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Eurozone crisis sees huge rise in numbers leaving Spain

by Dan Kervick 10/9/2012 - 8:56 pm
Read the full article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19868408

Spain losing its young people as the austerians drive them out.  Our future too?

by Dan Kervick 10/9/2012 - 8:58 pm

Dan, I think the comparisons you are making are superficial and misleading. And that just comes from reading this article and the related one that you yourself posted.

A more accurate comparison would be: when the Florida economy built on strings and mirrors crashes, and the corrupt government that enabled it goes broke, and when young Floridians start looking for work elsewhere in the U.S. or overseas, and capital pulls their money out of Florida, that  a healthier California should suffer to help get them back on their feet. Which is something that California might want to consider doing for the good of the whole country.

But even that's not accurate because where your arguments about a MMT-related solution would take you,  is to break up the EU so that Spain can go back to a sovereign economy and print its own money.

And it's easily argued that that's not really a solution at all, because without the EU brand behind it, Spain doesn't exactly have a reputation the last couple centuries of being a U.S.-type hegemon where investors are going to clamor to lend them money for eternity so that they can continually run deficits.

by artappraiser 10/10/2012 - 8:01 am (re: Dan Kervick)

AA, Spain has 50% youth unemployment!  That's criminal and disgusting.   If they did something wrong in the past, they should do better.  They should invest as a nation in something really productive and put their people to work in that productive enterprise.

Are you saying that Spain has suddenly discovered, after many centuries of existence, that it can no longer run a society that is capable of employing its own children and providing a decent life for them?   It must now leave its children on the doorsteps of foreign nations?  And who should decide this?  Spaniards, or a bunch of bankers in Frankfurt?

This has nothing to do with healthier nations helping the Spanish get back on their own feet.  Spain doesn't need a transfer from German taxpayers.  It needs the capacity to finance new productive enterprises that employ the many unemployed Spanish people.  If the Eurozone won't do that, then Spain should go their own way.  But I would hope Europeans are collectively smart enough to realize that there is no path to prosperity through idleness and stagnation.  Right now, that whole continent seems plunged in madness because of their commitment to a spectacularly failed neoliberal economic paradigm.

 

by Dan Kervick 10/10/2012 - 5:10 pm (re: artappraiser)

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