P
Prestwick
Guest
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8411749.stm
Make of it what you will but I will say this: anyone who knows someone who is either Greek, Greek Cypriot or has even been to Greece on holiday will tell you how tax evasion is Greece's 3rd national sport next to football and Turk-bashing and how the government have rigged the figures for decades to hide the gaping hole in public finances and the fact that billions of Lira and then Euro in tax wasn't being paid to the government's coffers. And I don't mean "rigged" as in "oh, lets just change the size of this bar chart slightly so that the deficit looks like its smaller than it really is" rigged, I mean "rigged" as in "lets just blatantly lie about basically all of our economic statistics so we can get in the Eurozone and keep lying so we can avoid getting penalised for running excessively high deficits year on year" rigged.
Obviously Britain and Ireland have serious issues of their own but Greece has had an..uh.."issue" for the best part of half of century and the fact that nobody, nobody seemed to see this coming is astonishing. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and all but when its common knowledge that the stats bureau people were more dodgy than the actual politicians and that people didn't really seem to be paying any VAT on stuff they buy then..argh, I've got a headache just thinking about it..I'm withdrawing from this conversation and I'll let you chumps figure it out.
Make of it what you will but I will say this: anyone who knows someone who is either Greek, Greek Cypriot or has even been to Greece on holiday will tell you how tax evasion is Greece's 3rd national sport next to football and Turk-bashing and how the government have rigged the figures for decades to hide the gaping hole in public finances and the fact that billions of Lira and then Euro in tax wasn't being paid to the government's coffers. And I don't mean "rigged" as in "oh, lets just change the size of this bar chart slightly so that the deficit looks like its smaller than it really is" rigged, I mean "rigged" as in "lets just blatantly lie about basically all of our economic statistics so we can get in the Eurozone and keep lying so we can avoid getting penalised for running excessively high deficits year on year" rigged.
Obviously Britain and Ireland have serious issues of their own but Greece has had an..uh.."issue" for the best part of half of century and the fact that nobody, nobody seemed to see this coming is astonishing. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and all but when its common knowledge that the stats bureau people were more dodgy than the actual politicians and that people didn't really seem to be paying any VAT on stuff they buy then..argh, I've got a headache just thinking about it..I'm withdrawing from this conversation and I'll let you chumps figure it out.