Bulgaria and Macedonia each have a flat-tax system of 10% on personal incomes. Adopt your own 10% flat tax. Then go one better and slash your corporate tax rate to 10%. While you're at it, whack your VAT to 15%, which will demonstrate your commitment to the downtrodden. As for your ridiculously high payroll tax of 45%, knock it down to 10% as well. Of course, the troika and everyone else will scream that you can't afford to do this. Your answer is that you can't afford not to. Tax evasion in Greece is endemic. Your hideous tax system is one reason that Greece has a large informal economy. To annoy the Germans, cite the example of Russia. When Putin took over in 2000, Russia's tax system was even more convoluted and corruption-ridden than that of Greece. Putin swept it all away, instituting a 13% flat tax on personal incomes and slashing other tax rates. Revenues soared immediately because of the ease of enforcement and greater economic growth. (Alas, that was the peak of the Russian president-for-life's statesmanship.) Taxes are a price and a burden. When you raise the price of such good things as productive work, success and risk-taking, the burden becomes heavier and the less you'll get of these things. Governments don't create resources -- people do.That was all edifying, Steve, but it assumes that Tsipras *wants* to improve the situation. He doesn't. He wants to climb into the driver's seat and stay there for life. Best way to do that is to create external bogeymen who are responsible for all of Greece's problems. Implementation of those ideas would require his becoming a martyr, if you get my drift.
Greece has taught us all a lesson.
That lesson is:
Socialism is parasitism and is always doomed to implode any economy stupid enough to play at it.