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What did Greece do wrong to cause its failure?

Melensdad

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
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Just curious, but what has Greece done wrong that it is now failing?

  • Did it not spend enough on universal healthcare?
  • Did it not pay its government union workers enough money to drive buses, fix roads, issue permits, oversee taxes, etc?
  • Did it not increase the numbers of government workers to a high enough level?
  • Did it not give liberal enough benefits to its government employees by only provided 14 months pay for 10.5 months work?
  • Are its government workers, among the highest paid in the world, not paid enough?
  • Was its government pension plan, which allowed government workers to retire as early as age 54 with full benefits, not generous enough?

If deficit spending is the key to pulling out of recessions, did Greece not spend enough over the past 11 years that it has been part of the European Union since it has never met the requirements of "fiscal responsibility" of the EU during that time period?

It is pretty obvious to most economic observers that Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and several other nations are following the same path as Greece into fiscal collapse, so I have to wonder what their failures are too? And economic observers are now writing that the USA is also following this very same economic path so what is it that we need to do to prevent us from following the path of Greece if we are following their economic model of increasing government debt, increasing government employment, increasing government worker pension benefits, increasing government worker wages, etc etc...
 
loboloco

loboloco

Well-known member
Geez Mel, anybody except a pseudo intellectual or a politician can see you just listed the causes. No reason to comment.
 
Melensdad

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
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loboloco said:
Geez Mel, anybody except a pseudo intellectual or a politician can see you just listed the causes. No reason to comment.
Click to expand...

How could I have listed the causes? I thought that those were requirements for a good economic model?

We keep hearing from Washington that we need to be more like the Europeans. ObamaCare is one example. Increasing government employment is another example. Supporting government workers unions is a further example. These a but a few of our movements to the European model.

So I still have to ask, where is it that Greece as gone wrong because we seem to be following Greece and its model.
Unlike Obama, Americans reject European model
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...s-reject-European-model-8397573-64576077.html
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

An interesting paradox. Last year America elected a president who, in attitudes and policies, is closer to the elites of Western Europe than any of his predecessors. Yet in the nine months that he has been in office ordinary Americans have been moving away from those attitudes and policies and have increasingly embraced positions that over the years have made Americans distinctive from those in other advanced Western democracies.

Barack Obama's European tendencies aren't in doubt. His policies on government spending, taxation, health care and carbon emissions would all tend to bring America in line with European norms, to a far greater degree than any other president of the last 40 years and probably any president ever.

And what of America's special place in the world? "I believe in American exceptionalism," Obama said on one of his trips to Europe, "just as I suspect that Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, not at all. One cannot imagine Presidents Roosevelt, Truman or Kennedy, Eisenhower or Reagan, uttering such sentiments.

Obama told European Union lawmakers in Strasbourg that he hailed "your dynamic union," but most Americans seem to have some vestigial knowledge that over the last 60 years America has been more dynamic -- economically, culturally, politically, militarily -- than our friends across the Atlantic. And when presented with public policies that would make us more like Europe, Americans have tended to recoil.

Examples abound. Despite the recession, by about 50 to 40 percent Americans continue to prefer smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services (June ABC/Washington Post and CBS/New York Times polls). Some 80 percent want the government to sell its interest in General Motors (July Rasmussen poll).

A 58 to 35 percent majority say keep the budget deficit down even if it takes longer for the economy to recover (NBC/WSJ June). A 53 to 33 percent majority oppose more government regulation of the finance sector (Rasmussen October).

As Europeanizing policies receive more attention they become less popular. June's 50 to 45 percent approval of Democratic health care proposals morphs to a similar margin of disapproval in October (Rasmussen). And satisfaction with one's own health care arrangements rises from 29 percent in 2008 and 35 percent in May 2009 to 48 percent in August (Rasmussen again).

European elites support gun control and curbs on carbon emissions almost unanimously. Americans don't -- and are moving in the other direction. Support for a handgun ban has fallen from 60 percent in 1960 and 43 percent in the early 1990s to 29 percent in May 2009 (Gallup). By a 48 to 34 percent margin Americans believe global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends rather than human activity (Rasmussen April); in 2008 it was almost exactly the other way around.

European leaders agree with Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo detention facility. Americans disagree by a 52 to 39 percent margin (NBC/WSJ June). Europeans accept a large role for unions. American approval for labor unions fell from 59 percent in 2008 to 48 percent in spring 2009, by far the lowest figure since Gallup began asking the question in 1936.

Gallup reports that 39 percent of Americans this year say their views have grown more conservative, while only 18 percent say they have become more liberal. No wonder Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who with Republican Bill McInturff conducts the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, said in June that Obama and the Democrats "are going to have to navigate in pretty choppy waters."

The late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote a book on American exceptionalism, long noted that Americans are more individualistic and less collectivist than Western Europeans (or Canadians). The election of a president who in many ways seeks to push America in a European direction seems to have increased rather than decreased those differences.

Why? My explanation is that until November 2008 Americans did not have any reason to contemplate what a more European approach would mean in real-life terms. Now, with Obama in the White House and a heavily Democratic Congress, they do. And they mostly don't like it.

Hence the embarrassment of liberal commentators and, it seems, the president himself when five Norwegian lawmakers tendered him the Nobel Peace Prize. European elites are delighted with Obama's European approach. Most American voters aren't.​
 
JEV

JEV

Mr. Congeniality
GOLD Site Supporter
As was pointed out recently, Americans are not a singular nationality. Instead, we are a melting pot of peoples from every country on earth, and as such, bring a combined experience over the past 250 years or so, that cannot be compared to any country or nationality on the planet. Americans have seen the best and the worst that the world has to offer, and have chosen to live under a unique umbrella of freedom experienced by no other country. From time to time, the leadership has been handed to someone who puts himself and his personal agenda ahead of that of all Americans, and begins to arrogantly act like an individual country who places itself above all its surrounding neighbors, and attempts to influence the collective with their individualistic demands. But Americans soon wake up and replace the wannabee dictator with a moderate, and we return to a time of prosperity and unity. We see what is happening in Europe as the EU is, IMO, failing to have the unification its planners had dreamed of. With cultures and languages differing from border to border, the common currency has not changed the attitudes of teh people withing their borders.

America will not tolerate for very long this leftist agenda and its insistence to be more like the failed countries from which our ancestors fled to begin a new life of freedom. We have a Kenyan in the White House who has proven himself a racist and who places himself and his agenda above that of the American people. He, like those who passed before him, will be dealt with at the ballot box, and the country will return to some semblance of normalcy, and hopefully, prosperity once again.

Anyone who thinks that Obama and the libs are going to change the way this country has operated for 250 years is going to be sadly mistaken. It is only when there is balance in the government that the country experiences prosperity, and it will surely come because we are Americans, and not Frenchmen, or Englishmen, or Turks, or Slavs. We are Americans who have seen and lived the worst, and will not return to that insanity and dictatorial control without a serious fight. Relish in your smugness for now, libs, but be assured that balance WILL return. The tide is already turning.
 
Glink

Glink

Active member
Site Supporter
JEV said:
We are Americans who have seen and lived the worst, and will not return to that insanity and dictatorial control without a serious fight.
Click to expand...
.............I am afraid you may be correct. This was cut out of a Czech newspaper; author unknown. I think it speaks to the difficulty ahead.

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."
 
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