Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BullNBear52]

Greece's nightmare was their own doing. They choose to join the Euro cook the books and not collect taxes. To think that they did not play a part in their own economic downfall is naïve.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/business/international/greece-debt-crisis-euro.html

How did Greece get to this point?

Greece became the epicenter of Europe’s debt crisis after Wall Street imploded in 2008. With global financial markets still reeling, Greece announced in October 2009 that it had been understating its deficit figures for years, raising alarms about the soundness of Greek finances.

Now that is hardly anyone's fault but their own.

As far as exiting the Euro they really can't. Their banks are broke. No country is going to do business with a BK nation. Borrowing from Russia was just a sideshow since Russia doesn't have the money to lend them.

And you can't compare them to Iceland simply because Iceland is not part of the Euro. Iceland swallowed a couple of bitter pills to recover. They let their banks fail and devalued their currency in order to receive the loan from the IMF. Spelled a different way they agreed to austerity measures and cleaned up their act.

Greece simply could not go hat in hand to the rest of the EU time and time again, (This will be the 3rd bailout.) without agreeing to clean up their corrupt tax collection.

The International Monetary Fund and Greece’s other creditors have argued for years that the country’s debt crisis could be largely resolved if the government just cracked down on tax evasion. Tax debts in Greece equal about 90% of annual tax revenue, the highest shortfall among industrialized nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

During the country’s centurieslong occupation by the Ottomans, avoiding taxes was a sign of patriotism. Today, that distrust is focused on the government, which many Greeks see as corrupt, inefficient and unreliable.

“Greeks consider taxes as theft,” said Aristides Hatzis, an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Athens. “Normally taxes are considered the price you have to pay for a just state, but this is not accepted by the Greek mentality.”


http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-struggles-to-get-citizens-to-pay-their-taxes-1424867495

If Greece claims they are a democracy then they also have to pay taxes. It comes with the territory. lol.

Republicans in the US can't grasp that fact at times. And when that happens we do let cities, towns, counties etc go BK. Or they have to raise taxes.

The Wizard of OZ the sequel.

Brownback's Right-Wing "Experiment" Is Bankrupting Kansas. His Solution: More Radical Cuts.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121068/kansas-tax-cuts-deplete-budget-brownback-proposes-more-cuts