Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

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Really? The economy has plunged further into decline after showing some signs of recovery in the second half of 2014. Tax avoidance (cheating) has soared given Syriza's populist promises to roll back measures designed to improve tax collection (and the Greeks are the worst tax cheats in the EU). They have both told their EU creditors f*ck you - you'll never get back the money you just lent us - while simultaneously demanding EU countries lend them more money. Unsurprisingly this pissed off their only friends/supporters in the world. Within the EU, support/goodwill for Greece has collapsed since Syriza took charge.

Other EU countries have taken on huge debts to support Greece only to be berated by Syriza; Spain for example has given Greece 27 billion euro (equal to an entire year of government social spending) while Spain itself suffers 25% unemployment and a collapsed economy. Syriza has/is rolling back many reforms (like paying civil servants 13 months pay every year) while other EU country are continuing to cut back (e.g. on retirement ages). Many EU countries (e.g. the Baltic states) have lower average salaries and work longer before retiring than the Greeks and yet have paid into the rescue fund for Greece. After all this Syriza still blames the EU for their troubles? Or threatens to unleash Jihadists on Berlin?

The trouble with Greece is that the government hasn't balanced its books in 35 years and the economy produces little of value (olive growing and cheap tourist sector jobs) while expecting to live a live-style like the average German, British or even French or Italian who produce high value-add goods which are exported to the world. They continue to demand that the government spend more while avoiding taxes.

Syriza feeds this national self-pity by looking for outsiders (particularly the Germans) to blame for this. At some stage reality has to be faced.

14, not 13 salaries a year. There are the normal monthly salaries, then there are an "Easter" and a "Christmas" salary.

I learned of this via something almost out of a ancient Greek comedy, the lines of the Goddess of irony:

A Greek manager sent to manage an branch created here in Bulgaria to take advantage our cheaper labor was outraged when she found out we only get 12 salaries a year. How is she expected to live on only 12 salaries, she asked incredulously, what about the extra spending around vacations??

I think that it is not very relevant whether civil servants get 12, 13 or 14 monthly salaries per year. The schedule of pay packages is just an artifact of history.

What matters is the annual salary (or total cost of employment). This can then be split into e.g. 12, 13 or 14 - I don't care - payment lots. But if the total salary package of civil servants is something that the government cannot afford, then that is the problem.

Is that anecdote about a Greek manager in Bulgaria real? If there indeed are such managers, they are definitely very silly not to understand how different the terms of employment may be in different countries. The practices in your home country may be not at all relevant somewhere else, and this is not just the pay packages, but also days off, terms of laying off people, what things like health care is included, and so on and so on.

We have a stereotype that Americans are particularly ignorant of the rest of the world in this respect, but I don't know if that stereotype is really justified.

(FWIW, our annual gross pay in Finland is typically 12.5 monthly salaries; the .5 monthly salary is paid out at holiday seasons, typically in the summer. The creation of these bonuses are related to the economic situation in 1960's and 1970's: during their summer holiday, many people took a temp job in Sweden, and pay in Sweden was so much better that once there, many decided to stay. A "return bonus" was commissioned in Finland after negotiations between employers and employee unions, to motivate people come back to their normal jobs at end of annual leave. This has since those times transformed into a part of the regular compensation package for everyone. In shorter employments, you earn both holiday days and the holiday bonuses, which are then paid out typically at end of employment if you're not in a regular job.)

That's not too uncommon in Europe. In Denmark we also get something like 13.5 monthly salary payments. In order to ensure that all workers have extra cash flow around the time of the summer vacation [1], the Danish Holiday Act (Ferieloven) requires an extra salary payment about 6 weeks before the normal summer holiday period, equal to 12.5% of the annual "regular" salary (i.e. 1.5 normal monthly salaries). Well, modulo some complexity: in some arrangements a part of that money may go to a communal holiday fund run by your union instead, which uses it to operate vacation property that workers can use free or cheaply, and only half or so might be paid out to the worker in cash. But in any case, everyone gets 13 salary payments of some kind.

[1] It's an important part of Danish culture that everyone, of all social classes, should take a contiguous 3-week vacation in the summertime.

Average workers' monthly pay (year/12) as of 2013 for some of the UE28 countries, in euros:

  DK 3739
  LU 3009
  FI 2622
  IE 2621 
  DE 2574
  ES 1634
  GR 1028
  PT 984
  HR 848
  PL 693
  BG 316

It's comments like this that make me sick in the stomach. I won't argue with @derriz because his lack of basic understanding of the situation both in Greece and the EU is extremely low.

To get a perspective of how inadequate German and EU (generally speaking) technocrats are at basic macro-economics take a look at Ben Bernanke's blog, on Germany's trade surplus[1].

NOTE: Noting @derriz posts I'd say there's a strange patterns emerging. He probably jumps into conversations just to make a point: Greeks are bad and they get what they deserve while Germans are good and we should follow their example. I will just say that this view is naive and stupid :-)

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben-bernanke/posts/2015/04/03...

In a way yes I do think countries get what they deserve if they repeatedly vote for politicians which promise the impossible and enact self-destructive policies. For example not collecting taxes and borrowing 10% of GDP every year to over-pay under-worked state employees and fund grandiose vanity projects like the Olympics. It's all great until arithmetic catches up with you.

I'm from one of the other PIIGS, lost my job and had to emigrate. I lived through bank and property implosion and unemployment increasing more than 3-fold. I saw friends lose effectively ruined.

However, the other PIIGS have all faced the unfortunate reality of their position, recognized their OWN mistakes and tried to correct things by cutting back on public and private wages and government spending. After a few years of pain, they are all seeing improvement - particularly falling unemployment.

Only Greece seems to think the party can keep and what's even more irritating is that they are angry and bitter towards the very people - the voters other EU countries - who have made huge sacrifices to provide them with almost a quarter of a trillion euro to ease them over the required adjustments. Put yourselves in the shoes of a politician in a poorer (than Greece) EU country sending money to Greece instead of spending it on hospital, schools, etc. in their own country.

It's time for a reality check, my sick-in-the-stomach friend. It's time for Greeks to consider the plausible possibility that they bear some of the responsibility for its own unfortunate state. But I guess it's easier to blame German trade imbalances, international capitalism, the IMF, the EU, the US, bankers, anyone besides Greeks themselves for the problems of Greece.

Your comment is wrong at so many level, I seriously don't know what to do with it.

That said, I wish you all the best in life. Stay strong.

On a side note, if I'm not wrong I guess you meant either that:

1. His lack of [...] is really high. ( Does this make sense?)

2. His understanding of[...] is really low/poor.

Cheers :p

Funny, it's point-by-point exactly the line of the french eco channel BFM Business (which, I concede, is my main and only source in term of economics matters). I am curious, are you also a listener of this channel ? If not, what medias also hold this line ?

> If not, what medias also hold this line ?

Practically all the serious ones across many countries and many languages.

I am pretty certain that the economical point of view diverge a lot between countries. France, UK, Italy and Germany all have common cultural roots but very different opinions about how economy should serve society. Thus, I think that the media could only agree so much on the specifics.

If we really all agree on the problems of Greece, it could be the first time ever all members of UE agree on something spontaneously...

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