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A comment on It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or Accept Debt-Serfdom. Parent comment

Re: It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or A... by nl on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @06:22AM (#3318868)
But that isn't true!

For example, Germany has a welfare system, but a budget defict that is ~3% of GDP (which seems pretty reasonable when you are trying to get an economy growing again)

Austria, The Netherlands, Denmark, etc etc all have similar (or better) welfare systems and low budget deficits.

The truth is that there isn't a single cause of the problems - Iceland was very different to Ireland, which was different to Greece, which is different to Italy. Each needs to be analyzed on its own.

But there is a good argument that taking private (bank) debts on as public debt isn't always a good way out of a problem this big.

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Re: It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or A... by viandante on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @06:53AM (#3318942)
Germany has 80% debt/gdp ratio.
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Re: It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or A... by nl on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @06:13PM (#3321579)
Germany has 80% debt/gdp ratio

Yes, and...?

Lots of people have a home loan that is greater than their annual income (ie, their debt/gdp ratio is greater than 100%) - even in places that had no housing bubble.

A high debt/gdp ratio isn't bad unless you can't service your debt. Germany clearly can (as can most countries when the economy is growing)

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Re: It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or A... by viandante on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @01:51AM (#3322827)
Italy and other South European countries are not growing.
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Re: It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or A... by nl on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @05:45PM (#3326531)
Exactly.

But to claim that is because of some "welfare state" thing.. the facts just don't back that up.

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Re: It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or A... by viandante on Thursday December 08, 2011 @05:42AM (#3328588)
I am not claiming that. I am saying that the problem with Europe is public debt and public spending. And that at European growing rates, expecially in the south, public spending cannot go up.
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