Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

[anunitu]

Saw this and said to myself,no wonder your broke. Retirement age in Greece is 45 years old..Who is left to work then?

http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/03/re...ing-right-now/


Your thoughts...

[gelman66]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

It really not that simple. People in North America like to say the whole European debt crisis happened because of laziness and if we all resigned ourselves to working 80 hours until we were 80 everything would be great.

Its really not the truth. Average age for retirement in Greece is 61. Average age in the US is 65 and in Germany 62. Those figures come from the BBC

[anunitu]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

I hate when there are differing figures for things..what I read online(not wiki BTW) said 45,but as with all sides,everyone targets their own agenda(there is also a thing where Germany owes Greece for money taken during WW2(amount in the Billions)) so it goes back and forth,and regular people like me(not expert on economics) find it perplexing to figure out how this happened.

[gelman66]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

Well it complicated. There is no single explanation for the crisis. One of the explanation is mismanagement on the Greek side. The other is the role financial derivatives played in the crisis.

As other view of the crisis states:

"Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere. ... Critics say that such deals, because they are not recorded as loans, mislead investors and regulators about the depth of a country’s liabilities.”

You can read more about it here http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...sachs_20100217

[anunitu]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

Yeh,those were a part of the US meltdown as well..along with housing(But more Bad loans)

[gelman66]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

So both crises are related. Only the banks win, profiting from the suffering of ordinary people, which is the common denominator.

[Munin-Hugin]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

I hate when there are differing figures for things..what I read online(not wiki BTW) said 45,but as with all sides,everyone targets their own agenda(there is also a thing where Germany owes Greece for money taken during WW2(amount in the Billions)) so it goes back and forth,and regular people like me(not expert on economics) find it perplexing to figure out how this happened.

Upon starting to read the article in your link, I immediately decided to take the entire thing with a grain of salt, upon reading "... things got really bad ..." At that point, I began to doubt the professionalism and face value of the site, based upon the fact that professional journalists and credible publications do not usually use such basic and informal wordage. My distrust of it's accuracy was further increased by this "... The crackdown was do in large part ...", the failure to use the proper word, writing "do" instead of "due". It's sad that with the proliferation of ease of access to the internet and the ability to fancy up a webpage, it has created an easy access for sensationalists and hacks to be able to spread their incorrect data at an alarming rate, and to have it passed off as fact.

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That very much could contribute to such great variations in facts and figures.

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

The original article really is rubbish at explaining anything. You might like to try this: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/0...the-creditors/

and this:

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/01/30/alexis-tsipras-on-the-fiscal-waterboarding-of-greece/

And then forget about the nonsense of retiring at 45.

[DavidMcCann]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

Retirement in Greece depends on where you work. It's the government employees who get to go early. They are very cosseted, while ordinary people can have a very hard time: no guaranteed unemployment benefit or health insurance!

Over the last 70 years, they've had a bloody civil war against the communists, a fascist dictatorship, and a series of corrupt and incompetent governments: more like somewhere in South America than in Europe.Really they were no more ready to join the EU, let alone the euro, than Albania.

[thalassa]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

It really not that simple. People in North America like to say the whole European debt crisis happened because of laziness and if we all resigned ourselves to working 80 hours until we were 80 everything would be great.

I don't know anyone that says this IRL.

[Hawkfeathers]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

I don't know anyone that says this IRL.

Jeb Bush is in favor of that.

[Munin-Hugin]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

I don't know anyone that says this IRL.

That statement confused me as well, as this is the first time I've heard it. In fact, the folks I generally talk to don't even discuss the European debt crisis at all. I had once thought that if all the nations got together and decided to work out a plan to settle all of their debts to each other, everyone would be in a much better place. Ya know, if the US owes France $5, Germany owes the US $3, and Spain owes the US $2, why not have France and Spain give what they owe the US to Germany, and that way three debts get settled with little hassle? While I understand that the numbers are in the billions and trillions and the like, but the theory remains the same.

What I don't get is that the US owes about $142 billion to China, but at the same time, China owes the US $1.2 trillion! Why not just say that China owes the US 1.058 trillion instead, and wipe our debt clean? I'm sure that the debt that China owes us could be parceled around to cover all of the various countries the US owes, until really, across the globe, the numbers would eventually work themselves down to become manageable.

As an aside ...

The way I understand it, under various laws and statutes, in the US, our national dept is, in fact, illegal. The only institution authorized to print and provide currency for the country and the government is the Department of the Treasury, but in actuality it has been the Federal Bank Reserve that has been providing the funds that have created the debt. Therefore, in theory, the Department of the Treasury could denounce and eliminate the entire debt, in essence with a single key stroke, because it is not based upon anything allowed by the Constitution. To add to that, the District of Columbia, in theory, is technically not part of the United States, being a sovereign state in it's own right. That can then be considered that the country is being taxed and governed by a foreign body, again going against the Constitution.

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I wonder ... they harp on us about out credit scores, but overall, how would countries rank for THEIR credit scores?

[MaskedOne]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

Err, you may want to look Article 1 Section 8 and the 23rd Amendment. They don't name DC but they do mention a district that shall be the seat of government for the US. There's only one of those.

[Munin-Hugin]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

Err, you may want to look Article 1 Section 8 and the 23rd Amendment. They don't name DC but they do mention a district that shall be the seat of government for the US. There's only one of those.

It's an interesting situation, to be sure. D.C. is effectively a U.S. possession, along with the five territories that it owns. I know that there are a number of issues regarding it, since they are subject to federal taxes but do not have the full representation that the 50 states possess. I'd never really thought of it before until I started doing a little research into global debts, and it popped up in one of hte articles.

[MaskedOne]

Re: Greece: How do you get to retire at 45

It's an interesting situation, to be sure. D.C. is effectively a U.S. possession, along with the five territories that it owns. I know that there are a number of issues regarding it, since they are subject to federal taxes but do not have the full representation that the 50 states possess. I'd never really thought of it before until I started doing a little research into global debts, and it popped up in one of hte articles.

Shrug, it's interesting but it's not some extra-Constitutional special snowflake. The existence of a seat of government that was not located in a state has been planned from the beginning. DC's existence as a non-State where the government would assemble is built into the Constitution by design of the Framers. Now whether it's existence as such is good can be called into question, the Framers did some silly things but it is intentional.

The debt issue might be more convoluted but I'm not looking that up tonight. The Constitution is a comparatively small easy to locate document. The justification for the Federal Reserve is liable to be less so.