The Great Pay Robbery

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If we want the government to start cutting into excessive pay at the top, how about starting with itself? The head of the tax-funded BBC is paid £800 000 a year, plus extravagant perks and a gold-plated pension. The head of Royal Mail pocketed huge bonuses - under the last, Labour, government, while cutting services and jobs. Not to mention the MPs paying themselves "expenses" which would be illegal for any private company, millions of pounds a year in subsidised meals - then had the brass necks to complain when they had to start providing receipts for some of their expenses claims, and the taxpayer was "only" paying 85% of their personal mobile phone bill rather than the whole lot! Many of them had been committing outright fraud; a few went to jail (then expected us to pay for their lawyers, too) but most got away with just returning the ill-gotten gains.

As for the EU's mess, a large part of that was governments spending beyond their means, binging on cheap credit then being unable or unwilling to pay when the bill came. Ireland had a housing bubble, which crippled their economy in the short term; Greece had a structural problem of government profligacy, a financially disastrous Olympics... it's the Greek government that was lying (fiddling the figures to get into the Euro), the banks are the ones being left out of pocket since the Greeks are now reneging on their debts. Of course, the Greeks just get violent when asked to carry some of the burden they're trying to shift onto the rest of us.

To make matters worse, the system has always been that if I lend your company or government some money, I can take out insurance against you not paying, known as a "credit default swap". The Eurozone governments have just discovered that if the insurance has to pay out on Greece's bad debts, it'll break the insurance companies as well - hence the need to find loopholes so that Greece can skip paying its debts and the insurance companies can dodge their obligations as well.

As with the banks, the governments seem desperate to avoid using proper bankruptcy proceedings to wind up the failed Greek government and failed banks ... as always, there is no limit to how much of our money they will spend rather than admit failure!