My blood pressure spiked after reading this story from the UK-based Times. The Greeks are rioting in the streets because they want our money (i.e., an IMF bailout) and they want to keep all the inefficient and wasteful government policies that caused the crisis. In other words, these bums and leeches want my fiscal burden to increase so they can get bonuses for things such as (this is not a joke) using a computer or (gasp!) getting to work on time. They want me to pay more so that children can “inherit” parents’ pensions and some bureaucrats can get 18 months of pay for 12 months on the job. Unbelievable.
The violence came as negotiations were concluding between the socialist government of George Papandreou, the IMF and the EU over a multi-billion-euro rescue package for Greece. …Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will. …Bureaucrats will raise their fists at the barricades in a general strike and protests on Wednesday to protect their considerable perks from the IMF. They and other public sector workers are virtually unsackable, can retire as early as 45 and get bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and arriving at work on time. Some of them get as many as four extra months’ salary a year, compared with the 14 months that are paid to other Greek workers. One of the most generous bonuses is paid to unmarried daughters of dead employees in state-controlled banks: they can inherit their parents’ pensions. …It costs more to transport a sack of potatoes from northern Greece to Athens than from Athens to Dusseldorf, because haulage, like many other sectors of the Greek economy, is an impenetrable cartel. When Michalos started a commodities trading business in London in the 1980s, the paperwork took him 48 hours, he said. In Greece’s “Soviet-style” economy he had to go through 117 bureaucratic procedures to get the right government permits. A wealthy friend of his had taken 10 years to win permission to put up a hotel.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7113941.ece
