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Wolff: Greece parallels developments everywhere

Richard Wolff

According to Richard Wolff, UMass Amherst economics professor emeritus, what is happening in Greece will parellel financial crises to come in other capitalist economies like Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

Greece, Again: Demystifying “National Debt”
by Rick Wolff

With too few taxes flowing to the state from employers and workers to finance its programs for both of them, the state must borrow the difference between tax revenues and programs’ costs.  By borrowing, the state escapes, at least temporarily, the dilemmas of its position within capitalism’s class struggles.  It postpones the day of reckoning until it can no longer borrow its way out of those dilemmas.  Now, the global crisis of capitalism has brought Greece that day of reckoning, just a little sooner than everywhere else.

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