Quote:
Originally Posted by Politenessman
I'd guess that there is most of your problem, much like Greece, you (as a society) chose free stuff and not to pay much tax to get it.
Unfortunately the money runs out and the societal Ponzi scheme of letting the next generation pay for it has gone off the rails, because in Europe, you haven't had a next generation (read up on the demographics, Mark Steyn has a number of entertaining books on the looming societal collapse in Europe). Advice, get out if you have a marketable skill, if you haven't, get a marketable skill and get out.
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Except that we don't excpect free stuff. We except a return on our taxes.
Greece collapsed because there was high level corruption sucking money dry with a population that used every trick in the book to avoid paying them. Greece would have floundered even without all the ''freebies'' we Euros get.
Slovenia has a good track record of paying taxes but has a high level corruption that is sucking us dry. Healthcare and education are not sucking us dry. Fat cats do. Teachers and doctors don't.
And then there's debt. Yugoslavia had 13,6 billion dollar debt in 1988. The countries that form the area today have a total debt of 184 billion dollars. Inflation ws not that high and the biggest share of that debt has Slovenia, which avoided the bloody mess of the nineties Balkans.
So how come the national debt skyrocketed when we lost a lot of the ''freebies'' my parents had. It doesn't make sense.
And move where, every other developed country has the same social system. Taxes for healthcare, education, roads.
And one more thing, there is no looming social collapse in Europe. Greece is Europe, but Europe is not Greece. We are angry, we are dissapointed, but we are still going about our business trying to get our collective asses organised enough to put some pressure on the fat cats. As we say in Slovenia: EU is bad, but imagine if we'd live in the US.