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I don’t know how international media reacted to Greece’s impressive claim that the general government primary surplus for 2014 will be 3.918 billion euro. I don’t even bothered to dig deeper into Greek Finance Ministry claims and verify whether they were true or not. Greek media did it. And what I read today is a bunch of ironic comments.
Indicative:
“The first question is how did the notorious primary surplus occur. Did it result from the development and the generation of wealth? Did it emerge from a fair distribution of taxes and the more rational use of public resources? Obviously not. It derived from the use of a socially barbaric recipe of overtaxing the weakest and the middle class – an over-taxation that moreover is also against development -. It resulted from the drastic reduction of public goods like education , health , welfare, pensions etc. , i.e. public goods that a modern state needs to provide to its citizens.” (full comment in Greek)
I believe that these few sentences summarize in full how the government managed to impress us #Not. Because the majority of the citizens of this country still struggle with their “primary deficit”, i.e. the constant economic bleeding to cover the holes created by exactly this primary surplus in real life. That is in education, in health, in welfare…
There is another question, of course: if this gorgeous primary surplus is and can be sustainable. But what is “sustainability”? Sustainable is only the universe and a place in paradise or hell. But this is also questionable…
Look! I saw a primary surplus walking down there!
PS At this point, we can proudly announce that we finally understood what is means “the sacrifices of the Greek people have been recognized”