131–140 of 302 posts
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A 650 sqft apartment of 1963 vintage is taxed around 250 euros/year
Still less than the property tax on a similar sized apartment in the UK (not in London).
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I didn't pretend to describe all the rules in detail. In Denmark, property taxes are also calculated based on values that are not the current market value. Currently, 95% of Danes pay the state property tax based on a 2001/2002 value assessed by the tax authorities.
2001/2 value assessment I would expect to be lower than current market price in Denmark?
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I don't understand this comment. What about this article makes you think the Greeks can't make decisions for themselves? Is their land unsuitable for farming, and manufacture, and services? Did someone setup an embargo against them? Furthermore, the idea of needing to overhaul things at a global level makes many assumptions. For example, that anyone has the authority and intelligence to tell the entire world how it s…
Just like everyone else, Greeks want to buy Samsung and Apple and Sony and VW and Facebook ads and materials and services from all over the world. It's the way our system works - I want avocados now, even though I'm thousands km away from an avocado tree. One solution would be for me to give up on the avocado, but then the world needs me to buy it, otherwise the balance of avocados in the economy will move and the fu…
I would like to push back on one point of the top though, I don't think the world is so locked in to the consumption of a small nation or any small population. Indeed, panic would happen if America banned imports. But if many in Greece had to take a step back and dramatically reduce their IPhone consumption until they invented new ways to add value, I doubt anyone would notice. The panic of a Greek default seemed to more step from the many who invested there without expecting a collapse. Even now I think a Greek default would be pretty non-eventful given how much warning time everyone had. (Debt defaults of small countries being relatively common)
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This is a superficial comment. How does downvoting work here? edit: (requires karma level > 500)
Downvoted it for you. Greeks didn't scam anybody, on the contrary, they were scammed by EU leaders and bankers. After signing the EU pacts, there was little their politicians could do to avert the catastrophe (and what little they could, they still didn't.)
Why doesn't thing go bad for Poland? Or Czech Republic? Because their finances are solid, not based on vaporware, and they don't lie to the world and themselves to get short-term benefits. And they actually work.
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Just so I'm clear, you are claiming that the finance ministers are purposely rigging things so that Greece will fail -- that all those loans and such were part of a plan to make an example out of them. First I've heard of this, but I haven't been following it. It sounds quite far-fetched though. I must be missing something.
I wouldn't go as far as the OP: I think Heinlein's razor comes into effect here. There is a clear solution to the problem, which is debt forgiveness. The troika has known this since the crisis began. The problem is that it's politically untenable. So instead they kick the can down the road, do nothing, and hope everything gets better on its own. They've caused a depression in Greece. They've also turned me into a eur…
At the end of the day, it's the banks' job to assess risk, they lent money to Greece, and they're only getting paid because of this bailout. What's greece paying in interest, again? Some kind of huge risk premium, probably?
http://taxation.lawyers.com/property-tax/when-you-cant-pay-y...
The system is fucked beyond repair. There is no 'Greek' system or 'English' system - it's all the same, it's all interconnected - so someone in Europe must live the consequences of political decisions in China or the United States or any other country, really. And that's to be expected, because the system was not 'engineered', but hacked together in time - sometimes in response to crises, sometimes influenced by insa…
The other problem is that the Economists who try to control it and debug it are terrible at understanding it. Every countries economy is subtly different, but they have a one size fits nobody, and doesn´t even have the right number of sleeves approach to it. For example, Greece. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/money-supply-m3 Expand it out to the max - this is an old style, US Great Depression monetary collaps…
If that's true, then one possible solution would be to let the cascade failure happen while the ECB prints enough money to replace the losses in money supply (and then some) and distribute the money equally to everyone in the Eurozone.
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What a horrible display of "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." 0,021% death rate is far from "extremely dangerous", and why the focus on this one specific chart? Amazing cherry-picking you've done.
Why do hundreds of pregnant women die every year in the US, but significantly less die in Singapore, Greece, Canada, Ireland, etc? This shouldn't be a thing, and we shouldn't be this far behind other countries on this, its not an impossible problem to halve or even cut into a quarter that death rate. This isn't even discussing complications of pregnancy or infant mortality, both of which we are not doing amazing at.
What I am contesting is that you are conflating absolute and relative measurements to try to make a point, and that you are reducing such a complex matter into a question of political ideology that governs the countries. Also, lots of weasel-wording there - e.g, "hundreds of deaths" in country of 320+ million people, comparing with countries that are 100x smaller? - which do show a lack of intellectual honesty.
At least that is the impression that it gives when I read your response as some kind of counterpoint to the comment from GP about socialism and the associated bureaucracy.
If I have read your statement correctly and indeed you meant something along the lines of:
- The USA is doing worse than Greece in this one metric.
- Greece has more Socialist/Welfare-state inclinations than the US.
- Therefore if we want to improve this one metric we ought to adopt more Social-Democratic policies
But then again, I could have completely misread what you meant. Please correct me if I misinterpreted any of your statements.
[1]: http://taxfoundation.org/blog/estonia-has-most-competitive-t...
(Note to down-voters: do you really think that anything I wrote is so offensive or damaging to the forum, to the point that it deserves to be in negative mark? Gee, I know it is election season for most of you, but let's please keep a HN a place where people can have an honest discussion?)
I live in Greece and things are bad but as a matter of fact, the real problem is that we ,the Millennials, feel that we're screwed because we compare ourself with our parents. Our parents and our politicians really scammed the whole europe into believing that we have a strong economy but the truth is that everyone avoided paying taxes, they got huge loans that could never pay of and our politicians where really corru…
Went to Crete a few years ago and was surprised by the number of (what seemed residential) buildings with unfinished roof/terrace, but otherwise being used and perfectly normal. You could see the concrete pillars with the steel bars coming out on top. Imagine it is some kind of way to dodge taxation since it is still considered unfinished? Have also read Michael Lewis' "Boomerang", which also has a lot of similar ane…