Free Market Money

The Gold Standard Cannot Survive Political Logic

By Robert Blumen

Publisher Steve Forbes, speaking to Human Events predicted “a return to the gold standard by the United states within the next five years”. Why? Because it would “help the nation solve a variety of economic, fiscal, and monetary ills”.

The article continues:

Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending, the media mogul and former presidential candidate said.If the gold standard had been in place in recent years, the value of the U.S. dollar would not have weakened as it has and excessive federal spending would have been curbed, Forbes told HUMAN EVENTS.[...] the idea “makes too much sense” not to gain popularity as the U.S. economy struggles to create jobs, recover from a housing bubble induced by the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies, stop rising gasoline prices, and restore fiscal responsibility to U.S. government’s budget, Forbes insisted.With a stable currency, it is “much harder” for governments to borrow excessively, Forbes said.

That’s all good stuff, Steve. But really? Are you kidding?

In politics, things generally don’t happen because they “help the nation” or “make too much sense”. If we lived in that kind of world, and the 19th century gold standard had so much going for it, then why was it abandoned in favor of the present system?

It was abandoned for political reasons. Factors leading to the demise of the gold standard were the desire of governments to spend in excess of politically tolerable levels of taxation, the desire to finance World War I and other wars, and the wishes for a lender of last resort to bail out over-leveraged banks when they had insufficient reserves to cover their losses.

Political reasons have a logic of their own quite different from the kind of logic that Forbes is using in which good things happen for good reasons. In politics, interest groups organize to gain influence over the government and implement policies for their own benefit, at the expense of the rest of society.

But why does political logic defeat common sense? The public choice school of economics has given us an explanation of the insidious process by which the few exploit the many. They point out that concentrated benefits and dispersed costs lead to rational ignorance. Translating, “concentrated benefits” are the large returns earned by the privileged groups through subsidies or bailouts.

For each one of us tax payers, the cost of any individual bailout or welfare program is quite small, hence “dispersed costs”.  In looking at political action to fight the system, the individual taxpayer faces the following set of tradeoffs: the time and effort to understand even one piece of legislation or policy is substantial, and even if opposition to a particular program were effective, it would only save a few dollars per individual in taxes. This leads to “rational ignorance”, the decision by most taxpayers that the return to working harder at your job or just enjoying life is much greater than the return to political organizing.

Given outcomes that are dominated by public choice logic, the monetary system will not be reformed when “it makes too much sense” to do so. It will not be reformed because it would put government finances on a sound footing, nor to restrain war-making. Stabilizing the dollar won’t do it either. The current monetary system (or as James Grant calls it, non-system) will be replaced, eventually, because it will fail, catastrophically.

What will the alternative to the current regime of central banks, floating exchange rates, and unbacked fiat money look like? Here I must reject the wishful thinking that “things need to get worse so people will be really angry and insist on something better”. Things do not necessarily get better when there is a crisis. Things can get worse and stay worse, or get worse and then go even further downhill.

What exactly Steve Forbes has in mind is nebulous because the term “gold standard” is used differently by different people.  The most conventional definition is a system of national currencies exchanging at fixed rates, with central banks, each one having some gold as a reserve asset. In this world, central banks are obligated to provide a form of convertibility, though reserves held may be less than 100%. Individual nations may, under some conditions, be able to devalue their own national currency relative to the fixed rates and to gold.

For adherents to Murray Rothbard’s theory of banking, the gold standard means gold as money proper with banks holding 100% reserves against demand deposits. Under these conditions there is no necessity or even any purpose to having a central bank and devaluation is a form of default.

What does Forbes have in mind?  He has been associated with supply side economics, who have their own so-called “gold standard”. So-called because it is not much of a gold standard at all, only a rule that the central bank is supposed to manage the inflation of the fiat money system in line with the gold price.

Under this system, gold is not money proper, it is a good whose price is considered the best indicator of the looseness or tightness of monetary policy. As Frank Shostak points out, this system offers none of the advantages of using real gold as money. And why should anyone expect that when push comes to shove, the Fed will follow any rule when the situation seems to demand improvements?

As Murray Rothbard wrote in his critique of a similar money supply growth rule advocated by Milton Friedman, “Of course, Friedman would then advise the Fed to use that absolute power wisely, but no libertarian worth the name can have anything but contempt for the very idea of vesting coercive power in any group and then hoping that such group will not use its power to the utmost.”

When the current system fails, there are two primary barriers to the adoption of a better system. The first is the political actors who moved to abandon the gold standard the first time around haven’t gone away. The vested interest of powerful groups who wish to use the fiat money printing press are still around; if a new opening appears, the usual suspects will apply for their jobs back. That which has not killed them has made them stronger.

But the deeper obstacle is ideology. Most economists and central bankers actually believe that a) an economy cannot grow without an increasing quantity of money, b) the gold standard caused the Great Depression, c) The Fed determines monetary policy, a necessary and beneficial function and, d) the banking system needs a lender of last resort in the case of financial crises, you know, those crises that just sort of happen, that come out of no-where with no warning and hit us when we least expect.

None of the preceding propositions are true, but as long as they are accepted factoids, the next monetary system is likely to look a lot more like the current one with extra lipstick than anything that existed in the 19th century.

CUT SPENDING

Taxes Upon Taxes Upon . . .

Obama wants $1 trillion in taxes on top of what he's already signed.

By WSJ Opinion

So the fondest Washington hopes for a grand debt-limit deal have broken down over taxes. House Speaker John Boehner said late Saturday that he couldn't move ahead with a $4 trillion deal because President Obama was insisting on a $1 trillion tax increase, and the White House quickly denounced House Republicans for scuttling debt reduction and preventing "the very wealthiest and special interests from paying their fair share."

How dare Republicans not agree to break their campaign promises and raise taxes when the jobless rate is 9.2% and President Obama's economic recovery is in jeopardy?

We think Mr. Boehner is making the sensible choice. No one wants to reform the tax code more than we do, but passing a $1 trillion tax increase first on the promise of tax reform later is a political trap. If the President were really sincere about reform and a willingness to keep the top tax rate at or below 35%, he'd negotiate that at the same time he does a debt deal. Mr. Boehner will have a hard enough time getting any debt-limit increase through the House, much less one that raises tax rates.

Keep in mind that Mr. Obama has already signed the largest tax increase since 1993. While everyone focuses on the Bush tax rates that expire after 2012, other tax increases are already set to hit the economy thanks to the 2010 Affordable Care Act. As a refresher, here's a non-exhaustive list of ObamaCare's tax increases:

• Starting in 2013, the bill adds an additional 0.9% to the 2.9% Medicare tax for singles who earn more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000.

• For first time, the bill also applies Medicare's 2.9% payroll tax rate to investment income, including dividends, interest income and capital gains. Added to the 0.9% payroll surcharge, that means a 3.8-percentage point tax hike on "the rich." Oh, and these new taxes aren't indexed for inflation, so many middle-class families will soon be considered rich and pay the surcharge as their incomes rise past $250,000 due to tax-bracket creep. Remember how the Alternative Minimum Tax was supposed to apply only to a handful of millionaires?

• Also starting in 2013 is a 2.3% excise tax on medical device manufacturers and importers. That's estimated to raise $20 billion.

• Already underway this year is the new annual fee on "branded" drug makers and importers, which will raise $27 billion.

• Another $15.2 billion will come from raising the floor on allowable medical deductions to 10% of adjusted gross income from 7.5%.

• Starting in 2018, the bill imposes a whopping 40% "excise tax" on high-cost health insurance plans. Though it only applies to two years in the 2010-2019 window of ObamaCare's original budget score, this tax would still raise $32 billion—and much more in future years.

• And don't forget a new annual fee on health insurance providers starting in 2014 and estimated to raise $60 billion. This tax, like many others on this list, will be passed along to consumers in higher health-care costs.

There are numerous other new taxes in the bill, all adding up to some $438 billion in new revenue over 10 years. But even that is understated because by 2019 the annual revenue increase is nearly $90 billion, or $900 billion in the 10 years after that. Yet Mr. Obama wants to add another $1 trillion in new taxes on top of this.

Another basket case of social engineering

The Shame of the Cities and the Shade of LBJ

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires.  By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense.  It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s and in addition to the interest on the debt from this ill-starred venture we are still paying (as we certainly should) pensions and medical costs for the vets and their spouses.

The Second Great Johnson Quagmire now destroying the nation is the Medicare/Medicaid complex.  These entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face.  They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like small change.  They not only cost money we don’t have — and are scheduled to cost inexorably more until they literally ruin the nation — they have distorted our entire health system into the world’s most bloated and expensive monstrosity.  Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost. (Note, please, that by comparison Social Security can be relatively easily reformed to be solvent for the next 75 years.  The New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, was almost infinitely more realistic and sustainable than the Great Society.)

LBJ Signing the Medicare Bill 

But that is a subject for another day.  The third Johnson Quagmire is the War on Poverty, and specifically the attempt to treat inner city poverty primarily as a racial problem.  After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy.  Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods.  The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more.  And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before.  There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched.  Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll.  Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women.  Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.

Crime as an employment opportunity

An Unhappy Ending To The Drug War?

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city.

I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing with urban problems: the catastrophic human cost both of drugs and of our faltering War on Drugs.  The widespread use of drugs in our inner cities and elsewhere in our society is both a cause and a symptom of social decay.  Drug addicts and heavy, habitual users do not make good students, good workers, good citizens, good neighbors or good parents.  This has nothing to do with illegality: cocaine could be as legal as parsley and it would still ruin lives.

The Drug War, with an impact stretching far beyond the inner cities, is one of America’s worst policies.  It costs billions we don’t have; it promotes the growth of transnational criminal gangs and supports large black markets in money and arms that terrorists as well as drug lords can use; if fills the prisons and it hasn’t stopped either the use of existing illegal drugs or the development of new ones.  Furthermore, as a Cato Institute paper estimates that legalizing and taxing drugs would yield more than $80 billion a year in savings and new revenue.  (Something tells me that even the hardiest Tea Partiers might see their way to a hefty excise tax on heroin and cocaine.) 

What we are doing now isn’t working.  My old CFR colleague and Coast Guard official Steve Flynn used to say that if terrorists wanted to smuggle a nuclear warhead into the United States their best bet would be to hide it in a shipment of cocaine.  Since our interdiction rate is so low, the bomb would have an excellent chance of getting through.

The drug war inevitably leads to corruption in the forces recruited to fight it.  It erodes civil liberties.  It diverts law enforcement resources from other tasks.  In a society which believes that lap dancers in strip bars are exercising their constitutionally protected right of free expression and that virtually any government interference in the termination of unborn life is an obscene and inexcusable violation of the right to privacy, it is hard to find good reasons why government should have the right to tell us what chemicals to put in our bloodstreams.

My personal brush with the war on drugs came when I was 18 years old and foolishly hitch-hiked on the New York State Thruway with a pipe that had marijuana residue on it.  Since I couldn’t get bailed out over the weekend, I spent a very instructive couple of nights in jail and once suitable amounts of money had been handed round I was able to plead guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct and go about my business.  Of course no inhalation ever took place in my preternaturally sober and sensible youth and I have no idea how that pipe got into my backpack, but nothing about that experience made me a fan of the drug war.

Distaste for the drug war didn’t make me a fan of drugs.  In my own case I soon realized that I had to make the choice between indulging in drugs or wrecking my life and wasting any talent I might have; ultimately I came to understand that alcohol was as bad for me as any other drug.  Some of my friends made different choices; a couple went to prison for long stretches; others had their lives wrecked because they took too many drugs or the wrong drugs.

Low intensity warfare

Chicago's long, hot summer of gun violence

by Rick Moran

Every day I click on the Chicago Tribune website and every day it seems I read a headline like this:

At least 11 wounded across city on steamy night

A headline from the day before indicated that 2 were dead and at least 11 wounded on Saturday night.
The city that has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation - and vigorously enforced - is a shooting gallery. Here are some of the latest victims:

• A 13-year-old boy told police that he was standing on the street in the 7200 block of South Campbell Avenue at about 12:25 a.m., when he heard gunshots and realized he'd been shot in the leg, police said.
The boy was taken Holy Cross, where he was being treated. Police couldn't offer a motive for the shooting, but Chicago Lawn District officers said the boy denied being in a street gang.
• Just before 12:30 a.m. Monday, a man and woman were sitting in the vehicle in the 7200 block of South Dobson Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood when police said a gunman inside a dark-colored vehicle pulled up alongside them and opened fire.
The man, 54, was struck in the eye, while the woman, 56, was struck in the head, said police, citing early reports. Despite the wounds, both victims were talking at the scene and were taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition, police said.
• At about 1:50 a.m. Monday, a 31-year-old man was with a group of friends getting into a car in the 5500 block of South Pulaski Road when his group began arguing with a man in another vehicle, police said.
The man got out, pulled a handgun and opened fire, striking the victim in the upper back and delivering a graze wound to his head, police said.
The victim's friends drove him to Holy Cross Hospital before he was transferred to Christ, where his condition was described as "guarded," police said.
No arrests were made in any of the shootings.

No arrests - and no answers - for why Chicago has as many casualties on some nights as a city in a war zone. 

The Attorney General as Hitman

The Stimulation Of Murder

The ATF's gun-running disaster was funded in the stimulus bill. Think about all the criminal and drug cartel jobs saved or created. And our attorney general once bragged to a Mexican audience about implementing it.

This could be, no pun intended, the proverbial smoking gun in a growing administration scandal that deserves as much mainstream media attention as Iran-Contra or Watergate.

Right there in the stimulus bill that no one in Congress bothered to read is $10 million for Project Gunrunner (aka Operation Fast and Furious), which resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and increased drug cartel violence.

Right there in the "shovel ready" stimulus, no black humor intended, is a provision for $40 million for "state and local law enforcement assistance" along our border with Mexico and in high drug-trafficking areas, "of which $10 million shall be transferred to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, salaries and expenses for the ATF Project Gunrunner."

Attorney General Eric Holder's "I know nothing" imitation of TV's Sgt. Schultz has evaporated with the discovery of an April 2, 2009, speech to authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he took Gunrunner credit for himself and the rest of the Obama administration.

Holder told the audience: "Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner. DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion."

So which administration official put the Gunrunner money in the stimulus? Which congressman insisted on this deadliest of earmarks?

The original Southwest Border Violence Reduction Act of 2009 was sponsored by Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas. Rodriguez's co-sponsors were two other Texans, Henry Cuellar and Silvestre Reyes, plus Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Harry Teague, D-N.M.

The Disparate Impact theory in action

Holder Launches Witch Hunt Against Biased Banks

By PAUL SPERRY, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD.

Prosecutions have already generated more than $20 million in loan set-asides and other subsidies from banks that have settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist. An additional 60 banks are under investigation, a DOJ spokeswoman says.

No Job, No Problem

Settlements include setting aside prime-rate mortgages for low-income blacks and Hispanics with blemished credit and even counting "public assistance" as valid income in mortgage applications.

In several cases, the government has ordered bank defendants to post in all their branches and marketing materials a notice informing minority customers that they cannot be turned down for credit because they receive public aid, such as unemployment benefits, welfare payments or food stamps.

Among other remedies: favorable interest rates and down-payment assistance for minority borrowers with weak credit.

For example, the government has ordered Midwest BankCentre to set aside almost $1 million in "special financing" for residents living in predominantly black areas of St. Louis. The program includes originating conventional home loans at fixed prime rates for African-American borrowers "who would ordinarily not qualify for such rates for reasons including the lack of required credit quality, income or down payment."

The same federal order, signed last month, praises Midwest for adopting "less stringent underwriting criteria" while under investigation.

In the case against Citizens Bank of Detroit, settled in May, the U.S. decrees that "the bank may choose to apply more flexible underwriting standards in connection with the programs under this order."

Such efforts risk recreating the government-imposed lax underwriting that led to the housing boom and bust, critics fear.

"It's absolutely outrageous after what we've just gone through," said former Rep. Ernest Istook, a Heritage Foundation fellow. "How can someone both be financially stable enough to merit a mortgage at the same time they're on public assistance? By definition, you don't have the kind of employment that can support such a loan."

Justice March

Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said the anti-discrimination notice "does not compel the banks to make loans to people who do not qualify." She said such measures are "essential to remedy the harmful effects of the banks' conduct."

But industry analysts fear Attorney General Eric Holder is rekindling an anti-bank witch hunt launched by Attorney General Janet Reno in the 1990s, when Holder served as her deputy.

Some blame that in part for the subprime boom, because banks were ordered to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities. That crackdown spurred the American Bankers Association to distribute to its thousands of members "fair-lend ing tool kits" advising the adoption of more permissive underwriting criteria to help inoculate them from prosecution.

In the new prosecutions, Justice acknowledges in every case it did not prove charges of intentional discrimination, while banks have denied any wrongdoing. Many, in fact, earned outstanding ratings from anti-redlining regulators enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act.

Istook calls Holder's crusade an "egregious overreach by the government." He says many of the targets are smaller banks without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle.

The House Judiciary Committee plans to investigate.

"This is an expansion of the law," said a congressional investigator. "They're pushing the envelope as far as they can go in the enforcement of civil rights."

UN Demands $76 Trillion for “Green Technology”  

by James Heiser    

With the Western nations continuing their downward economic spiral, the advocates of the United Nations’ redistributionist schemes also continue to exploit the environmental agenda in their effort to fundamentally alter the global economy to serve their own ends.

Despite the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 to achieve its goal of a treaty binding the industrialized world to an economic suicide pact, the "voluntary" agreements are still a threat to the West. The UN is engaged in an effort to use the imagined environmental crisis as the justification for a program of sweeping economic redistribution that would shift trillions of dollars from the industrialized nations to the Third World. The UN is now demanding an “investment” of $1.9 trillion per year in “green technology” to meet the goals that the internationalists have set for the nations of the world. An AFP story entitled “World needs $1.9tn a year for green technology:UN” sets forth the lament of an elite for whom “real money” is measured in tens of trillions of dollars:

"Over the next 40 years, $1.9 trillion (1.31 trillion euros) per year will be needed for incremental investments in green technologies," the UN Economic and Social Affairs body said in its annual survey.

"At least one-half, or $1.1 trillion per year, of the required investments will need to be made in developing countries to meet their rapidly increasing food and energy demands through the application of green technologies," it added. At the moment, "external financing currently available for green technology investments in developing countries is far from sufficient to meet the challenge," it assessed.

Over the last two years, climate change funds managed by World Bank disbursed about $20 billion, a fraction of the sum necessary for developing countries to build up clean energy technologies, sustainable farming techniques and technologies that help cut non-biodegradable waste production. Even though states agreed during a 2009 Copenhagen summit to spend $30 billion over 2010 to 2012 and $100 billion a year by 2020 in transfers to developing countries, these sums have not been realised.

In other words, the costly “feel good” language adopted at Copenhagen — though far from the crushing obligations a treaty would have imposed — still means the World Bank and the United Nations will be playing the role of an international collection agency, metaphorically beating on the doors of various heads of state until they “cough up” the demanded funds.

Generations of Pork

How Greece's Political Elite Ruined the Country

The latest tranche of loans from the EU and the IMF has helped buy debt-ridden Greece some time. But the Greeks will find it hard to get back on their feet. Their country has been ruined by three political dynasties, which created a bloated system of cronyism that is hard to change.  

By Spiegel Staff

The queue of hungry people snaked across the courtyard and into the street at the homeless shelter behind Omonoia Square in Athens last Thursday, just as it does every day at lunchtime. The retired, the unemployed, mothers with children, immigrants; they were all waiting patiently for church members to press something to eat into their hands.
Georgios Levedogiannis, 38, managed to get his hands on some peas with root vegetables and potatoes, along with three hunks of bread and a few cups of yoghurt. Levedogiannis has been coming here regularly for nine months. "I have to, in order to survive," he says.
Levedogiannis worked in security at Athens Airport for seven years. He wasn't rich, but he got by -- until his bosses fired him in 2009. At the moment, his poverty is not yet visible. Levedogiannis wears a clean shirt, smart blue slacks and a new-looking bag slung around his waist. He clearly makes an effort. But there are tears in the man's eyes as he says: "If I had work, I wouldn't do this to myself." He says he has "zero" money and that he sleeps at the Red Cross, eats at the church and dreams of a different time, a time where there was still work. "If you don't have connections, no one will take you," he explains. "And it's only getting worse."
Number of Needy Increasing Rapidly
Nearly all of Greece's 400 church districts have started distributing food to the poor, including at Omonoia Square. "The number of needy is increasing rapidly," says one helper there, "and we don't know whether the end is even in sight."
In fact, it probably isn't. Last Wednesday, the governing Socialists passed a massive austerity package in parliament by a slim majority, despite intense protests. The decision paves the way for the next round of emergency loans from the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Without this €12 billion ($17 billion), Athens would default on its debt within two weeks.
George Provopoulos, governor of the Bank of Greece, believes torpedoing the austerity package, as the country's conservative opposition tried, would have been "suicide." Still, Provopoulos also believes Greece has "reached the limit" and that it would be impossible to squeeze any more out of the people.
In remarks to the conservative newspaper Kathimerini, he spoke about what he saw as the root cause of the crisis. "There is little doubt that the failings of (the existing social and political) system hindered the implementation of policies that would have averted the existing ills," he said. "We are paying the price of past mistakes."
The emergency financing will help Greece through the next months and it will buy the rest of the EU some time -- time in which the euro crisis may ease somewhat. But it's unlikely that it can save Greece. The last few decades have seen an elite, with the Papandreou, Karamanlis and Mitsotakis families at its core, establish a system of economic patronage. They threw around billions the government didn't actually have and showered friends and relatives with prosperity that was all based on credit. These leaders bloated their country's administration so that everyone could have a piece, and created a bureaucratic monster in the process.
The political parties' business dealings were always more about favors than policies. Anyone with access to public funds used them to buy friends and voters, who were then beholden to the party -- and to the family running it. The result for Greece has been a feudal democracy, where the generations come and go, but the names remain the same: Papandreou and Karamanlis and Karamanlis and Papandreou, with a Mitsotakis thrown in every now and then. No other European democracy has seen the like.

Child abuse still going on in Greece

Τι θα έκανα με το άγος του ΟΣΕ

Απο Κώστα Λυμπουρίδη http://e-drasis.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_31.html

Ο Οργανισμός Σιδηροδρόμων Ελλάδας είναι μια ιστορία αθλιότητας, την οποία ανέχονται αδιαμαρτύρητα οι Έλληνες φορολογούμενοι για πολλά χρόνια. Θα παραθέσω ορισμένα στοιχεία που συνθέτουν το μέγεθος της καταστροφής.

Τα βασικά οικονομικά στοιχεία του Οργανισμού τα τελευταία χρόνια έχουν ως εξής:

(χιλιάδες ευρώ)	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Πωλήσεις (έσοδα)	94.898	104.780	105.439	195.618	174.006
Κόστος προσωπικού		374.543	386.119	292.001	290.575
Αποτέλεσμα (ζημιές)	-829.550	-845.111	-939.910	-794.570	-936.812
Επιδότηση Ελλ. Δημοσίου	287.312	334.867	506.105	462.858	548.314
Νέος δανεισμός	1.427.600	968.700	110.477	330.500	482.891
Σύνολο δανείων	6.438.064	7.325.743	8.408.948	9.756.461	10.712.778

Αυτό σημαίνει ότι:

• για κάθε εισιτήριο των 17 ευρώ που αγοράζουμε, ο ΟΣΕ καταβάλλει μισθό 29 ευρώ, μπαίνει συνολικά μέσα 93, επιδοτείται από το Δημόσιο με 54 και δανείζεται άλλα 48!
• κάθε Έλληνας χρωστάει 1.000 χρέος, απλά για να υπάρχει ο ΟΣΕ!
• το κόστος προσωπικού (ακόμα και το μειωμένο του 2009) αντιστοιχεί σε 4.182 εργαζόμενους (κυρίως βασικής εκπαίδευσης), δηλαδή μέσο κόστος 70.000 ευρώ ανά εργαζόμενο!

Το άγος συμπληρώνεται από τα παρακάτω στοιχεία:

• ο ΟΣΕ καλύπτει μόλις το 2,5% των εμπορευματικών μεταφορών στην Ελλάδα (το 97,5% διενεργείται οδικώς, δηλαδή με νταλίκες). Αλλά και σε αυτό ακόμα το ποσοστό, πρέπει να υπολογίσουμε και το «παραμάγαζο» που πρόσφατα αποκαλύφθηκε ότι είχαν στήσει εργαζόμενοι και εκμεταλλεύονταν το δίκτυο του ΟΣΕ εισπράττοντας οι ίδιοι.
• το 30% των 2.500 χλμ δικτύου του είναι στο παλαιό, μη ευρωπαϊκό, πλάτος και στην ουσία είναι άχρηστο.
• το δίκτυο του ΟΣΕ καλύπτει περίπου 20 από τους 51 νομούς της Ελλάδας, ενώ όλοι οι νομοί διαθέτουν ΚΤΕΛ, τα οποία τον ανταγωνίζονται στη μεταφορά επιβατών
• 2.700 υπάλληλοι πρόκειται να μεταταγούν στο Δημόσιο, προκειμένου να πάψει ο ΟΣΕ να είναι ζημιογόνος. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι αφενός έτσι κι αλλιώς θα μπορούσε να δουλεύει με 1.500 εργαζόμενους, αφετέρου ότι το κόστος μισθοδοσίας απλά «θα κρυφτεί» στο αχανές Δημόσιο.

Δυστυχώς, η μόνη λύση για τον ΟΣΕ είναι το άμεσο κλείσιμο. Μια ανώνυμη εταιρία με ζημιές 4 με 9 φορές το τζίρο της θα είχε κλείσει προ πολλού, καθώς κανείς μέτοχος δεν θα έβαζε πλέον λεφτά. Πρέπει επιτέλους και ο μέτοχος του ΟΣΕ, το Ελληνικό Δημόσιο, να αντιληφθεί ότι εκπροσωπεί όλους εμάς τους φορολογούμενους που δεν δεχόμαστε πλέον να χρηματοδοτούμε 4.200 υπαλλήλους Δημοτικού με 70.000 ευρώ το χρόνο.

Τι θα έκανα τον ΟΣΕ; Θα τον έκλεινα σε μια μέρα και θα έδινα στους υπαλλήλους του το προβλεπόμενο επίδομα ανεργίας, που έτσι κι αλλιώς θα έπαιρνε κάθε μη προνομιούχος εργαζόμενος του ιδιωτικού τομέα. Στο κράτος θα έμενε ένα χρέος περίπου 11 δις ευρώ, αλλά και η υποδομή. Με έναν πλειοδοτικό διαγωνισμό θα καλούσα οποιαδήποτε σιδηροδρομική εταιρία της Ευρώπης στήσει μια νέα εταιρία εκ του μηδενός, προσλαμβάνοντας και πολλούς απολυμένους του ΟΣΕ, με μισθούς αγοράς. Στη νέα σιδηροδρομική εταιρία θα παρείχα πλήρως ελεύθερα τιμολόγια, και μάλιστα στους νομούς όπου υπάρχει σιδηροδρομικό δίκτυο θα απελευθέρωνα και τα τιμολόγια των τοπικών ΚΤΕΛ. Ο ανταγωνισμός των δύο φορέων θα οδηγούσε σε μικρότερες τιμές και καλύτερες υπηρεσίες.

Δυστυχώς αυτά θα έκανε κάποιος που επιχειρούσε να βάλει μια τάξη στη μαύρη τρύπα του Δημοσίου, και όχι μια Κυβέρνηση, βασική προτεραιότητα της οποίας είναι να διαφυλάξει τα παιδιά που προσέλαβε, να κρύψει από τους φορολογουμένους τους τεράστιους μισθούς που παίρνουν για μηδενικό έργο και να μας αναγκάσει να συνεχίσουμε να πληρώνουμε κοντά στο 1 δις το χρόνο λόγω της «κοινωνικής σημασίας του σιδηρόδρομου».