Proverbs 16:18
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
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[…] Sunday, 6/28/15 at 10:46 am […]
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So remember kiddies, when you are tripping the light fantastic at the Pride Parade today, don’t trip and fall.
I had once assumed that the “destruction” was of whoever felt pride. But I now see that what is destroyed is the old order. The oppressors are the one’s destroyed by the “haughty spirit” that dares to defy the hateful spirit and thus a new paradigm takes root.
We could apply the prideful label to a lot of commenters right here on HA. Frankly, “arrogant jerks” is a more descriptive label for some of HA’s citizens.
Nice platitude, but it doesn’t work. If it did, you stupid humans would be long gone by now, and we rabbits would be running this place. But our time will come.
Feeling the pride, Greeks?
Isn’t “an haughty” pronounced “a naughty”? A naughty spirit is so much more fun.
@5 Since you brought up Greece, let’s talk about what’s going on there, which can be summed up like this:
1. Rich Greeks refused to pay their taxes. (Tax evasion is Greece’s national sport.)
2. As a result, the Greek government is broke, and can’t pay its bills.
3. So Greece’s creditors, i.e. governments and banking institutions run by conservatives, want to impose “austerity” on Greece.
4. This means cutting the wages and pensions of poor Greeks because rich Greeks don’t pay taxes.
5. The result is street riots in Athens and the election of a socialist government. If you think the solution to this is more austerity, just remember that Greece, which already has 50% youth unemployment and 25% overall employment, can always make money by renting military bases to Putin if they get desperate enough.
Yeah, wingnut austerity Whack-O-Nomics is working just great in Greece.
@ 7
You left out a couple of things:
• On pensions, the key concerns on the creditor side are those of the International Monetary Fund. The Washington-based fund has long argued that Greek pension funds receive budget transfers of about 10 per cent of GDP each year. “This compares to the average in the rest of the euro zone of 2½ per cent of GDP,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters earlier this month.
“The standard pension in Greece is almost at the same level as in Germany and people, again on the average, retire almost six years earlier in Greece than in Germany. And GDP per capita increase, of course, is less than half that of the German level.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/busi.....-1.2263345
• Creditors have already taken a 50% haircut, back in 2011.
Germans retiring in their mid-late 60s have little reason to sympathize with overborrowing Greeks unwilling to give up their early 60s retirements and 80% pensions, especially after agreeing to forego return of half of what they loaned.
Eastern Europen EU members with living standards below those of Greece similarly have little sympathy left.
Greece, in January, voted to hit the iceberg. Time for the baroque quartet to gather next to the lifeboats.
The Republican base is burning black churches while they scream religion is under attack! Where is the outrage?
@8 What you’re leaving out is that in Greece, with its high unemployment, a pension is often the sole support of an entire extended family. You also completely glossed over the fact that the poor (pensioners) are being made to pay for the sins (tax dodging) of the rich. Now c’mon, Bob, add 2 + 2 and tells us what the politics of this situation are, remembering that it isn’t Germans who elect Greek politicians. We have an announcement this afternoon from the PM that Greece’s banks and stock market won’t open tomorrow, and he used the word “humiliating” to describe the EZ’s latest demands. It’s now clear where this is going; Greece will default on its debt payment to the IMF on Tuesday, and while polls indicate a majority of Greeks still want to stay in the EU, it doesn’t look like that can or will do that on the EU’s present terms. Somebody’s gotta cave here, and it very much looks like Greece’s politicians have given up as much as they can.
@10 Btw, Bob, what imposes a larger loss, a 50% haircut, or a default? As an article I read this weekend pointed out, the ECB could purchase the entire country of Greece with two years’ worth of its QE money. The EU doesn’t have an affordability problem here; they have a stubbornness problem.
your ten percent versus 2.5 % is a bit misleading given the gdp’s so much smaller in greece… got facts as to the actual level of the pensions?
got an answer as to whether the last round of austerity worked? if the gdp doesn’t go up, Greece pays back less, do you grok that?
every capitalist corporation in all capitalist countries can declare chapter 11 or bankruptcy or similar usually controlled by a judge. but here germany is the creditor and in effect the judge, see a problem there?
tell me this, mr. austerity lover — if GM can declare bankruptcy in the usa why can’t Greece? how about that solution? they declare bankruptcy, all the debt is wiped out — or are you suggesting german creditors seize the parthenon and sell if off in an auction? if the debt were to be wiped out, what then? given all this, why on earth should Greece agree to pay back what it cannot pay?
seems you’re being romantic and not very capitalist minded. good smart capitalists don’t waste time fighting a chapter 11 or a liquidation bankruptcy — they GIVE UP AND MOVE ON often taking the five cents on the dollar. or they take yet another haircut. this is why we all it a haircut, no big deal — just reality. they don’t moralize that much. why the moralizing here?
@ 10
Somebody’s gotta cave here, and it very much looks like Greece’s politicians have given up as much as they can.
Not quite. They can still do the right thing and give up their chance to remain in office the next time there’s an election.
@12 The 10% figure is accurate, but it’s also a red herring. Pensions aren’t the cause of Greece’s problems. A roughly comparable figure for the U.S. is 14%, yet we don’t have Greece’s economic problems.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/qu.....ge-of-gdp/
Bob, like all conservatives, has an ideologically distorted view of economics. Conservatives believe wages are evil, and in a perfect conservative world, labor is free. Pensions (and all other transfer payments) also also are evil, because they undermine the “incentive” (read: coercion) to work for almost nothing.
What tanked the Greek economy was not decent wages and pensions, as alleged by conservatives, but monetary strangulation. Being tied to the Euro is like being on the gold standard. Conservatives, of course, love the gold standard and want the U.S. to return to it. Most economists think the gold standard is a terrible idea, and some have persuasively argued that the gold standard was the leading cause of the Great Depression. But reality, as you know, doesn’t deter conservatives from rigid adherence to their ideology.
The solution for Greece’s economic woes is devaluation, which requires to abandoning the euro and returning to the drachma, and probably requires leaving the EU. Argentina devalued in 2002 and its economy rebounded.
Popular media focus on the boost devaluation would give to exports and tourism, but that’s not nearly as important as the effect of removing the demand straitjacket from the domestic economy.
It isn’t the ordinary Greek citizens who created the problem, and we shouldn’t expect them to go hungry because of the failed policies arising from conservative ideology, and imposed on them by foreign bankers and politicians. Their new government understands the cause-and-effect relationships and sees clearly what needs be done to restore the Greek economy to long-term health.
@13 The “right thing” is to side with the ordinary citizens who didn’t create the problem, not kowtow to the foreign bankers and policymakers who did create the problem.
@14
Read your own link. Your 14% figure includes welfare and health care along with Social Security. Back out the welfare and health care costs and the US is at around 6% for ‘pensions’, vs. 10% for Greece.
You were correct that we don’t have Greece’s problems. Our retirement age is 67 – currently – and we assign far less to pensions than does Greece. Which is a big reason why we don’t have Greece’s problems, and it’s why that noted conservative organization, the IMF, remains troubled about Greece’s pension allocations.
Demagogue Mike Huckleberry and his religious extremists haters see a lifetime of grifting about equal marriage.
Speaking of Greece, how does the world’s premiere vacation and tourist spot go broke if there isn’t some jiggery pokery going on?
Greece should just default and let the chips fall where they may.
I wrote an analysis of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and posted it here:
http://handbill.us/?p=54935
You can read the Court’s opinion here:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/op.....6_3204.pdf
@16 “Your 14% figure includes welfare and health care along with Social Security. Back out the welfare and health care costs and the US is at around 6% for ‘pensions’, vs. 10% for Greece.”
That’s why I qualified my statement with the “roughly comparable” language, jackass. Except I don’t agree that your 6% figure is a fairer comparison than my 14% figure. But I’ll split the baby with you; if we average your 6% and my 14%, we’ll get 10%, same as Greece, which is sufficient to make my point.
I’m not going to spend time crawling through a detailed breakdown of the pie chart in the linked article, other than to say, “Be careful about relying on labels like ‘welfare,’ and read the explanations in the article before you take these labels literally.” I did a back-of-envelope rough calculation before posting my comment to satisfy myself that the U.S. economy has pension burdens roughly comparable to Greece’s in GDP terms.
Nor is a precise calculation necessary for the purpose of making my point that Greece’s pensions aren’t what “broke the bank” in that country. Pegging their economy to a currency and money supply they can’t control did, and your quibbling over percentages doesn’t refute that assertion in the least.
I assume that as a trained radiologist, when you look at an x-ray or CAT-scan, you accurately identify the abnormality that is causing the patient’s distress. In your case, this skill doesn’t carry over into economics. Maybe you should worry about cancerous biological growths and let others identify and figure out treatment plans for economic cancers.
@16 (continued) “You were correct that we don’t have Greece’s problems. Our retirement age is 67 – currently – and we assign far less to pensions than does Greece. Which is a big reason why we don’t have Greece’s problems, and it’s why that noted conservative organization, the IMF, remains troubled about Greece’s pension allocations.”
Bobbleheads like you assign blame for Greece’s economic problems to pensions without any thought. People with more brains than you read articles like this
http://blogs.wsj.com/brussels/.....after-all/
and realize that Greece’s pensions function much better as a lightning rod and talking point than as an explanation for that country’s tanking economy.
Further slashing Greece’s pensions and inflicting more hardship on Greek families won’t solve Greece’s economic problems. In fact, it’ll make things worse by further eroding domestic demand. Ditching the euro and devaluing its currency would break the deflationary spiral and allow its economy to grow.
@19 That’s stupid. Greece should try to regain control of its destiny by abandoning the euro, returning to the drachma, devaluing, and paying as much of its debts as it can, when it can.
Yeah, Greece can just print a bunch of drachmas. Yeah, that’ll work…
@24 Believe it or not, and you obviously don’t, it’ll work. When have conservatives ever been right? I’ll answer that with another question: How well has the conservative “solution” — austerity — worked so far?
Well, the Dow futures are indicating a dramatic down opening for the market tomorrow. Either tomorrow will be a fantastic buying opportunity or the beginning of a Greek disaster.
Pensions are going to disappear entirely over the next 50 years. It’s going to be defined contribution plans that take their place, whether we all like it or not.
25
Maybe you should ask a conservative.
@27 Well then, I guess everyone will have to be capitalists, and this is as good a time as any to start. Tomorrow will be a good day to buy stocks, because they’ll be selling at a discount in the morning thanks to our German and Greek friends and the European conservatives’ failed austerity policies. As for me, I saw the death of wages and benefits coming a long time ago, and while I have a state pension of the defined benefit type, it’s less than a fourth of my income; so even if the rightwing pension haters figure out a way to destroy the state pension system, I’ll be just fine. Learning to distrust employers and trust stocks changed my life. It’s better to own than be owned, that’s all; seems pretty simple if you think about it for a moment.
Once again the IDIOT Wabbit pollutes the thread and there is no retribution EVER!
Acts 17:28 – 28 for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
@30 Ha ha ha ha — the lightning bolt from the blue (gray?) fizzled out before it got to my burrow! Go complain upstairs.
Since you all went to the whole Greek thing I’m going to point something out you all have overlooked The problem here for Europe is that when countries go broke and they owe other countries money those other countries have to decide whether to collect or cut loses. European nations have not always decided to cut loses. It’s likely that in this case Germany would choose to cut loses, but you do have to consider what the nations owed the money will do. France was owed money from Mexico and sent in a French army to collect, they were able to do this because we were busy fighting a civil war, and the French got a bloody nose and got out as our civil war ended and there was teeth in our ability to carry out the Monroe doctrine.
The whole Greek situation is awash in pride and hubris. Ahh Sophocles is this familiar to you as Antigone and Creon? Ahh what pride on both of these unbending so human beings. And the tragedy appears to be unfolding anew and the tragedy is it doesn’t need to have happened, and it may bring down the European Union in the end as it exposes it’s strengths and weaknesses. In a economic pact that does not go far enough. As in our system will come to any states aid with unlimited recourses or cash if necessary.
@30 “Once again the IDIOT Wabbit pollutes the thread and there is no retribution EVER!”
If you feel your idiocy isn’t getting enough retribution in these threads, we, the HA guardians of truth and the American Way, can arrange for you to get more.