[…]
Europeans must grasp a simple fact: Greece has been, and remains, a failed social economy. Rumours of its recovery are just that: ill-motivated rumours!
Besides the wretched diagrams and data above, there are other facts on the Greek soil that corroborate the characterization of Greece as a failed nation-state. Here are some:
• There are 10 million Greeks living in Greece (and falling fast due to migration), ‘organised’ in around 2,8 million households that have a ‘relationship’ with the Tax Office. Of those 2,8 million households, 2,3 million have a debt to the Tax Office that they cannot service.
• 1 million households cannot pay their electricity bill in full, forcing the electricity company to ‘extend and pretend’, thus ensuring that 1 million homes live in fear of darkness at night while the electricity company is insolvent. Indeed, the Public Power Corporation is disconnecting around 30,000 homes and businesses a month due to unpaid bills.
• For 48.6% of families pensions are the main source of income, expected to be cut even further. The €700 pension has been reduced by about 25% since 2010 and is due to be halved over the next few years.
• The minimum wage shrunk (on the troika’s orders) by 40%.
• Social transfers have been cut by more than 18%
• 40% saying they will not be able to meet commitments this year
• Unemployment has risen 160% so that now 3.5m employed people have to support 4.7m unemployed or inactive
• Of the 3 million people constituting Greece’s labour force, 1.4 million are jobless.
• Of the 1,4 million jobless only 10% receive unemployment benefits and only 15% any benefits.
• The rest must fend for themselves. E.g. of the self-employed who have no business, none receives benefits.
• Of those employed in the private sector 500 thousand have not been paid for more than three months.
• Contractors who work for the public sector are paid up to 24 months after they provided the service and pre-paid sales tax to the Tax Office.
• Half of the businesses still in operation throughout the country are seriously in arrears vis-à-vis their (compulsory) contributions their employees’ pension and social security fund.
• 34.6% of the population live at risk of poverty or social exclusion (2012 figure)
• Household’s disposable income contracted 30% since 2010
• Health care cuts of 11.1% between 2009-2011 – with a significant rise of HIV infections, tuberculosis, still births.
Nothing further needs to be added here to convey the true picture of today’s Greece. Except, perhaps, to suggest that, when one hears buoyant accounts of Greece’s recovery, one has a moral duty to respond with an ironic smile.
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