Quote from: StockPhotosArt on June 27, 2015, 17:02

Quote from: Zero Talent on June 27, 2015, 15:32

Quote from: StockPhotosArt on June 27, 2015, 14:35

Quote from: spike on June 27, 2015, 13:22

..and all somebody has to do is link the median wage instead of the average...

here: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_European_countries_by_median_wage

Those values are GROSS income. In Portugal, after the huge taxes (among the highest in Europe) the NET income drops considerably and those 694€ will fall to under 600€.

And if you consider we pay some of the highest prices for energy, fuel and everything else there's not much money left for anything.

Here is your net income. There are 10 EU countries behind Portugal and Greece!

Portugal has 8177/12 = 681/month NET

There is something very wrong with those informations. One says the Gross income for Portugal is 694€, and the other says that the Net is 681€.

I can assure you that a worker in Portugal does not pay only 13€ of taxes over income and Social Security.

Social Security alone, for workers working to an employer is 11% (employer pays another +-23% for each worker), which roughly reduces 70€ over the mentioned Gross 694€ sending the salary under the 600€. But then you still have to cut the tax over the income.

You also say that there are other countries with a wider gap between min and max wages. According to data, only Latvia has a bigger gap. Portugal is in the second place equal to Romania and Bulgaria.

And if you consider that the extra hours are in most cases not paid, and you do it for free if you want to keep the job, and that this one is extremely precarious putting the worker at the mercy of the employer, the salary is in fact much lower since you should be earning more for the work you do.

I tend to believe Eurostat numbers a little more than some "wikiland" numbers.

Anyway, the topic is not about Portugal, but about Greeks, living on borrowed money, way above their possibilities.
FYI, Portugal's national debt is 130% vs Greece 179% GDP. Portugal might still have a chance to avoid the a "Greek crisis", if the Portuguese people will elect and keep in power fiscally responsible politicians,  instead of populist gamblers like Tsipras.

Since you mentioned it, I am not aware of any debt bailout requested by Romanians, Bulgarians, etc despite living much harsher lives than the Greeks!
And Romania has a national debt of only 38% for a net income of 172 euros/month.
And Bulgaria even 19% for a median net income of 243 euros/month!
And more or less, the same goes for all the other 10 countries having a lower standard of life than Greece or Portugal. All of them are much more fiscally responsible!

What about that?

Very responsible...

Lets check on Croatia last EU member...

Banks...sold out after EU and financial commissions orders , not a single one owned by the Republic Of Croatia anymore, all of those banks rejecting to respect court ruling against them ,openly  threatening with European Commission.

Energetic... sold out  sole Croatian oil company sold after instructions of same institutions for a 3 years profit

Telecommunications.... sold out largest monopolistic company sold by same principles for a shameful 2 years profit

Social Insurance... on best direction to become privatized together with health care


Dont have to mention that the main blackmail argument of EU to privatase all that was the huge loan created in 20 years while governments blindly followed EU instructions against its own people and sol out 90% of everything that was in peoples hand 20 years ago and bringing pure profit to the country.

Lets see where the loaned money went....

Mostly in private pockets to the people serving and cooperating with the ones that were giving those loans

The main instructions was obligation to invest in highways which are generating such looses now that the new government is about to give in concession to the same ones that were giving the loans for their construction against will of people and rejecting the obligation for referendum for which enough signatures were collected despite the insane referendum regulation that were implemented lately.


The same prime minister and his colleges who arranged all those deals is sitting in federal prison after he decided to stop obeying at the moment they asked him to trade territory.

All deals are still valid , will never reach courts and the official explanation is that we cannot change past , that a deal is a deal, the country has no options than to take more loans, unemployment is higher then ever and 10% of highly educated people are just waiting that work permits agreement gets ratified and to leave the country.

The day before EU referendum minister of finance in main daily news openly instruct  retirees to vote YES because there is a strong chance they will never see their well earned pensions if the country stays out of the union.

Constitution say that the country can loose its sovereignty only by will of absolute majority yet they changed the rules only for that referendum so relative majority of turnout of only 40% of people was enough for the move.


That my friend is called economic genocide over a nation.

Having in mind things like ignoring Irish votes and treaty of Lisbon its absolutely clear that this is operated by people who couldn't care less about democracy and responsibility of any kind that are using finances to enslave people.


What about that  ?

Quote from: Lizard on June 27, 2015, 19:21

The EU membership is the best thing that happened to these countries.
Politicians cannot change the laws to suit themselves and steal with impunity, anymore. They must adhere to the rigors of the EU club.
Some of them would love to go back to the "free-for-all" theft and corruption frenzy from the post-communist years. Some of them would love to buy for themselves and for peanuts, the telecom, energy or banking industries, you seem to worry so much about. And they would love to prevent all external competition.
This is why they do their best to play the nationalistic card, blaming EU for making life harder for everybody, when in fact it is harder for them to steal, in the name of the "national interest"

Nope actually its worst thing that ever happened to people and best thing that ever happened to political elite parasites.

External EU conglomerate competition already bought all that was worthy for peanuts buy bribing those politicians under the table and changing laws to suite their needs.

Political structure never changed indeed and highest party leaders and their families from communism time are the biggest pro Europeans at the time and they have never been richer by far. Its not s hard to check someones political history at all.

EU has exactly the same political structure as ex USSR and the highest part of them has never been elected by people at both systems. 

Political power of EU elite is being inherited by family roots in worst way in history that you cannot even compare with hardest communistic times.

The voting power of the people in Europe has never been so degraded in whole Europe history and its harder to have a referendum at this time than in communism.

And after all why are European leaders so starving to pull nations in their union ? Especially nations with financially unreasonable leaders and people ?

Isn't it easier to let them perish in ignorance a come back begging to be part of that great thing ?

Why did the ever start to give loans to such countries and "help" them ?   

Again that called economical genocide and nothing less than that.

And please don't start with the nationalism cliche because people who are among worst opponents of EU are well known anti nationalist in their countries and wider and have gone to huge problem because of that from both ends.

 

 

Quote from: Lizard on June 27, 2015, 21:56

You contradict yourself.
You admit that your politicians stole and enriched themselves during the pre-EU years.
Now, when EU tries to stop the corruption, theft and economical malpractice by asking for good governance principles and practices (as they tried with Greece, to stay on topic), you consider this the "worst thing that ever happened"

Obviously, for some reason, you either prefer the lawless, anarchic, post-communist years, or, you are nostalgic about the "glorious" communist period.

Would draw you the image if I could to get you realize I liked those time as much as I like this and the ones before...sleazy people always find a way to go to the top because the system basically never changes despite the illusion that it does. If it did you would notice that the society is lead by the most consent and capable based on science and innovation in favor of all and not by a third grade clerks based on economy which isn't even a science itself to favor very small minority of greedy billionaires.   

They were stealing then and they are stealing now and the ones running EU are no different at all.  No one of them is being kicked out of his place because he cannot afford to pay his bills that's for sure regardless of a system he ruled at.

And when you say good governance you mean lowering health and social security rights to the people, forcing them to work to the day they die and making them pay even more taxes on the enough tiny piece of their work they are already getting to pay the debt created by the people walking inside the European parliament and their sponsors that are financing the creation of those debts at the first place.

I would also talk about anarchy and politics with you but you would have to stand in another level of conciseness to get my point without trying to guess what I stand for and using any political system terms in the same sentence.

I surely have no reasons for nostalgia , I'm a pure dreamer and the world that I dream of surely doesn't stand at this pseudo fascistic grounds using communist principles and changing names of the terms to suit their needs and to suck the last drop of a small man for the corporate success hiding behind the great term of globalization.

Im fist for globalization, I see no difference between any man whatever language he speaks or whatever paper they made him carry in his pocket, respect them all equally couldn't care less for countries and borders but when a modern corporate colonization movement takes the wheel of the "term" i can only wish that it will end like a soap bubble and Greece leaving the euro zone is nice step in that direction. Hope they will let them peacefully because I'm always for peace.

Peace      

 

 

OK, John Lennon, peace

Sent from my SM-N910T using Tapatalk

 

FYI, Portugal's national debt is 130% vs Greece 179% GDP. Portugal might still have a chance to avoid the a "Greek crisis", if the Portuguese people will elect and keep in power fiscally responsible politicians,  instead of populist gamblers like Tsipras.

I wouldn't be very reassured by that if I were Portuguese. In 2008, when it was discovered that Greece needed to adopt "responsible austerity" to repair its economy, the Greek debt to GDP percentage was 129.9 - a whisker less than the current rate you quote for Portugal. It has only risen to 180% because responsibly following the EU prescription has shrunk the economy by 30%. If you divide 130 by 0.7 (the percentage of the economy that hasn't disappeared) you get 186, which shows that destroying a third of the economy and leaving more than 50% of young people without jobs over a seven year period has succeeded in cutting the debt load in cash terms by 3%. And it's clearly going to be a lot harder to squeeze another 3% out of the country over the next few years because there is so much less of the economy left to squeeze.

A recent report showed that Greece was hit by a cyclical slowdown in the shipping industry after the global crash of 2008, with freight rates being squeezed. Shipping delivers something like a fifth of the country's gdp, so this was a major blow. The normal response to a cyclical decline in a major part of the economy would be to boost spending - as the UK did - until there is a recovery. Instead, the Troika chose that moment to impose austerity. The consequences of this were not impossible to see, the Indian representative on the IMF board warned that the policies they were embarking on could lead to a recessionary spiral resulting in a full-blown depresssion - which is what has happened.

A lot is made of the spendthift Greeks who want to live the high life by borrowing other people's money, and that they should learn to live in austerity, like the Germans do. But according to a top economist writing in The Guardian today the Germans don't go for austerity at all. Their economy is based on a high level of spending to develop the infrastructure - precisely opposite to the policies they say will save Greece - see the third assessment in this article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/27/greek-bailout-extension-refused-panel-leading-economists-give-their-verdict

A lot is made of the rectitude of the Institutions, and how the Greeks should learn from them and abandon their evil ways. But it seems to be widely accepted that the ECB knew that Greece was massaging the figures but still let them in because the political project desired Greek entry and, anyway, the Germans and French had broken the rules too, so why shouldn't Greece?  They even elevated the chief Greek figure fiddler, Lucas Papademos, to the number-2 post in the ECB as a reward for his good work. If it's imagined that this was just because they didn't know of his fiddling, it's worth remembering that after the crisis erupted in 2010 - with the fiddle fully exposed - Papademos was made Prime Minister of Greece, with the Troika's enthusiastic support.

It's also worth thinking about how much the "feckless spendthrift Greeks" problem owes to the level of interest rates. If the Greeks were blessed with the same interest rates as the Germans (who you actually have to pay to get them to accept your cash) then, clearly, servicing debt would not be a problem. But when the markets want 20% or 30% return for lending then servicing the debt becomes impossible. In the 1990s, UK mortgage rates went above 16% (courtesy of the EU, as it happens), today they are maybe 6%. The difference in repayments on a 140,000 mortgage going from 6% to 16% is about £1,000 a month. How many people could cope with that sort of increase in their monthly mortgage payments without turning into "feckless spendthrifts, living high on the hog at other people's expense" who moaned about not wanting to repay all that interest on what they borrowed?

Of course, this doesn't exonerate Greece for its tax evasion, corruption and cronyism. I don't know how they will solve those problems when they seem to be pretty much built into the system. I suspect tax rates are set artificially high to make allowance for the expected degree of fiddling - so anybody paying taxes in full is actually getting over-taxed and in the case of businesses is probably becoming completely uncompetitive.

Hopefully, you will see that the situation is far more nuanced than the tabloid papers like to make out. The stuff I see a lot of people writing - and apparently believing - really is just a parody of the actual situation.

What bothers me is the European people being brainwashed against the simple portuguese citizen, like we're living luxurious lifes, in a pre-racist attitude.

The other day, in the middle of squabbling with the Greeks, Juncker described the eurozone as  "the area of solidarity and prosperity".  Of course, my first assumption was that this was a line from a stand-up comic, but it seems that Juncker is so deluded that he believes it despite the evidence from Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. I can't think of anything in Europe responsible for more division, nationalist sentiment and economic misery than the euro.

4 - people living in greece, portugal, etc ... should just plan to migrate elsewhere as soon as possible, the world is so big, plenty of better places both in the West and the East ... the EU can scr-ew us only as long as we live there, just leave for greener pastures and don't look back.

... true - so called free world is now outside the borders of EU and USA...

Is this a success? When hundreds of thousands of portuguese have now emigrated, especially the highly-qualified ones?

Then you have the government saying that the economy is recovering and that the unemployment is starting to drop. Sure, if unemployed people leave to foreign countries in droves, unemployment drops. Yet the truth is that there aren't more jobs, and in fact they are shrinking.

there's nothing wrong in moving to greener pastures and this is true also at the local level, just think about people wanting to enroll in university but living in the mountains, people skilled in a trade but their potential employers are all in the capital city .. no matter what, most of us will have to leave our little village sooner or later ...

what's the difference between moving 500km away in a big city and moving 1000km in a different EU country ?
like for instance portuguese or greeks moving to germany and UK ? no big deal, especially nowadays when we have cheap airplanes and fast trains and there's no need for silly red tape burocracy in order to get a job in another EU country as it was before the 90s.

leaving your friends and relatives back home ? so what ? the idea of doing the same job forever and living in the same place forever is ridicolous in 2015, smart people move where they're getting a higher ROI for their work, simple as that .. why being a doctor or an engineer in greece when you can get paid 3-4x times more in germany or UK ? is it worth it to emigrate ? yes and yes, of course it is, only losers will live their whole life in the same sh-itty village locked into a low paying job just because they can't find anything better in their area and they don't speak a foreign language and they're terrified at the idea of being alone in a foreign country.

moreover, what is greece or portugal doing for their own citizens ? more taxation, more burocracy, less benefits, pension cuts ... there's just no point giving their country any loyalty or money, ethnic or nationalist pride should be kept for our family and friends and eventually for our city or origin, anything else is just nonsense and has been abused by the elites since forever ... even the idea of being "european" .. i mean in the end we're just whites and europe is just a geographic notion, we're white even in other continents or on the moon, doesn't change anything in being white and european and from city xyz and from that specific rich or poor neighborhood and carrying that surname and the whole mumbo jumbo.

it's just you and me and ultimately we only live once.
if country xys is going down the drain you better leave the ship before it sinks and good riddance, plenty of other countries around welcoming us with open arms as long as we carry some skills and money !

it's only the parasites who are now terrified of their governments' imminent default or economic bust, they're the ones with no skills and no hope but sorry guys being weak is a choice and so is being strong, they reap what they sow and they will pay the price for their non accountability that they enjoyed in the past.

nobody owe us anything in this world, it's up to us to play our cards as best as we can, especially if you've not much to put on the table and if you're not born rich.
don't blame the cultural dumbing down imposed by the elites, blame yourself for being dumb and believing their BS, turning off the TV is a good start for instance.

greece going bankrupt will change nothing as far as i'm concerned, they will adapt to the new economic scenario and act accordingly, what they call now "poverty" is still light years better than the real poverty i've seen in third world countries so i'm hardly impressed by all these horror stories about greeks begging for food in Athens or rumming in the garbage bins ... and this is even more true for the greeks now assaulting their banks to empty their bank accounts .. they had all the time to do it in the last 2-3 years but guess what will wait till the last day to save their money, too late as some banks have already announced they will close and good luck with that ..

Especially when you know how business is done outside of Europe, how salaries can be higher in so called third world countries then in a bunch of EU countries, when you see how easy a startup can emerge in HK whilst e.g. the Czech Republic is killing every Entrepreneur without a expensive and complicated legal entity with fraudulent and ridiculous taxes and social security obligation (fraudulent because the state offers almost nothing in return) then you wonder how long the EU can survive as a legal framework in a world which is every year more populated and competitive.

again, the solution is to migrate in countries where taxation is low and you're welcomed as an investor.
waiting for a miracle in your own village is silly, nothing will ever change too much in most of the EU, and of course how are you supposed to compete with asian producers who have low taxation and cheap workforce ? you can't, unless you stick with high-end products and that's exactly what we're doing in EU but it wont last forever, japan and korea are already ahead in high-tech and much more, soon even china will invade the few markets where we're still leaders, what's next ? we know very well what's next and there's nothing we can do apart moving to asia as well, the EU is rotten to the core and there's no hope it can be fixed because the whole system is not designed to sustain the unfair competition we're facing from asian producers and the social-democracy ideology is a dead man walking now that the sh-it is hitting the fan ... first it's greece and tomorrow will be france and UK as well, just a matter of time !

What I find very interesting about the puritanical "so you sow, so shall you reap" brigade is that may of those with this attitude are the same folks complain about the "unfairness" of the big bad agencies who reject their work or pay them buttons.  The agencies are commercial bodies with no considerations other than the bottom line.  The bad decisions that created the situation in Greece were not made by the folks who are suffering the most.


Is it fair to say then that, anyone who bought into the whole MS thing because they felt money was to be made, and now find their income eroded by increased competition and low prices are to blame for their situation? 


Have some empathy guys because, like the Greeks, most of us have zero control of events that can land us in the *, and it could happen to any of us.

The countries are not being punished.  They are being bailed out at a cost.

Bailed out from debts artificially created. The Money does not go to the People or infrastructure or salaries. It goes to Investors and Bankers who actively provoked that situation:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/thomas-fazi/troika-saved-banks-and-creditors-%E2%80%93-not-greece

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/07/29/where-did-greeces-bailout-money-go/

http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2015/01/18/where-did-greeces-bailout-money-go-mostly-to-the-lenders/

http://www.attac.at/news/detailansicht/datum/2013/06/17/greek-bail-out-77-went-into-the-financial-sector.html

Greece is held hostage.

Greece cooked the books. They we're in a hole and needed EU money to survive. Of course debts were created. Its called a bail out. We never should have. We should have cut them out there and then. They're not held hostage. Nonsense. They can leave whenever they want. But they don't because of their greedy nature