Greeks Reject Bailout Terms

Firearms/Jersey: That is true and it's one of the big reasons that if you are going to transport a firearm you have to know the laws. I'm not arguing that it doesn't have problems.

People disagree about things all the time. People argue about things. The way cities setup laws causes issues and confusion for people, especially travelers. It can be annoying but it's less annoying than having outside parties make those decisions for you without the local residents having a say in the matter.

States/Human Rights: Fair enough. I take no real issue with that outside of a branding/labeling political perspective.

Line: Honestly as often as possible. The line is supposed to be hard, difficult to overcome and argued to a point of undeniable certainty before the Supreme Court or to the point that it gets past both houses of congress AND the president. If something can't be argued convincingly enough to pull that off, it's left up to the states. Framing anything as a human rights issue would depend on backing up an almost total lack of demographic free will in order to do so. That's why a lot of Indian reservations are dry though. The native american population doesn't handle alcohol well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans). Doesn't mean the whole country shouldn't have it, but it makes complete sense for them to want to ban it locally.

Balance: Federal programs that create an exercise of redistribution are out of the hands of state budget control but the funds are still limited, budgeted and when the money runs out somebody is still left holding the bag.

Issues/Gap: There's a number of issues that go well beyond the drinking age and it usually has to do with aiming a federal monetary firehose at an industry with no regard for the after effects. The Farm Bill is a great example of this because of the disruption that it caused globally and played a huge part in Mexico's farming industry struggles, which had cascade effects eventually helping us get to the immigration issue we have today.

Others revolve around tax policies around businesses and the lack of understanding of how money flows in different areas. Tax policies are huge, especially when talking about business tax policies because the big guys who everybody envisions when talking about taxing the 1% or forcing businesses to provide benefit X can actually afford it. The smaller businesses caught in the middle are the ones that can't and they are your eventual potential competitors. Small businesses employ 2/3 of the people in this country and every tax increase hits them harder than anybody else because most of them are 1 or 2 bad months from going under completely.

We can look at how we got to the medical issues we have today, when the federal government incentivized businesses to provide health insurance and never gave citizens the same ability to simply pay for it directly pretax. That removed insurance from the consumer market and was the first big step in creating the cluster that led to needing an overhaul.

We can look anywhere from student loans and education prices in conjunction with national campaigns that made it undesirable to just learn a trade rather than getting a degree...ANY degree regardless of its ability to help you earn a living. Increase demand, create money out of thin air to pay for it and wonder why prices keep out pacing inflation...

Let's not forget military spending while we're on the subject.

We can look at housing prices and the issues on both sides of the federal isle that led up to creating that debacle.

These are not trivial issues. They are massive economic disruptions that happen when a federal financial firehose is aimed at a problem and they always have consequences.

Right now the TPP is squeaking its way through the system with barely a blip on the radar. That legislation is scary but all anybody on my Facebook feed cares about right now is rainbows and confederate flags - the issues that let people for one reason or another feel better about themselves.

The issues that have serious consequences that involve math, numbers and logical exposition of the worst case scenarios in trade agreements...those are boring. Those are federal. Those are out of reach and we don't immediately FEEL how those affect us. We'll deal with that when we have to.

Just like credit card debt.

Just like the 30 year mortgage that will result in paying more than double the price of the house but we could fit it in the cash flow.

Just like the degree with zero job prospects that we just took on $50,000 worth of debt to get.

Just like how we really stuck it to those greedy businesses owners to get them to give us stuff that we assume they can afford...because after all they own a business and by default, that makes them rich.

For what it's worth, I grew up in South Carolina, went to a Christian school up through 5th grade and grew up in a Southern Baptist Church. At no point during any of this did anybody try to convince me that the world was 10,000 years old. We learned dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago. We learned everything we needed to learn. I now have a masters degree.

This school brainwashing stuff that floats around the internet is a scare tactic at best and an isolated minority of people at worst who actually believe their children aren't going to have internet access one day. Most of the best schools in my area now spend more time focussing on teaching kids HOW to learn effectively and core life skills because there is an assumption that the bulk of the information is a few clicks away.

Somebody teaches a kid a made up story, that kid is eventually going to have Google and question just about everything those people ever told him.

"A year later, a worsened recession along with a delayed implementation by the Greek government of the agreed conditions in the bailout programme revealed the need for Greece to receive a second bailout worth €130 billion (including a bank recapitalization package worth €48bn), while all private creditors holding Greek government bonds were required at the same time to sign a deal accepting extended maturities, lower interest rates, and a 53.5% face value loss."

When you do the math (the maturity extension and interest rate cuts were steep), the total haircut was 75%+, with the bulk of the losses absorbed by French banks. It got a HUGE amount of press back in 2012—at least in the financial press. Google for "greece", "2012", "bond swap", "haircut", "debt swap", etc., you'll find hundreds of articles. Many of which boiled down to "um, if the troika doesn't take a haircut too, it won't fix the core problem, and we'll be right back here in another 2-3 years". They were right too. :(

Edit: Your link is part of that. All that's left is government held debt, and they STILL insist on avoiding any haircut, just as they have been this entire time. They were happy to see other people lose their money, but by now we're out of people with skin in the game. All that's left is the troika. Their insistence on avoiding a haircut is why everyone else had to have a 75%+ haircut..and why even that wasn't enough.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis#2...

There is no abdication of responsibility in a democracy and the Greeks should know that better than anyone.

Perhaps everyone in Germany would be better off still re-paying that 50% that was just removed.