘different demographics, customs, etc.’
The Germans are opposed to working 48 weeks out of a year, so the Greeks can work 42 weeks of a year, to put it in simple terms.
Austerity to Greece, is having to actually work.
And the Germans expect to be repaid.
If Russia thinks their greatly reduced oil revenue will afford them the ability to subsidize Greece, good luck with that.