IOW, you need an apartment with plaster walls. I can't stand that cheap ass drywall that is paper thin and has no noise buffer. It's the same with just about every house that was built in the past 15+ years, how can anyone feel confident about the mass building of houses with sub-standard materials and workmanship... Just look at the classic houses from 80-100 years ago, many are still standing (hell look at Detroit and the burbs...many of those older homes are still standing after 50 years of neglect and abandonement even).
oh yeah, that's the other thing, I have my own appliances. I am very picky. They took their's out and let me put mine in. But maybe I just got lucky. Right time at the right place at the right time in my life. The funny thing is, sometimes on a bad night, I think about an old trade where I wish I had gone long instead of going short, and then I think, "Yeah, but then you wouldn't have this apartment." And I am very happy here.
Exactly, it's all a bunch of PR bullshit. "Austerity" nowadays implies cutting from the rate of growth of increased spending. complete budgetary shenanigans...So if we "planned" on spending 200mil, now we are only spending 160mil (voila, we cut 20 percent from spending!!).
Austerity Has Yet To Come To Greece Nikos Tsafos | October 30, 2012 The idea that deep cuts are pushing Greece to the brink makes for great punditry. But it is a woefully incomplete description of what is really happening. Austerity is not killing Greece. Instead, austerity has yet to come to Greece. There is no doubt that the plight of the Greek people is real. The governmentâs draft budget shows that GDP in 2013 will be 22 percent below its 2007 peak. Over eight hundred thousand people have lost their jobs, and unemployment is at 25.1 percent. Private deposits have fallen 35 percent as people and companies tap into savings or send their money overseas. Tax hikes have led to the highest inflation in a decade, further squeezing incomes. Households are suffering with no end in sight. Greece is in the midst of a lost decade. It is easy to blame austerity for this. But it is also wrong. Austerity came from the recession, not the other way around. The recession started in mid-2008 and worsened in 2009. Yet government spending rose in both 2008 and 2009. In fact, the recession started during the largest expansion of the state since the 1980s and at a time when government primary spending, or spending excluding interest payments, as a share of GDP was at a historic high. The problem was that despite this stimulus, Greece was not only in a recession but also had a budget deficit that it could no longer finance. That is when austerity started. From 2009â2011, Greece cut its primary deficit by an impressive â¬20 billion (down 17 percent). But when you put this number in context, it looks a lot less impressive. Spending had risen by â¬28 billion in 2006â2009, so after two years of âausterity,â primary government spending as a share of GDP was still higher than in 2007, when the party had just gotten started. Worse still, the â¬20 billion adjustment was not as painful as it sounds. Over half of it came from four sources: less public investment (down 39 percent), a cut in weapons procurement (down 84 percent), fewer civil servants due to retirements (down 8 percent) and a doubling in EU finding. These are not tough political decisions. Meanwhile, cuts in wages for civil servants and in social benefits made up just 23 percent of the deficit reduction. As a result, if one excludes public investment (to control for the recent drop), the state spent in terms of GDP 4 percent more in 2011 than in 2006, the last ânormalâ year. Since the cuts have been skewed, government spending on wages and social benefits was higher in 2011 than in 2006. Social benefits, in particular, continue to be much higher than their 2006 level, and Greeceâs spending on pensions as a share of GDP was the second highest in Europe in 2010. All this mocks the idea that the welfare state is being starved. The inability to retrench the state to its 2006 level is the reason why the government wants more time and why it keeps raising taxes. Of course, Greece has a chronic tax-evasion problemâno doubt about that. But revenues reached a ten-year high in 2011. All revenue items were at or above 2006 levels due to the extra taxes levied during the crisis. Only thrice before has the state collected more in revenue than in 2011 (while entering the euro zone in 1999â2001). Greeceâs fiscal woes are due to out-of-control spending, not abnormally low revenues. The idea that austerity is killing Greece is thus absurd. The problem is the inability to practice austerity. Greece has slashed public investment, bought fewer weapons, let civil servants retire without replacing them and raised taxes that have pushed revenues to historical highs. It has done all this to avoid antagonizing the consistencies that benefit from public largesse and to avoid reining in a chaotic public sector. Output is collapsing, people are out of work, prices are rising and wealth is evaporating so that the state can keep eatingâin fact, eating better than the carefree years of the early and mid-2000s. Austerity has yet to come to Greece. http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/austerity-has-yet-come-greece-7678
I like Ed's definition. Austerity isn't a plan, it's something that happens to you if you don't plan.
Look at the most Pro-Union states in the US. The whole bunch of them are beyond insolvent. Just the sort of thing that happens when you are literally paying at least 2-3 people for the same job...the current employee and the retiree's, who in many cases are earning roughly 60-80% of the current employee PLUS healthcare benefits...and remember we have been in a "ZIRP world" since 2008. (and the S&P 500 is still at the same levels we saw in 2000). So how in the hell can we afford to pay these public sector employees? We can't.
I agree, but I'm not so sure the problem is if a few uneducated blue collar public sector employees end up doing ok (or even great) instead of broke like they deserve.