After promising austerity measures, Greece got its bailout. Evidently, though, some who’ve been nurtured at the teat of the European nannystate continue to believe that if you can’t have it all, none of it is worth having. Ed Morrissey:
Communists in Greece staged massive May Day rallies this weekend, opposing the deal and the austerity measures. Molotov cocktails got tossed at police at some of the demonstrations. The Greeks are not happy about the coming cutbacks in government services and the higher taxes to which Papandreou committed in order to get the emergency loan.
The rest of the EU is equally unhappy about providing them the money. None of the EU nations are exactly awash in cash, and all of them have the same problems as Greece: high debt and massive government spending. Spain and Portugal are also on the cusp of failure, and investors have turned up their noses at bonds from both countries, forcing them to pay ruinous interest rates on debt. The IMF and the EU cannot possibly bail all of them out, especially when even Britain is now getting warned over its high deficits.
As Morrissey notes, the EU/IMF bailout for Greece represents about a tenth the size of our annual budget deficit here in the US, and about a sixth the size of Obamaco’s “Stimulus” money.
As California teeters on the brink of failure — and states like Texas show signs of balking at the idea that their wealth should go to bailout states that have continually overspent, overtaxed, and overpromised — we would do well to look to Greece, and its relationship with the EU, as a cautionary tale.
Is the US too big to fail?
No, it isn’t. And yet it seems that a good portion of political power in this country is being spent creating the conditions under which failure is inevitable — and our “progressive”-led Congress (and its cheerleaders in the press), undeterred by the increasing ill-will of the electorate, seems determined to destroy the bourgeois in order to “save” them from themselves.
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related?
Countless man-hours lost while the paper-changers reach into lives and pockets around the world to obstruct entire economies. Money should be a facilitator of trade, not a harbinger of ever more dysfunctional, over-managed, envy-based progressive collectivism.
We’re in for a test, and that test is if any of us have the will to cut out these cancers. So far we do not.
People won’t make drastic changes until drastic circumstances force them to do so.
However, it is dispiriting to see the Greeks, the developers of modern philosophy, democracy, mathematics, and science in general, become such spoiled wretches that they refuse to go, uh, Spartan, to save the country’s finances.
The teat has always been full before, even as people warned that it wouldn’t be, and there’s no reason it won’t be full forever.
Also, teenagers never have a grasp of the family finances, and figure their parents are lying or exaggerating when they say “we can’t afford it.”
Perpetual adolescence is an ugly thing.
Melanie Phillips was on Bill Bennett this morning (and I was unfortunate enough to be awake for it), and she said that, relative to the Enlightenment, Britain was “first in, first out.”
A young co-worker of mine said that when she told European friends that she was getting married in their mid-twenties that they were horrified. She’s carrying twins now. Wonder what they’d think of that.
(Not a clown car!)
And for your amusement, “Stuff White People Like” posters.
Irony!
How to destroy a functioning economy
Step one: institute countless welfare programs.
Step two: Hire millions of bureaucrats to run said programs.
Step three: Pay them staggering amounts for doing next to nothing.
Step four: Bloat public sector spending to an unsustainable level.
Step five: Repeat 1 through 4 for decades as necessary.
Step six: Pay the government retirees like the princes they are.
Step seven: Distort market incentives with a series of ill concieved laws.
Step eight: Make sure that you enrich you and your government allies.
Step nine: Blame the private sector for the crash.
Step ten: Institute martial law to control the rioters.
Step eleven: Begin the show trials of your opponents.
Step twelve: Open the gulags.
When private entities, corporations, companies, families, get in deep debt problems they must either tighten their belts or face bankruptcy.
Governments, having the power of the gun to collect money, and the printing press to print it, can stave off the consequences longer at the cost of making the consequences much worse in the end.
The computer revolution in the 90’s caused corporations to flatten their management structure. They found they no longer needed as many layers of middle management to facilitate communications from the top to the bottom.
Government has not, will not, flatten out the structure. They insist on increasing the size of the middle management, increasing the size of the pensions, and adding new organizations even if they duplicate the work already done elsewhere. The power of the gun and the printing press has allowed this but it is coming to a head, everywhere.
What happens if all the major indebted nations default? What if they all decide to print their way out? What if as is most likely there is a mixture of these responses? I truly do not know how this will effect things but it can’t be for the good.
#6–As one of my favorite posters at AOSHQ puts it, “in the end, there will be only Chaos”
Guaranteed.
I’ve no way of knowing, but this seemed to me at the time to potentially have lain behind the story Darleen blogged about the EU creating a “right to vacation” to be funded by government. Need to boost Spanish GDP? Make tourism there an entitlement.
Homo Parasiticus, it’s Progressive! Other than that, I have nothing good to say about them.
Beware of Greeks bearing IOUs.
Prelude to default?
What happened to Krugman’s neck? Where is it?
The problem with Greece isn’t necessarily just about debt – it’s the endemic corruption. Even the PM Papandreou admits it:
A study to be published in coming weeks by the Washington-based Brookings Institution finds that bribery, patronage and other public corruption are major contributors to the country’s ballooning debt, depriving the Greek state each year of the equivalent of at least 8% of its gross domestic product, or more than €20 billion (about $27 billion).
"Our basic problem is systemic corruption," Greece’s Prime Minister George Papandreou said after he took office late last year, vowing to change a mentality that views the republic as a resource to plunder. He later berated the chief of public prosecutions, saying Greeks believe "there is impunity in this country." The chief prosecutor said that wasn’t so.
And don’t forget – chaos is a Greek word.
After “Fallout: Las Vegas” will come “Bailout: Greece.”
More trees, less super-mutants, otherwise not far off.
Beware of Greeks bearing debts.
I thought it was beware of geeks bearing grifts.
[…] Emulate, yes. Kow-??tow to, no. That is saved for countries actively working to destroy us. […]
[…] Emulate, yes. Kow-??tow to, no. That is saved for countries actively working to destroy us. […]
[…] Grecian formula, 3 […]
Greece and Spain won’t pay back. This was a calculated Risk, and a Lesson for the Banking System. What is happening in Greece, is a very well orchestrated show, to get granted €110bn aid, to avert meltdown. A new deception compared with the old Trojan Horse. The only thing Germans can do is:
REPOSSESS 170 Leopard 2AEX Battle Tanks from Greece, and 190 Leopard 2A6E Battle Tanks from Spain.
U.S.A must REPOSSESS 170 F-16 Jet Fighters from Greece, … the rest is gone with the wind …forever …
Greece must stop paying lucrative pensions with borrowed money, reform the free health care system, and cut down, 4 times the military budged.
Greece’s problem is too much debt. Greece has a budget deficit of 12.7% of GDP – meaning that the country is spending 12.7% more than the value of one year’s economic output.
Greece is no different to a serial credit card borrower who can’t pay back his loans. But just like a serial credit card borrower, as long as Greece keeps relying on borrowed money to fund itself, the problem won’t go away. It will just get worse.
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Greece-in-Default-on-U-214-Submarine-Order-05801/
But don’t worry; the ECB, the Fed or both will print the money.
And all of us will share the pain, with our hard-earned money.
Bad is never good until worse happens.