Exploding the myth of the feckless, lazy Greeks

[girl gone mad]

53. No, it's not the revenue.

Greek tax avoidance is not a new phenomenon, as you said yourself. Repeat: this is not a new issue. It is also a wildly over-hyped issue.

Insufficient tax collection did not cause the crisis in Greece and increased tax collections will not end the depression in Greece.

Once more, I'm shocked to see deeply conservative economic principles espoused on a supposedly progressive internet forum. 20th century liberals were much more intelligent than this when it came to economic matters.

A nation can't tax its way out of a financial crisis caused by private sector debt deleveraging. The one and only way for a nation to healthily emerge from such a crisis is for the public sector to run a corresponding deficit to replace enough of the money removed by debt deflation to stabilize the economy. Greece gave up its currency sovereignty at Maastricht, therefore Greece is unable to take these necessary actions. What's more, Greece is locked in to an uncompetitive exchange rate (which massively favors Germany) and so cannot export its way to growth.

Increasing tax collections only removes more money from the Greek economy, as does the austerian spending cuts and debt payments. Let's stop promoting economic policies from the middle ages which are based in religious thinking and not reality.