Even if more recent optimistic projections are to be believed, and a steady rate of growth can be expected, it would take Greece perhaps 15 years to regain the jobs it has lost, said Panagiotis Liargovas, the director of the Greek Parliamentary Budget Office.
'The mix was not right,' Mr. Liargovas said of the austerity measures. 'It was a cure that has almost killed the patient.'
[Austerity's] failures have been striking, leaving millions of Greeks baffled and angry as their lives disintegrated while the elite often escaped, untaxed and unbothered, experts say.
In a wide-ranging review of the Greece program last year, the I.M.F. found that many of its predictions had failed. There was a sharp fall in imports, but little gain in exports. Public debt overshot original predictions. Predicted revenues from selling public assets were way off. The banking system, perceived as relatively sound at the beginning of the bailout, began having problems as the economy soured.
Over the last four years, the three lenders have demanded more than 800 actions a year, Greek officials say, requiring hundreds of new laws, sometimes changed and readopted within weeks or days.
The one bright spot in the economy has been tourism. But even on Greece's most famous islands, such as Corfu, there is little sense of relief. Many tourists come on cut-rate or all-inclusive packages. The wages of hotel workers have been cut severely, and many are not paid for months, if at all, according to union officials and Corfu's mayor, Kostas Nikolouzos.
Mr. Nikolouzos said he was worried that drastic budget cuts could affect the islands' ability to attract tourists. The municipality once had a budget of 13 million euros a year for capital repairs. This year, it will be one million euros, though roads are buckling and some villagers can no longer drink their tap water.
Eleni Alexaki, 56, has worked as a hotel maid for more than 20 years. She was cleaning 20 rooms a day at the beginning of the crisis and now cleans 35, while her pay has gone from 1,600 euros a month to 985. She receives no holiday pay and fewer days off.
'And they terrorize us," she said. "They say, 'There, the door is there.''
Pericles Mastoras, 59, a cook in a different hotel, needs an M.R.I. for a kidney problem, but he has not been paid since October. As he sat in his union office recently, his cellphone rang, but the conversation with his boss was brief.
'He said, 'Call back tomorrow,'' Mr. Mastoras said. 'That means I won't get the money for months.'"
This is one of the rare NYT articles about the eurozone that gives serious detail about the catastrophic costs and failures of austerity. But the perceptive reader will already note the key analytical flaws underlying the article -- the same flaws that pervade the NYT's eurozone coverage. There is no recognition that economists have known for over 75 years that following pro-cyclical policies, i.e., policies that make the business cycle more severe is insane in response to a Great Recession, is economically illiterate and self-destructive. When demand is severely deficient (i.e., in a Great Recession) one does not further reduce demand by cutting net government outlays. None of the four NYT articles on Greece and its economic crisis even note the concept of economic "demand" or the fact that economists have known for a very long time that slashing demand when it is already inadequate is harmful. The discussion of IMF errors ignores the fact that IMF studies found that fiscal stimulus was even more effective than economists had thought -- but the IMF continues to do Germany's bidding and demand that the EU not engage in fiscal stimulus. Indeed, the article does not explain why Greece suffers from a Great Depression that exceeds in severity and length the original Great Depression or why Greece has long-term, massive unemployment. The article offers no explanation of why austerity could cause unemployment and a recession and no explanation of why and how counter-cyclical fiscal policies could have prevented these disasters.
Second, even if one is determined to bleed the economy via austerity as a quack "cure" for a Great Recession, why would one cause mass unemployment? Why not pay people to work on productive tasks? What is the point of sparking suicide, marriage discord (unemployed males do less homework, not more, as they become more depressed), and mass emigration of college graduates? What is the point of wasting the talent of people who are willing and able to work? It takes truly depraved decision-makers to choose mass unemployment as a policy that under the troika's most optimistic assumptions require 21 years (the six years since 2008 plus "15 years") just to "regain the jobs it has lost" (which is far from full recovery)? Not only has the troika's Greek austerity assumptions consistently proved grossly over optimistic, but the idea that Greece should assume that there will be no future recessions for 15 years is fanciful. The troika's optimistic scenario for Greece is that it will take Greece over five times longer to simply get back the jobs it lost (a very low bar for a "recovery") in this crisis than it took Greece to achieve a far fuller recovery from the Great Depression.
Why would anyone in a nation with heavy tourist trade choose to ruin the infrastructure so that tourists will go elsewhere? Are they trying to prove the validity of Marx's description of the role of the reserve army of the unemployed and how it gives the business owners the leverage to commit vicious abuses of workers? This is madness of such proportions that the only question is why it took the Greek people so long to rise up and say "we will no longer give in to your demands that we commit these acts of savagery against each other."
The NYT is so hopeless in discussing the troika's infliction of austerity that even in an article that shows that the policy is vicious and self-destructive the paper cannot really bring itself to quote economic experts explaining why austerity is the toxin rather than the "cure." Instead, Daley claims that austerity succeeded at least partially even in Greece.
"[T]he austerity program has had some notable successes. When Greece was forced to ask for help, its deficit was more than four times the 3 percent of gross domestic product allowed under European Union rules. The financial markets had lost confidence in the country. Greece desperately needed money to pay its bills, but the cost of borrowing on the financial markets had become prohibitive.
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