Congratulations to the Greek left! The movement against austerity....

I live in Greece and personally speaking i haven't seen any substantial change neither in employment nor in economy growth. These charts may be true but people aren't numbers, the failure of Troika is shown on everyday peoples' lives.

From my point of view, PASOK should have found other ways to solve the problem. There had been deficit problems in the country in the past too and the government didn't call out Troika or any other institution. Italy has deficit problems as well and they didn't get ''help'' from Troika.

From your point of view, cutting wages is the way to go? I don't know how the UK media portrays the situation in Greece and i'm not sure the average European has realised what is really going on in countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus. Making statistics is fine, but having people getting unemployed and homeless and having Troika saying that they're really helping Greece is not.

Nigel Farage, the man of the people who supports fox hunting and opposes gay marriage.


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Out of interest, what type of public sector worker are you? I doubt that very many have had a near-doubling of pay. The great majority have flatlined, but when you take inflation into account, most UK workers have suffered a big net drop in real incomes which is hardly made up for by a modest recent revival.

Global living standards are a very mixed topic. Quality of life has probably fallen in many developing countries (and even developed ones) because of longer hours spent working to maintain living standards, increasing urban pollution and reduction in working conditions. The standard GDP PPP figures are strongly influenced by the growth in incomes of the corporate sector and the rich.

In the developed world, marginalisation of vast numbers of workers, casualisation and zero-hours contracts, the mass destruction of professional work and the removal of whole tiers of employment by the digital economy are further entrenching the privileges of wealth owners and the destruction of real living standards for whole swathes of middle and working class families.

Seen what this ukip MEP thinks about gay marriage?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gay-ukip-mep-samesex-marriage-backers-are-equality-nazis-supporting-false-*******s-so-queens-can-dance-up-the-aisle-to-village-people-9830047.html

It would appear that he's gay himself. Is he a homophobic homosexual?

Seen what this ukip MEP thinks about gay marriage?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gay-ukip-mep-samesex-marriage-backers-are-equality-nazis-supporting-false-*******s-so-queens-can-dance-up-the-aisle-to-village-people-9830047.html

It would appear that he's gay himself. Is he a homophobic homosexual?

I'm a civil servant, so haven't enjoyed progression pay unlike the majority of the public sector.

Have the great majority flatlined? Average income has flatland, but most people earn more money as they get older, so most workers will have outpaced the average. The rest have become pensioners.

I live in Greece and personally speaking i haven't seen any substantial change neither in employment nor in economy growth. These charts may be true but people aren't numbers, the failure of Troika is shown on everyday peoples' lives.

From my point of view, PASOK should have found other ways to solve the problem. There had been deficit problems in the country in the past too and the government didn't call out Troika or any other institution. Italy has deficit problems as well and they didn't get ''help'' from Troika.

From your point of view, cutting wages is the way to go? I don't know how the UK media portrays the situation in Greece and i'm not sure the average European has realised what is really going on in countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus. Making statistics is fine, but having people getting unemployed and homeless and having Troika saying that they're really helping Greece is not.

Sophistry. You aren't comparing like with like. If you got a 65% rise (difficult to accept, but let's just speculate for a minute that's true) and that was due to age increases, promotion, bonuses, or whatever, then that isn't real increase in pay rates.

However, increasingly I have to say I don't really find many of your points credible and short of you posting your payslips, then and now, we will have to leave it there.

Living standards have improved since the '50s yes or no?

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gains a clear win.

Owen Jones writes brilliantly about it. This was a victory of hope against the lies of the post-cold war 'consensus' that only neoliberal capitalism can solve our problems and the lie that we have to destroy our public services, the incomes of more than half the population and the lifestyles we've been used to, because capitalism demands it.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/26/syriza-victory-lifted-greek-politics-cynicism-hope

Syriza's victory in Greece should be a role model for us here in the UK. We do not need to accept the Tory/neoliberal/New Labour line that there is no alternative to massive cuts in public services.

Sophistry. You aren't comparing like with like. If you got a 65% rise (difficult to accept, but let's just speculate for a minute that's true) and that was due to age increases, promotion, bonuses, or whatever, then that isn't real increase in pay rates.

However, increasingly I have to say I don't really find many of your points credible and short of you posting your payslips, then and now, we will have to leave it there.

How is it not an increase in pay?
Someone starting in the job I had in 2008 last year would start on £970 less than I did. But that's a very different thing to arguing to say people's individuals haven't seen their pay keep up with inflation.

It's really not. It's about the incompetent Greek government living beyond their means for decades by failing to collect tax and offering huge pensions by a continued cycle of borrowing and hiding debt.

Then, when they get found out and are given money on the condition that they begin living within their means, they throw a hissy fit and elect a party who don't want to pay the debt. You can't just refuse to pay a debt, no-one would lend to them again.

Syriza are being completely unreasonable here.

Funny that the Keynesian argument about the suppression of demand always gets trotted out even though a lack of demand does not even anyway justify socialistic policy or increased government spending. Best way to increase demand would be to actually give the middle class their money back by cutting taxes.

That's the long term goal in my opinion as it is very hard to say that the UK has a liberal, free-market system when the government takes such a significant portion of our income and government spending as a percentage of GDP is at 45% (without including the massive unfunded liabilities of public pensions).

It's hardly a 'hissy fit'. The country has been devastated.

Obviously the problem was over-borrowing, but as in the UK, it isn't the tax evaders and avoiders, the bankers, or the politicians who are suffering from the austerity - it is the poor and the middle class.

Austerity suppresses demand and causes deflation, which is happening in the UK, across Europe and elsewhere. For sure the Greeks made a lot of very bad mistakes (or at least, corrupt civil servants, the rich and bankers did) but the payment is being made by the majority. The austerity programme is pushing us collectively back to the early 30s and in some ways things are already worse than they were then. The current depression has lasted longer and wages are not recovering as they did after some years back then.

A more sensible way out would be to leave the Euro, default (most of the bankers to whom the money is owed are little better than gangsters anyway) and set a new economic system up. I doubt that Greece can handle all this alone, but at the moment, the 'Troika' is basically just about ensuring that Goldman $achs and JP Morgan retain the profits of their programme of Euro-manipulation.

Isn't a good 60% of their bailout sourced from the Eurozone? Also wouldn't call the likes of the IMF as 'as good as gangsters'. Just like Iceland they want to rack up a bill and leave someone else with the tab.

Out of interest, what would have happened if nobody had bailed out Greece at the time?

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Raising the incomes of the poorest is a foolproof method, since they will immediately spend most of the new money.

Opposing austerity is not the same as advocating 'socialistic policy', but if by that you mean a measure of rational government planning as opposed to a bizarre and madly idealistic fantasy that the 'market will sort everything out' then you are right. However, my experience with these sorts of arguments is that libertarians think that the opposite of anything not controlled by hedge fund algorithms and offshore tax-free oligarchs is 'socialism'.

Giving tax breaks to middle class people has been proven over and over in the US not to raise demand. This is because they are much more likely to save additional and unexpected income, or else to spend it on cheap imports. Arguably part of the reason China surged from the 80s onwards is that the US handed tax breaks to those on comfortable incomes.

Raising the incomes of the poorest is a foolproof method, since they will immediately spend most of the new money.

Isn't a good 60% of their bailout sourced from the Eurozone? Also wouldn't call the likes of the IMF as 'as good as gangsters'. Just like Iceland they want to rack up a bill and leave someone else with the tab.

Out of interest, what would have happened if nobody had bailed out Greece at the time?

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