The Cradle of Democracy?

Fantastic article in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis on the mess that is Greece. It is very long but very well worth reading. Funny, informative and downright scary.

Here are a couple quick quotes, but do read it all if you can:

In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.
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As he finishes his story the finance minister stresses that this isn’t a simple matter of the government lying about its expenditures. “This wasn’t all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.”

“What?”

He smiles.

“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”

“You’re kidding.”

Now he’s laughing at me. I’m clearly naïve.

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Astonishingly, it’s widely believed that all 300 members of the Greek Parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value. Or, as both the tax collector and a local real-estate agent put it to me, “every single member of the Greek Parliament is lying to evade taxes.”