Greeks protest (once more) and burn German/Nazi flags

[Tender Branson]

Seen today in Athens:

[Tender Branson]

LOL @ the glasses guy on the right...

Didn't even see that. Protesting Germany and wearing a BMW jacket ...

[Tender Branson]

Here's a chart of net payers and net recipients within the EU:



Every year, Greece gets about 6-7 billion € more from the EU than they have to pay for them.

This accounts for about 3-4% of the country's GDP.

Germany is the biggest net payer as you can see.

Don't bite the hand that feeds you - indeed ...

[Tender Branson]

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I've read somewhere that Greece has too high minimum wages anyway. Much higher than for example in Spain/Portugal, which also have more productive economies than Greece (900€ a month compared with 500/600 or so in Spain/Portugal).

[Tender Branson]

Why is Tender playing the part of the neoliberal a-hole here ?

Because you can be left-wing and care about fiscal responsibility, as he's always appeared to be to me.

It's the German (or Austrian) blood, perhaps...

I'm hardly neo-liberal, I just want Greece to get more productive and arrive in the 21st century world of economic competition, which is very important these days. If you are a part of a highly productive Union, you should at least try and show the others that you still want to be productive in the future and not give up and complain. But I also recognize that the EU alltogether made a mistake in accepting countries like Greece or Portugal to be members so soon. A country should need at least 90% of the productivity/debt/deficit of the whole EU to join. If this would have been the case, a lot of these problems wouldn't take place right now. Greece would just go bankrupt like many other failed countries before and start from zero.

As for Franzl: Yeah, it's probably got to do with mentality. Austrians/Germans have grandparents who tell their grandchildren of how difficult it was after WW2, when they built our 2 countries back up out of the ashes and made them one of the most well managed and productive countries in the World. And it's passed along the generations. If you are told that you must work hard and don't whine around you also expect something like this from the people of Greece. That could also be a reason why there are almost no strikes here.

[Tender Branson]

I'm hardly neo-liberal, I just want Greece to get more productive and arrive in the 21st century world of economic competition, which is very important these days. If you are a part of a highly productive Union, you should at least try and show the others that you still want to be productive in the future and not give up and complain. But I also recognize that the EU alltogether made a mistake in accepting countries like Greece or Portugal to be members so soon. A country should need at least 90% of the productivity/debt/deficit of the whole EU to join. If this would have been the case, a lot of these problems wouldn't take place right now. Greece would just go bankrupt like many other failed countries before and start from zero.

As for Franzl: Yeah, it's probably got to do with mentality. Austrians/Germans have grandparents who tell their grandchildren of how difficult it was after WW2, when they built our 2 countries back up out of the ashes and made them one of the most well managed and productive countries in the World. And it's passed along the generations. If you are told that you must work hard and don't whine around you also expect something like this from the people of Greece. That could also be a reason why there are almost no strikes here.

I really don't get this logic. How do you expect Greece to develop, modernize and become productive through savage austerity measures no civilized country could ever accept ? Don't you see how cutting the Welfare State, cutting social protections basically leads to economic and social regression ? How can you consider yourself a social-democrat and advocate such policies ?!? All these measures are doing is pushing Greece into recession. Recession means less tax revenues, less tax revenues mean an even bigger deficit. So what do you do, another austerity plan ? Great ! When will this stop ? When there is no deficit, because there's no government anymore. And there will be no civilization anymore, as mass unemployment and poverty would have led to the breakup of social contract.

People, grow up. THINK, for God's sake. Deficit isn't good, especially in times of economic prosperity. It's better to have a surplus than to have a deficit, of course. But since Keynes, everybody with half 1/100th of a brain understands that a deficit might be necessary to avoid economic collaps in times of recession. It has been proven thousands of times that making deficit reduction a higher priority than restoring growth equals economic suicide. Someone who thinks Greek people deserve this because their past (right-wing) government let the deficit grow to excessive level could, IMO, reasonably be called an asshole. I hope it's not your case.

I think it all depends how these austerity measures are put together. Of course I would favor austerity measures that are not impacting the middle class by a great deal. As I have posted in the Austrian election topic, the government here unveils a spending cuts/tax increase package that the Standard newspaper here calls "moderate, but not bold". This package is worth about 30 billion € for the next 5 years and involves almost exclusively areas that won't impact the solid economy and it's future growth (read more in the Austrian election thread about this). So, if Austrian politicians can find areas that won't impact the economy, the Greeks I suppose can do so as well and weed out areas that are bloated (like their mega-million-civil servants sector) or deeply flawed (pensions, billions of pension payments each year to dead people ?) or deeply flawed² (tax system, tax evading is a hobby in Greece, most people have not heard about the word "bill" when a customer buys something, fakelaki or what it is called is the easier solution) or flawed³ (a megalomaniac military industrial complex that has spending that is 5 times higher than Austrian military spending). Then there's also the problem with the pledged privatisations by the Greek government worth of about 50 billion €, pledged about 2 years ago, and the government hasn't privatized almost anything of this sum in these 2 years to pay down debt. And of course, the minimum wage decrease might be not the best way, but I have read somewhere that it might be better to decrease it now, so that the employers can hire more and more people are paying taxes again.