11 ms·

Hi, croat here. Just one detail, this year there will be elections in Croatia and current gov didn't do anything useful for our economy, so this is kind of popu

• bsaul 12y ago
  Your comment made me realize a more appropriate title would be : "Current croatian government cancels poor citizen's debts one year before election". But that would probably cast a VERY different light on the event. The original intent was probably to give the (positive i guess) impression that the greek trend of not paying debts is spreading.
  • riffraff 12y ago
    > the greek trend of not paying debts is spreading. I don't think that trend exists (yet) but _canceling_ debt (creditor) and not paying debt (debtor) are quite different.
    • bsaul 12y ago
      I don't know the details but i suppose the debts weren't owned by the state (nobody borrows from a state) but rather by credits corporations or banks.
      • riffraff 12y ago
        yes, but that doesn't change the fact that the croatian government would have persuaded/forced the banks to cancel the debt, it's not the people with a loan who decided not to pay.
        • bsaul 12y ago
          Well, then you must agree it's neither the side in debt neither the side who's supposed to get the money that decided to cancel the debt. Which leaves that situation in a very very weird place. I would say, the government probably expect citizen that got their debt cancelled to vote for them in return (and they'll probably do, because those tricks unfortunately always work). Which makes them both a bit on the same "side" of the transaction.
        • nl 12y ago
          Given the 30-300 million euro cost associated with it, I think the government is paying the debts for the people.
          • bmelton 12y ago
            The article specifically states that they are not.
  • Moru 12y ago
    Greek trend? I can remember quite a few american banks doing just this recently.
    • bsaul 12y ago
      Debt cancellation indeed has always existed, greeks just bringed it to another level, with their magic combo : fraud the state's accountings, get as much as you can from the eurozone before the crisis, get as much as you can from other european countries after the crisis, and then 2 years later when things start to stabilize, declare unilaterally that you're not going to reemburse people, and party in the streets over that decision. At least US banks had the decency to not laugh about it publicly.
      • BSousa 12y ago
        Geesh. I'm no Greek and not fond of Syriza, but god damn, the brainwashing is strong here. a) fraud the state's accountings: True, but the difference was minimal (2.7% or so to 3.07%, and by fraud you mean they accounted for the expenses on arrival and not when ordering, not cook your books). Also, this was well known by all the other countries and none of them made a peep at the time b) get as many as you can before the crisis from banks that (correctly) assumed they would get their money anyway. c) get as much as you can from european countries after the crisis to pay the mostly German and French banks what they have loaned before, moving private debt to the hand of the tax payer (of the 250b, only about 27 billion were for greek gov. usage and all the rest was for debt payment/interest/etc [1]) d) they never said they won't pay, they just want to change terms and not just keep getting more and more indebted to foreign institutions that through their mandate are actually 'ruling' the countries. Again, no fan of Syriza, but enough is enough. Folks in Greece (and Portugal and Spain) are in a very bad shape, poverty is up and the only thing the troika cares is about the deficit reduction and nothing else.
        • briandear 12y ago
          And why is Greece in bad shape? Mightn't the deficit and fiscal mismanagement be the problem? How else should they solve it?
  • ivanhoe 12y ago
    Actually, this law was proposed way before the elections in Greece were held, so it wasn't related in any way.. except that Croatia and Greece are in a similar positions debt wise, so similar political moves can be expected
    • adventured 12y ago
      To be fair a portion of the Greek government has been arguing - quite publicly - for debt forgiveness for a long time. That didn't begin with the Greek elections.
    • ptaipale 12y ago
      However, there is the significant difference that Croatia has its own currency, so it has one tool that Greece does not: devaluation. It's of course like pissing in your pants when it's cold - only a temporary relief - but it may help sometimes.
• kghose 12y ago
  Welcome to Democracy! :) As long as you can make fun of the politicians and not go to jail, things are nominal.
  • davorb 12y ago
    The problem is more that some of the politicians should go to jail, but don't.
    • jfoutz 12y ago
      Hmm. Perhaps the line can be drawn a little closer to the truth, but i'm happy with the bias toward false negatives over false positives. In death penalty cases, when you'd expect the justice system to work its absolute best, 5% were overturned when DNA evidence became reliable. 1 in 20 on they way to die because of false positives.
      • TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Cynic in me would say that if we jailed all top-tier politicians, we'd have less than 5% false positives. I honestly don't believe that in an established democracy (as opposed to freshly formed) you can get to the level of a minister or above without doing something illegal or immoral. The dynamics of the system clearly shows that.
        • hueving 12y ago
          "illegal or immoral" You can't be prosecuted for just the latter.
  • nofutureagain 12y ago
    Yeah... the thing is, some of us have had a higher standard than that for generations and are now being sucked into the abyss of corruption under the flag of the EU.
    • kjjw 12y ago
• byoogle 12y ago
  Interesting, this quote comes to mind: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
  • nickthemagicman 12y ago
    The term, bribery, is extremely subjective in this context. It's the same ephemerality as saying someone is a hater of "Freedom". It makes an easy soundbite but what does that even mean?
    • michael2l 12y ago
      I think most people use the concept of being for or against "Freedom" to refer to the opposite sides of the bottom-up versus top-down modes of economic development and governance. Certainly, it's an over-generalization, and the word freedom is used specifically to evoke an emotional response, but I don't think it's devoid of meaning. An unfortunate side-effect of having a democracy with 300 million plus people in it, is that to a certain extent these sort of over-generalizations are a necessary part of coalition building.
      • nickthemagicman 12y ago
        Overgeneralizations? You mean "propoganda"? Coalition? You mean "fear fueled mob"? Not sure what you mean by a bottom up government but the buzzwords are flowing I'm assuming it involves something along the lines of privatizating everything.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • bmmayer1 12y ago
    I love that quote but it should be mentioned that it is actually misattributed to de Tocqueville. Doesn't make it any less true though.
  • acdha 12y ago
• enupten 12y ago
  The Indian polity resorts to similar schemes, come election time. I'm hardly surprised at WP not taking a more critical stance.
• ptaipale 12y ago
  Just nitpicking one thing: > taxes are very high Doesn't seem so: Croatia's tax to GDP ratio is 26.6 %. Compare that to 46.8 % in Belgium, 43.4 % in Austria, 40.6 % in Germany, 45.8 % in Sweden. 26.9 % in U.S. which is internationally known as a low-tax regime. Surely some taxes are high, and taxation is not necessarily fair, but I'd say that Croatia's taxes overall are not high. I would also expect that the "black market" GDP is higher there than in "old" EU countries, say Germany or even France, or the U.S. Though I admit this is mostly based on just prejudice. (Using Heritage Foundation figures in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu... - OECD numbers are slightly different but not that much)
  • adventured 12y ago
    The US is not regarded internationally as a low tax economy, it's regarded as a medium tax economy. There are about 110 countries with lower tax takes per GDP than the US. Singapore (14% of GDP) and Hong Kong (13% of GDP) are low tax economies. Japan and Australia are similar to the US, and are not considered low tax countries. The US and Japan also share the distinction of having among the highest corporate tax rates on earth.
    • ptaipale 12y ago
      You are right, but in comparison to European countries, U.S. taxes are low. There's only one European country (Lithuania) where tax per GDP is clearly lower than U.S. E.g. in Scandinavia, the horrors of U.S. are attributed to its "extremy low" tax status. Horrors like that rich people only live in compounds surrounded by walls and armed guards, and the poor are dying because of no health care and no food, and the middle class does not exist. Yes, I know it sounds rather extreme but this is common rhetoric in countries where the tax rates are >40%. Election time is never far away.
      • adventured 12y ago
        What are you talking about? "Horrors like that rich people only live in compounds surrounded by walls and armed guards, and the poor are dying because of no health care and no food, and the middle class does not exist." The poor have essentially universal free healthcare in the US and have for a long time. I should know, I've used it before, and it's very easy to use. The poor also have the benefit of the one of the largest welfare states on earth, including the largest food and subsidized housing programs. The US has the world's largest true middle class, with a median income among the highest of any country. A mere 1% of US labor earns the minimum wage, and the majority of those people are below the age of 25. The US also has a higher labor force participation rate than nearly all of Europe - while simultaneously having a high median income. The US has a lower unemployment rate than: Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Greece. And while Europe rolls around in a near depression, with Europe's GDP still at 2007 levels (since 2007 the US has added $3.5 trillion to its GDP) and high unemployment, US wages are expanding at the fastest pace in a decade, while unemployment keeps falling, which will drive even faster wage growth in the next few years.
• ricardobeat 12y ago
  These exact same words could come out of a Brazilian. Word by word. I don't know about Croatia, but in that case they are only half-truths. The idea that there are 'people who pay for everything' is usually misguided. There are the exploited, and the less exploited. Both pay in one way or another, and only a very small elite group is actually well off. You say "the situation is complicated" and "this is not fair", but how exactly do you think this measure will fail? From a distance it sounds like it would boost the economy by allowing people to prosper, while debt is written off mostly by private entities, not the tax payers directly. Even if it was, it might still be a win.
  • jfoster 12y ago
    One way it could fail is by having a substantial portion of the same people back in a similar situation within a few years. I don't know how likely that is to happen.
  • bjt 12y ago
    The obvious possible failure is that these people may find it hard to get credit in the future, as described in the last paragraph: > Some economists, among them Baker, are skeptical whether the scheme will succeed: "I am not sure that this is the best way to help low-income people. If lenders think this can happen again they will charge very high interest rates to low-income borrowers," Baker said. If you were a bank that had just been pressured into forgiving a bunch of loans, how likely would you be to make new loans to the same class of people?
    • deciplex 12y ago
      > If you were a bank that had just been pressured into forgiving a bunch of loans, how likely would you be to make new loans to the same class of people? Considering that many of those loans are predatory in nature, that may not be a bad thing.
      • hueving 12y ago
        Any proof of that? Or are you just assuming that it is similar to payday loans in the US?
• aswanson 12y ago
  Don't apologize. Your English far outclasses my Croatian. Interesting, from what you write it seems as though Croatia is dominated by a two-party system, like here in the U.S. Is that true?
  • puerto 12y ago
    More like two leading blocks, system is multiparty with 116 (!) registered parties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Croatia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Cr...
  • dijxtra 12y ago
    We have a multiparty system, but highly polarised society (reminiscent of your cultural war in the US) which results in two dominant parties, although we have all the infrastructure needed for pluralist democracy.
• rebootthesystem 12y ago
  What you are describing is happening and has happened for decades in many countries and at different levels: Governments with failed philosophies buy votes en-masse from various numerically large groups of people by (a) pretending to be aligned with their interests and, (b), gift-giving to that group. I think it is fair to say this is now happening along the entire American continent, from Argentina to the USA. I know nothing about Canadian politics so I can't comment. The framework is the same everywhere: Socialist or socialist-leaning ideology coupled with failing policies. If you truly study history from, say, Evita Peron in Argentina to Obama in the USA the parallels are scary. It's almost like they study each other's techniques and replicate them across time and space. Of course, this makes sense. Politics responds to evolutionary forces. It is easy to see that "survival of the fittest" converged on a solution that swaps favors to the masses for votes. The only thing that matters is the survival of the organism, in this case a politician and the party they are associated with. Of course, what happens to the masses and the ecosytem within which they live (the country) is of no importance to the organism aiming to survive (politician and party). Again, Argentina is a perfect example of killing the host or the environment in exchange for the survival of the political species. The country goes to hell but the politicians live it up. Same in the US where not one of our populist politicians has to live by the very rules they push on us. For example, Obama and his daughters will never have to worry about healthcare because they exist on a plane far above ours. Humanity has to come up with a way to prevent political actors from manipulating the masses for their own gains. Easier said than done.