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I promise... this isn't just a geography joke. Like many Americans I tend to watch the State of the Union Address each year, followed by the response from the other party. While I'll try my best to keep my personal politics out of this article I found one part of the response speech that even still nags at me for how far from accurate it is: "In our economic stagnation and indebtedness, we are only a short distance behind Greece, Spain, and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe."
While people can argue over the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from a single credit rating agency, a move which marked similar downgrades from other European countries shortly thereafter, this had less to do with the ability of the US to pay its bills and had much more to do with our willingness to pay our bills, primarily stemming from the control of the purse strings which rests with congress and an ugly public fight that marked the first time the raising of our debt ceiling was held hostage by our own representatives (and no one is surprised by Congress' 11% approval rating).
I digress. Greece just reached an initial deal that will help them cut their spending (known as Austerity). While people throw around the phrase "deficit reduction" what they really mean is cutting spending. Alexander Hamilton had envisioned how quickly the American economy could grow and our political position could improve by taking massive foreign loans. Yes, our country was founded on a principal of improved value through revolving debt. It's a practice that spread from our government to our people and it cost us about five very difficult years so far. The same thing is happening in Greece, except their economy generates an incredibly small amount of money compared to the U.S. and you have a nearly non-existent production rate for exported items.
Much of this is due to the 55 age limit for retirement, but there are myriad reasons. Now Greece is being forced into making tough decisions in order to not go bankrupt and see its current political upheaval turn far more reactive and potentially violent. Take for instance minimum wage. They are reducing it by 20%, or if you're under 25 it's being reduced by 32%. Could you imagine the Congress in the US reducing Minimum Wage by 1/3? While they aren't yet raising the age of retirement as we've done slowly over time they are slashing benefits to be proportional to the contribution you made to the fund while working. In other words... they're moving from a flat rate retirement system to something more closely resembling our social security system.
One of the next things Greece is moving towards is automatic deductions for taxes in each paycheck, something they don't currently do, instead expecting citizens to fork over all their taxes at the end of the year based on their year's earnings. The current method has resulted in constant and systemic fraud, whereby the country is being cheated out of millions of dollars of tax revenue every year. Once again, this is something the U.S. already does. Citizens can expect more fees levied against them for services because they hope to privatize more of the government "with the aim of collecting billions of euros" as described by Dave Gilbert's breakdown of the Austerity measures (http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/14/world/europe/greece-austerity-detail/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2).
My question to Gov. Mitch Daniels is this... if the U.S. is doing so badly that it is on the verge of a collapse more spectacular than Greece then why is Greece working so valiantly to operate more like the U.S.? I'm certain it's not just to slow the flush down the drain.
/rant
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