Wasting Time With Alex

As Greece goes….

So the Greeks are pissed at their government and on a war path, and threatening more strikes because they do not like the bitter pill decades of communist and/or socialist economics is now forcing them to swallow.

Greek tax collectors and customs officers walked off the job on Thursday, kicking off a spate of strikes against government austerity cuts designed to halt a financial crisis caused by massive debt. Both groups embarked on a two-day walkout ahead of industrial action called by civil servants, doctors and Communist-backed workers on February 10 and a general strike called by Greece’s main umbrella union on February 24.

“We have already made sacrifices and will accept no more cuts,” the chairman of the customs officers’ union Argyris Sakellaropoulos told Flash Radio. The unions are on the warpath over a government austerity programme that they say has progressively become harsher under pressure from the European Union and market speculation that has hurt Greek finances and rattled the euro.

Anyway, for those that don’t know the issues facing the Greeks, it is one that Obama and democrats are hard at work recreating here. The country has been in love with collectivism for decades now and has lived large on borrowed cash and time. Over generous benefit packages, unrealistically low retirement ages, social spending run amok, people that are always ready to party but absent when it is time to work, and a system that can virtually be paralyzed by ultra powerful unions that can make the country grind to a screeching halt, have reduced the Greek economy to a joke. The country suffers from a staggering debt, but because it is part of the EU they can’t just devaluate the currency yet again, as it had done in the past, and pretend all is well. The Greek government has to take drastic & painful measures precisely because it waited until the last possible moment to admit that the pace of the existing scheme was unsustainable.

Greece’s debt stands at more than 294 billion euros ($412 billion), its 12.7-percent deficit is well beyond EU limits of three percent of output for eurozone members and it suffered a triple downgrade of its sovereign debt in December. The government hopes to economise over a billion euros ($1.4 billion) from benefit cuts and operational cost reductions in the public sector. Overall, Athens aims to save over 10.3 billion euros ($14.3 billion) this year with improved tax collection, state cost cuts and reduced arms spending to bring the public deficit to 2.8 percent of output by 2012. The programme also seeks to stabilise Greece’s debt burden—one of the highest in the eurozone—and reduce it to 117.7 percent of GDP by 2012.

Simply put, the socialist experiment has reached the inevitable conclusion - the proverbial brick wall - in Greece, and the house of cards is imploding. Those that have lived high on the hog however, don’t want the free ride to end. The unbelievable part in all of this is that these harsh measures are being initiated by a avowed socialist. Many say that it is all too little, too late. The place is simply now dysfunctional and not willing to do what it takes to even get out of the hole they are in. This same story is also repeating itself in other Eurozone countries like Portugal and Spain – whom had been actually making progress under Aznar a while back before electing Zapatero who literally destroyed all the positive reforms – and even France and Germany are wondering how bad things are going to get. The writing is on the wall.Sooner or later the “free ride” comes to an end.