Reply To: Austerity has failed. An open letter from Piketty to Merkel
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VirgilFirst.
Here’s the source I forgot to cite. All you had to do was c&p the title.
Second.
There’s no sense in discussing anything related to Greece’s debt for a while. Everything we know about it in an illusion only now being dealt with. It seems they paid Goldman Sachs $500 million to help them conceal the real debt before they were accepted in the EU. Now the Greek government may be suing G&S.
But it’s been “known” for five years.
The past two “austerity plans” were put together with political agendas/favoritism over financial common sense and were predicted for doom from the beginning. Example here in a quote:
….the politics of the plan is too timid. It avoids taking on powerful lobbies who benefit from wasteful public spending. For example cuts in medical spending of €310m are promised this year. That might sound like a lot, but Greece’s over-generous markups to pharmacists add something like €1.5 billion a year of extra spending to its drugs budget alone. The government also seems to lack the stomach to see its plan through. It has said that it will cut civil-service jobs—but the suspicion is that those on temporary contracts, not the expensive and virtually unsackable people on permanent contracts, will go. Even the railways, which are down for privatisation, may well be sold with guarantees protecting jobs and services.
from June 2011
In the video Davis linked to Guy Verhofstadt outlines…
Lack of reforms undertaken on the political level while saddling the citizens with all the burden
Lack of a sincere long range plan
Lack of legislation to stop cronyism
Lack of efforts to downsize the 24% of Greeks working for the government
Lack of reform to end privileges, exemptions and political favors to special groups, cities and islands.
Listen to the 2 minute response by Tsipras. He mentions cracking down on people avoiding taxes through Swiss banks.
Meanwhile with a Black Market economy estimated at 25% the size of the GNP….. There’s talk that the problem is due to the high number of ‘self employed’ Greek citizens without mention of the politicians and bureaucrats who are not only turning a blind eye to it but profiting from it. No mention of organized crime in the black market. Every item that is profitable for the black market is so because of the taxes put upon it. PREDICTION.: Watch for Greece to crack down on self employed people and no others in a lame effort to curtail their black market economy.