Het Limburgse fenomeen, u weet wel, die rijkelijk met waterstofperoxide besprenkelde sprekende aambei liet afgelopen week weer van zich horen, 't ging dit keer niet over de muzelmannen onder ons, maar over ander volk, waar meneer klaarblijkelijk jeuk van krijgt en meneer heeft veel jeuk. Waarschijnlijk kent u het gezegde: wie jeuk heeft moet krabben, maar de armpjes van het Limburgse fenomeen zijn daarvoor te kort en in plaats dat hij zijn beschermende kaalschedels zijn jeuk laat bestrijden, roept hij maar weer wat in de Tweede Kamer en vergelijkt hij Griekenland met een junk waaraan z.i. geen cocaïne meer dient te worden verstrekt. De sprekende aambei zit vol onsmakelijke vergelijkingen. Nobelprijswinnaar Paul Krugman schreef gister dit: "Many people seem to believe that the loans Athens has received since the crisis broke have been subsidizing Greek spending. The truth, however, is that the great bulk of the money lent to Greece has been used simply to pay interest and principal on debt. In fact, for the past two years , more than all of the money going to Greece has been recycled in this way: The Greek government is taking in more revenue than it spends on things other than interest, and handling the extra funds over to its creditors. Or to oversimplify things a bit, you can think of European policy as involving a bailout, not of Greece, but of creditor-country banks, with the Greek government simply acting as the middleman - and with the Greek public, which has seen a catastrophic fall in living standards, required to make further sacrifices so that it, too, can contribute funds to that bailout, (.....) Objectively, resolving this situation shouldn't be hard. Although nobody knows it, Greece had actually made great progress in regaining competitiveness: wages and costs have fallen dramatically, so that, at his point, austerity is the main thing holding economy back. So what's needed is simple: Let Greece run smaller but still positive surpluses, which would relieve Greek suffering, and let the new government claim success, defusing the anti-democratic forces waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, the cost to creditor-nation taxpayers - who were never going to get the full value of debt - would be minimal. Doing the right thing would, however, require that other Europeans, Germans in particular, abandon self-serving myths and stop substituting moralizing for analysis.
