yes. unfortunately it influences a certain attitude and mentality on a large scale.
Go out and see how many people are in debt themselves. Even if the US excesses of using your house as an ATM are little known in Europe I am stunned at the number of people still getting to their collective neck in debt to get a brand new car when the “old” one is just three years old or to buy an MP3 player or a cellphone. Each week I toss away tons of letters from financial societies offering me loans, even if I’ve never taken one. Nobody seems to have learned anything from the US situation. How can you expect people to ask for financial responsibility and integrity when they have none themselves? And how can you expect Cargo Cult followers to abandon their own childish ways when Joe Frum and his big red airplane are real?
Is it true that 1 in 3 Greek workers are government employees? I heard something like this but I am not sure if it is true. Is it?
It’s hard to tell because everything military related is a State secret but even the most conservative analysts agree government spending is “worth” 40% of Greece’s GDP, well ahead of tourism (15%). That’s mind-boggling even by European standards.
Anyway in these days I am enjoying myself quite a lot. The Germans keep changing their minds: one day they say they are going to give 30 billions and the next they say they won’t give a single cent unless all other countries agree to “chip in” and form a European Monetary Fund. The latest issue of Der Spiegel (The Mirror) run a very nice cover: a 1€ coin melting with the words “Der Euro-Luge” (The euro-lie). It details how the anti-euro sentiment is at an all time high in Germany. This sentiment is spreading like wildfire all over Europe as can be gauged from the number of articles defending the euro appearing in all newspapers. Let’s if I am right in saying the euro won’t see 2020 in its present form.
Kakugo, I very much enjoy your posts on Europe.
How else would I know what’s really going on there?
Thanks, and keep up the good work
Yes I agree with you Smiling Dave. Thanks Kakugo on your insight on what is going on in Europe. You would know a lot more than any of us here in the US what is really going on Europe as far as the euro goes.
Who even knows today what is a government employee? What about a chimney sweep with a concession from the state, an industrial worker in a factory partially owned by the state or just a union worker not having to worry about low skilled competition due to state regulation? They are all a drain to one extent or another and given a short-term perspective they all have a stake in the status quo. It is not just the bureaucrats and the subsidised students coming out against cost saving measures.
Yep. The only really accurate measure is the proportion of spending that is from the government. It measures not only how big the government is, but also how much its regulations shrink the rest of the economy.
Do you guys think taxpayers and public sector workers could ever start rioting against each other? That seems to be a moderately likely outcome of the poor fiscal situation of various nations.
Let’s face it - the public sector is becoming a huge drain on the man who runs the petrol station, the senior medical professional, the middle-aged woman who owns a Pizza Hut, the young financial services executive, and thus just about anybody you can conceivably imagine in the private sector.
On YouTube, I see Americans complaining about how unionised public school teachers are being five times the average local salary in the poorer areas, for what amounts to barely a 25-50% success rate among students. It’s these sort of people who run on the taxes of those very people earning a quarter of what they do, and push up deficits which are funded from bonds that take away capital, which yet again could have funded private enterprises and created jobs for those very people in the private sector who are losing them.
I think what E. R. Olovetto says is an understatement. Insurrection is a mild way of putting it when you see that there is a slightly neat division between people who are part of the problem (those who eat up the money) and people who are part of the solution (those who give the money). Public sector jobs are often little different from welfare handouts, and the people who live off them are not used to any less. To take that away from them would be a threat to their very lives, and the only thing they expect is that when the fiscal deficit runs high, they don’t want to be the ones bearing the cost of it. The ax must instead fall on the rest of their neighbourhood which was already heavily paying for them.