Troubles in Europe

Apparently tourists are voting with their feet, and they're traveling increasingly to places other than Paris.  The stereotype at least is that Parisian service providers are crabby, so unpleasant the Paris Tourism Board had 35,000 pamphlets distributed explaining how to behave towards tourists.

"The British liked to be called by their first names.  The Japanese like to be reassured.  The Spanish just want people to be nice.  Americans are glued to their electronic devices and like to eat as early at 6 pm."

Paul Kappe, an owner of the renowned Brasserie de I'lsle Saint-Louis, perched behind the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, gave a Gallic shrug when he saw the brochure.

"In the United States", Mr. Kappe observed, "waiters can be fired at any time and must work for tips, so they have to be nice. In France, you can't just fire somebody if they're not doing a good job.  If you could, everyone would be friendly."

Ummm....

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And apparently HRH Queen Elizabeth II is having a tough time making ends meet, too.  The headline in today's paper read:

England:  Queen's Swan Is Barbecued and Eaten

(Maybe I should go back and read the accompanying article?)

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On a more serious note, I recently watched an episode of Top Gear (British car show) where the guys drove some exotic convertibles around sunny Spain.  The striking thing that was pointed out was how economically depressed things are there.  You can read about it, but until you see it you can't really comprehend it.

Spain had a building boom just like we did in America, their bankers throwing money at builders and developers and unworthy borrowers while raking off Mucho Euros for themselves in the process.  (Apparently we don't have a monopoly on crooked Banksters.)  In some areas, as far as you can see, tens of thousands of unoccupied high-rise condos sit abandoned.  

There was even a billion-Euro airport built, complete with a 15,000' runway (wildly excessive), that sits unused, rotting.  And long stretches of roads equal to our Interstate highways are totally empty.  There is no traffic.

The Spanish economy is in ruins.  Overall unemployment is 25%....youth unemployment (<24 yrs) is 56%.  It will take them years to pull out of this self-inflicted disaster.  Kinda makes our mess here seem tame, doesn't it?

Q:  And what have governments / regulators done to see to it that this can't happen again in the future?  A:  Almost nothing, here or there.  And don't bother writing your Congressman to complain.  They're probably on a junket somewhere with their sponsoring Bankster.  (They can probably get a helluva deal in Spain.  Just sayin'.)

S

And nobody saw this coming? Really?

Once again it has been brought to my attention that the world's economy is royally screwed up.  This time it's the tiny island/nation of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean that has imploded.  It seems Cyprus and its banks have become a major tax safe-haven for the world's oligarchs, particularly the newly-rich Rooskies.

Except, as with banks almost everywhere, the Cypriot banks didn't have enough safe places to invest their depositor's money.  Instead they chose the high-yield but also high-risk route and invested in Greece.  Yes, THAT Greece.  

Here's the problem in a nutshell:  There is too much money concentrated in the hands of too few people.  The wealthy have already bought essentially everything they want....homes, islands, exotic cars, planes, trains, jewels, art....and they still have trillions of dollars left over. Their excess cash just piles up and they often have no where but high-risk places to put it.  That's a disaster just waiting to happen.  

Meanwhile, with too much of the world's wealth in the hands of too few, there isn't enough left for the masses to buy enough of the things that spurs production and creates jobs.  That's why unemployment is so high worldwide.  The wealthy simply can't buy enough "stuff" to keep the rest of the world busy producing it.

So how do you fix it?  No, you don't just pull a "Robin Hood" and confiscate money from the rich and drop it on the poor.  That's a double-bad move.  The rich won't have any incentive to work because they'll just have their gains taken away from them, while the poor won't have any incentive to work because they'll just be handed a windfall for doing nothing.  

So what then?  Level the playing field.  We need a new tax code written on a clean sheet of paper and not just another band-aid on what we have now.  Start right now phasing out all the hundreds (thousands?) of tax credits and deductions and subsidies that are increasingly making our "free-market" economy anything but.  

The idea that we need to give all those loopholes to the wealthy so they can have more money to "invest" in the economy is bull!  They have several trillion (with a "T") dollars on the sidelines right now doing very little.  (And let's be honest....it isn't just the wealthy that benefit from loopholes.  We all benefit from a few....it's just that the rich's are bigger.)

Without special favors for a few I think you'd see in short order income becoming more equal based on the efforts of those working and not just flowing one-way to those who know someone important or can afford a lobbyist.  

The rich can still work and get richer, but it will be due to their superior intelligence or by the sweat of their brow and not by just knowing a congressman willing to sponsor their heavily camouflaged loophole.  More well paid workers = more  consumers = more production = more tax revenue.  See how this works?

It's called "growing the economy", and it's not a new idea.    We've heard a lot of talk about it recently, but very little movement towards it.  That's because some toes will have to be stepped on for it to work.

Finding someone willing to do a little "toe stomping" is the first challenge.  Any volunteers?

S

My kindred spirit in revolution

Spain is a real mess today.  They had an economic crash a couple of years ago that was even more severe than ours.  Unemployment is over 20% and the country is effectively broke.  The people are feeling the pain while those who profited tremendously from the corruption still sit atop their spoils and are enjoying the good life.   (Sound familiar?)


They are having nationwide elections today, and there have been huge protest rallies all across the land.  They carry signs that say, among others, "Let those responsible pay for the crisis".  Visiting a protest site in Madrid the BBC reported this:


"This is an historic moment.  Thousands of people have been camping in Sol since last Sunday with no flags or affiliation to any party."


They go on to quote one of the protesters, Milena Almagro Garcia: "Young people, old people, families, it does not matter.  We are not just asking for jobs.  We are asking for a change in the political system."


"We have no option but to vote for the two biggest parties in Spain, who are more or less the same.  They are unable to solve any problem.  It is just a nest of corruption.  We are tired.  In short, we want a working democracy.  We want a change."


We need to get more people here fired up like Milena.  I'm pulling for the Spanish to start something big, something that will inspire us here.  


This might be a bit of a heavy read for a Sunday morning, but this story from across the pond really grabbed me.  I'll be watching with interest.


S