# What's the real reason behind the Greek rioters? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 13, 2012, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730 "2012-02-13T18:59:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/141 "2012-02-16T16:24:25Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Contrary to popular belief, I don’t approve either…it’s freaking stupid for the country as a whole, not to mention to the countries trying to bail Greece out. But it’s both inevitable and even logical, if you are thinking in terms of ever person for themselves. > > -XT I agree - it is a Tragedy of The Commons type situation. Individually rational, collectively destructive. I certainly won’t be crying if these hidden assets are seized though. ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/142 "2012-02-16T16:29:32Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > The NYTimes had an article last year, about a Greek entrepreneur. He decided to get into the beer business, and invested over $8 million of his money. He was almost run out of business-his delivery trucks were vandalized, he was harassed by government inspectors, he was fought by bureaucrats. > Greece needs major reforms. A couple of years ago The times (I think) ran an expose of the Greek Tax system based on interviews with two honest tax inspectors who tried to do their jobs properly. Needless to say their careers by no means prospered. The Tax system was deeply corrupt from top to bottom. Currently the tax inspectors are not collecting taxes as they have been stopped from taking bribes. Speaking as a liberal I say it’s time to arbitrarily shoot 1 in 10 and set large ‘Avoid Getting Shot In The Head’ quota’s for the rest. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/143 "2012-02-16T16:33:34Z")
Sort of an illustration of your point there about the tax collection issues (from Princhester’s link earlier): > [@](#): > > Fraternal Revenue Service > > The costs of running the Greek government are only half the failed equation: there’s also the matter of government revenues. The editor of one of Greece’s big newspapers had mentioned to me in passing that his reporters had cultivated sources inside the country’s revenue service. They’d done this not so much to expose tax fraud—which was so common in Greece that it wasn’t worth writing about—but to find drug lords, human smugglers, and other, darker sorts. A handful of the tax collectors, however, were outraged by the systematic corruption of their business; it further emerged that two of them were willing to meet with me. The problem was that, for reasons neither wished to discuss, they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. This, I’d be told many times by other Greeks, was very Greek. > > The evening after I met with the minister of finance, I had coffee with one tax collector at one hotel, then walked down the street and had a beer with another tax collector at another hotel. Both had already suffered demotions, after their attempts to blow the whistle on colleagues who had accepted big bribes to sign off on fraudulent tax returns. Both had been removed from high-status fieldwork to low-status work in the back office, where they could no longer witness tax crimes. Each was a tiny bit uncomfortable; neither wanted anyone to know he had talked to me, as they feared losing their jobs in the tax agency. And so let’s call them Tax Collector No. 1 and Tax Collector No. 2. > > Tax Collector No. 1—early 60s, business suit, tightly wound but not obviously nervous—arrived with a notebook filled with ideas for fixing the Greek tax-collection agency. He just took it for granted that I knew that the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “It’s become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.” > > The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe. > > The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” But, I say, if some plastic surgeon takes a million in cash, buys a plot on a Greek island, and builds himself a villa, there would be other records—say, building permits. “The people who give the building permits don’t inform the Treasury,” says the tax collector. In the apparently not-so-rare cases where the tax cheat gets caught, he can simply bribe the tax collector and be done with it. There are, of course, laws against tax collectors’ accepting bribes, explained the collector, “but if you get caught, it can take seven or eight years to get prosecuted. So in practice no one bothers.” -XT ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/144 "2012-02-16T16:36:10Z")
I’m sure none of us in this thread has ever accepted cash for services rendered or offered cash in order to get a discount on services knowing that the person providing the services would not report the income. I guess it’s just a matter of scale. ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/145 "2012-02-16T16:38:04Z")
The link didn’t work for me but that looks the one. ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/146 "2012-02-16T16:39:04Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I’m sure none of us in this thread has ever accepted cash for services rendered or offered cash in order to get a discount on services knowing that the person providing the services would not report the income. I guess it’s just a matter of scale. Sure. Not from my surgeon though. But the sheer scale, the sheer cultural embededness of it all, doesn’t bode well for their future. Default or no - a massive cultural change is needed. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/147 "2012-02-16T16:39:08Z")
[QUOTE=John Mace] I’m sure none of us in this thread has ever accepted cash for services rendered or offered cash in order to get a discount on services knowing that the person providing the services would not report the income. I guess it’s just a matter of scale. [/QUOTE] We probably all do that, John, but there is no loophole for most of us to simply switch our jobs to ‘self employed’ and skate out of pretty much ALL taxes. Nor is there a way for me to say ‘Well, I only make $10,000 a year, which is below the taxable rate, so I don’t have to pay income tax’ and just have officials go along with that and not check to see. -XT ---
**Author:** ![Gagundathar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a183cd/32.png) [@Gagundathar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gagundathar)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/148 "2012-02-16T16:42:39Z")
The, admittedly few (after all, y’all I am in Georgia), Greeks I have met were all entrepreneurs. It seems odd to me that ‘back home’ they are so laid back. The two men and the one woman I knew were anything but ‘laid back’. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2012, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/149 "2012-02-17T00:14:14Z")
Immigrants are always a bit different from the folks they left behind. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be immigrants. ---
**Author:** ![CJJ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecc23a/32.png) [@CJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CJJ)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2012, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730/150 "2012-03-01T17:23:14Z")
Latest news: Greece has [met the legislative requirements](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-01/greece-parliament-approves-pension-health-cuts-in-race-for-second-bailout.html) for further austerity that were imposed as terms of the second bailout. > [@](#): > > Greece’s parliament approved cuts in pensions and health care a day after ratifying a 3.2 billion euro ($4.3 billion) package of spending reductions to move closer to a rescue package to avert financial collapse…Approval in parliament allows Prime Minister Lucas Papademos to meet with euro-area partners this week having met most of the conditions demanded by the European Union and International Monetary Fund for Greece to get a lifeline of 130 billion euros. This second round of austerity was obviously imposed because the first round did so much to help the Greek economy recover from the government debt crisis–oh, wait: > [@](#): > > Pension and wage cuts are reducing state spending and changes to labor rules are liberalizing the jobs market. The measures are also driving the economy deeper into a recession and fanning discontent among Greeks as unemployment has jumped to 21 percent. The economy shrank 6.8 percent last year and is set to contract for a fifth year in 2012. …and to think these rioters are still ungrateful for everything the Euro-zone has done for them. Don’t they realize how important it is to have a “liberalized” jobs market? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-greek-rioters/612730.md?page=7)