Why aren’t there pitchforks?
The HAVE raised taxes as well as attempted to cut spending (and actually collected taxes that they weren’t in some cases, which I suppose is equivalent to ‘raised taxes’). What’s your point?
I think the general point is that Greece has been run like Ponzi scheme and the bill is due. Progress is nice, but when a new party is elected on a platform of (at least partly) rolling back some of that progress, the guys with the checkbooks are going to wonder what the hell is going on.
The EU is definitely liberal in both American and British axioms. American conservatives may feel strongly toward free trade, but not to the extent of renouncing political and monetary sovereignty.
The idea of an American Union of the US, Canada, and Mexico, for example, would be considerately more popular among American liberals.
I don’t think so. Certainly NAFTA wasn’t a liberal idea. Why do you think liberals are happy to throw away sovereignty?
Why did the following liberal Senators vote for it, then?
Biden
Kennedy
Kerry
Leahy
Mosley-Braun
Murray
Simon
et al.
How about the WTO? Was giving up sovereignty for that a liberal idea? Were the protesters against it wearing bowties?
I find it interesting that some are attempting to assert that free trade is now an American liberal idea ;).
Bill Clinton.
Clinton negotiated some additional agreements to address concerns Congressional Democrats had with the base agreement. Clinton inherited that base agreement from Bush though. Unless you call Bush a liberal it was not a liberal idea.
Combining numbers from here and here (both from wiki) with numbers adjusted for seats vacated and taken by the opposing party:
Senate:
27 of 56 Democrats voted for it (48%)
34 of 44 Republicans voted for it (77%)
House:
102 of 258 Dem for (40%)
132 of 176 Rep for (75%)
The majority of Congressional Democrats voted against ratification despite Clinton supporting it. I don’t know that we can necessarily label the ratification as strongly supported by liberals either.
All of which is completely separate from a continental union like the EU or a common currency. This is a thread about Greece though…
/hijack
Those gosh darn liberals.
For example:
Akaka
Biden
Boxer
Bradley
Feinstein
Inouye
Kerry
Kennedy
Kohl
Lautenberg
Levin
Mikulski
Mosley-Braun
Moynihan
Murray
Rockefeller
Simon
amongst others.
Maybe liberals didn’t come up with the idea of free trade agreements, but they sure do vote for them.
…and so did Republicans in that case. It’s really easy to cherry pick names when both parties supported it overwhelmingly and did so at a similar rate. Your point?
The main opponent of the UK entering the organisation that predated the EU was the British left, an opposition that still exists to a certain extent in the TUSC/Left Unity political party, funded by trade unions and ardently Euroskeptic. The main proponent of the UK entering the organisation was the British right. Thatcher, that mainstay of left wing politics, was a lukewarm Europhile for the majority of her administration. The UK’s current right wing Prime Minister, Cameron, is also an ardent supporter of the EU and Britain’s place in it.
Further, how hard is it to get this right? The EU is not the Eurozone. The UK is a member of the EU without renouncing monetary sovereignty, as are Sweden and Denmark. We all still have independent central banks, and independent currencies. The UK has also not seceded any sovereignty to the EU. Parliament could decided tomorrow that we are leaving the organisation and there’s not a jot anybody could do to stop us. Parliament has passed laws stating in certain circumstances the UK agrees to be bound by rulings made by European courts. We’ve lost sovereignty in the same way that members of the WTO have lost sovereignty.
I agree with much of this. Though as you said it’s important to point out the difference between the EU and Eurozone. Most on the Conservative Right are against the Euro, most are pro EU to some extent or another.
The Labour Party made a huge u-turn on the EU. Initially against the project they became passionately pro. THis I believe was a reaction to Thatcherism. I remember those days well. I was a lefty at the time. Perhaps this wasn’t said explicitly at the time but many on the the left came to view the EU as a protection against Thatcherism. French and German social & industrial policy was often looked upon admiringly.
I think its worthwhile to remind ourselves of the default position of political parties and newspapers in the UK. The Independent and Guardian were both passionately in favour of almost everything EU and single currency. I think(but am not certain)the Times and Telegraph have both been a touch more Euroskeptical.
Labour and LibDems parties were both passionately pro EU and Euro for the last four or five election cycles. The tories have been pro EU but anti Euro with a whole lot of internecine warfare thrown in.
So does this make it more likely Greece will leave the Euro?
I don’t even know why there is a debate within Greece about remaining in the Euro any more. Apparently it’s related to pride and being accepted as “real” Europeans, over any serious economic debate, though I’m not sure who thought Greece, the birth place of Europe as a concept, wasn’t really European before entering the Euro.
Anyway, it’s become clear that Northern Europe (not just Germany, but Finland, the Netherlands and co.) are not going to budge one iota and meet any of Greece’s demands. No doubt they’ve all got one eye on PODEMOS in Spain, who are likely to win the next election there, and who have similar politics to Syriza.
It’s probably better for Greeks at this point to end the madness, default, and go back to their own currency. They’re running a 4% primary surplus (though the exact figure seems to range from 2-4.5% depending on the source) and are being crushed under onerous debt repayments. Though will the Euro survive if they do? It seems like a lot of things have to not go wrong for the markets not to turn on Portugal, Spain or Italy as the next weakest link in the currency almost immediately.
You can avoid ~$1 worth of spending cuts by increasing taxes by $1.
The problem is that Greece cannot avail itself of Keynesian stimulus because they cannot borrow. The stimulus has to come from countries like Germany who can still engage in deficit spending.
(Underline added)
I think that you’ve summed up the Greece situation very nicely. Greece couldn’t manage it’s financial affairs. Other countries generously agreed to bail out Greece before Greece went bankrupt. Greece now wants to renege on it’s bailout agreements.
The problem Greece now faces is that its potential benefactors are much less likely to loan money to a country that doesn’t want to live up to its past agreements. If you can’t trust the borrower (Greece) to repay its debts, it’s foolish for other governments to ask their taxpayers to bear an even greater load in order to loan Greece more money that may not be repaid.
I’ve seen this argument crop up time and time again since the start of the crunch but consistently without any reasoning behind it.
Why forecast Britain’s performance on Greece’s? Why not on another one of the majority of the countries who benefited?
I would also like everyone who ever said similar statements to man up and bet £10,000 on the pound against the euro from the start of the crunch (2007) until now.
Care to guess the result? You would be £1,000 short.
Well, HIFIMA (Holy International Financial Markets) did not like the above post written by my previous self therefore I bow to my minisculiness and duly retract my last statement.
It’s kind of a zombie thread and I don’t know if anyone is still interested in the topic, but was watching some videos today on YouTube on economics and I found this one that does a good job of visualizing the underlying issues. It’s called The European Debt Crisis Visualized and I think it’s worth the 12 minute investment to get a high level overview of the issues. It also touches on the systemic problem of the Euro-zone and the Euro itself and what might need to be done to actually fix this problem in the long term (i.e. having a fiscal union to go along with the monetary union…sort of a United States of Europe, or, conversely, getting rid of the Euro and the EU/EZ completely and having EVERYONE leave the Euro).