Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobias3 | Hacker News Reader

Actually greece has a primary budget surplus, so at this point they are paying back the "loans", the problem is that they are miserable while doing so.

If people are unemployed you are squandering resources.

View on HN

While being miserable they are better of than let's say Slovaks who paid 660 mil Euro to bail out Greece. Think about it, they are not really living in poverty, they just lost the luxury standard they were used to.

Greece's GDP per capita has dropped below Slovenia's.

Slovaks are from Slovakia. (Greece also has a lower GDP/PPP per capita than Slovakia, though Greece's GDP is much higher in nominal terms.)

If by "luxury standard" you mean "being able to afford rent and have youth unemployment be less than 50%", then I agree.

Oh come on, have you been to Athens? Everyone drives a Porsche and wears a Rolex, but all the buildings are unfinished, because if they were they'd be taxed. Greece is a poor country weirdly full of rich people.

Everyone? Really? Because half of my friends are unemployed, and every single one has a university degree. And who starts building and then doesn't finish it because they don't want it to be taxed?

That's how it is in Mexico, too. They leave some unfinished faux-second-story attached to their building and never pay full property tax on the value of property-with-one-completed-story. Re: "who starts ..." why don't you search before you post?

Oh, is Mexico actually a rich country too, then?

That's actually not true, you are referring to a very bad "cooking" that Samaras presented to Merkel at the fall of '14 which was proved to be too stupid to talk about ever again...

Actually that is true. He was referring to Greece having a budget surplus, not a plan. They missed their target surplus but still had a budget surplus for 2014 of near 2 billion euros.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-misses-target-on-budget-s...

The current finance minister says they cooked the books: yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/04/24/greek-statistics-are-back-primary-deficit-presented-as-surplus-with-eurostats-seal-of-approval/

Your link is about a 2013 budget surplus and not 2014. The reason eurostat did those adjustment was too eliminate one off expenditures that would not continue. And they didn't continue in 2014.

As I understand it, they converted their currency to the Euro, which means unlike the US who can simply print more money to get out of a bad economic situation, the Greeks can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com