> That means a pause in privatization, which Morawiecki says contributed up to 14 billion zlotys a year to the budget, a preference for domestic over foreign borrowing (the share of Poland's debt owned by foreigners is down to 50 percent from about 60 percent three years ago) and a reliance on state enterprises to increase investment because private companies are too small and not boldly expansionist enough to provide the desired boost.
Sad to read this. Most LatAm leftist governments tried the same formula over the past 2 decades, with disastrous consequences. Focusing public borrowing on the domestic market means that the government will compete with households and businesses for capital, which have a much harder time raising capital internationally.
This will make it much harder (and raise interests) for households and businesses to secure capital for new investments (especially when the domestic savings rate is so low), restricting supply growth and possibly leading either to inflation or to an increase in imports.
That, coupled with a low or nill savings rate, an over-reliance on government for retirements and a low retirement age, means an economic disaster, exactly like the one in Argentina and Brazil.
> Sad to read this. Most LatAm leftist governments tried the same formula over the past 2 decades, with disastrous consequences.
Korea, Taiwan, Japan and china tried it with spectacular results. Also, latin america is a especial situation because they are within the US sphere of influence. Their economic situation is far more complex because of it.
> exactly like the one in Argentina and Brazil.
Brazil and especially argentina's financial problems were a result of international borrowing, not domestic borrowing.
> Brazil and especially argentina's financial problems were a result of international borrowing, not domestic borrowing.
Patently false. The public debt in Brazil has been almost entirely internal for the past 10 years. Should I show you a chart to settle it?
> Korea, Taiwan, Japan and china tried it with spectacular results.
Quite the opposite, actually. They received massive inflows of foreign investment, and very high domestic savings rate.
That's the difference you're not seeing: the Asian countries you mentioned have a history of very high savings rate, this generates a stock of capital that the government and companies can borrow at low costs to develop. Poland (and the LatAm countries I mentioned) have very low or negative savings rate, and almost no capital stock, so any increase in borrowing by the government has to be met with foreign capital or it will cause inflation and higher interest rates.
> Patently false. The public debt in Brazil has been almost entirely internal for the past 10 years. Should I show you a chart to settle it?
Why not show it rather than asking for my permission? But since you asked, please do. And show me the one for argentina while you are at it. Here is brazil's external debt. Increased 250% in 10 years.
> Quite the opposite, actually. They received massive inflows of foreign investment, and very high domestic savings rate.
Foreign investment != external debt. So their high domestic saving rates means they had little need to borrow internationally? That was my point.
> the Asian countries you mentioned have a history of very high savings rate, this generates a stock of capital that the government and companies can borrow at low costs to develop.
But you wrote that it was quite the opposite just a sentence ago? I'm saying that korea, taiwan, japan and china did not depend on foreign borrowing. You conflate foreign investment with borrowing. Then you contradict yourself.
> Poland (and the LatAm countries I mentioned) have very low or negative savings rate, and almost no capital stock, so any increase in borrowing by the government has to be met with foreign capital or it will cause inflation and higher interest rates.
Well then they need to increase their savings rate or limit their borrowing?
> Why not show it rather than asking for my permission? But since you asked, please do. And show me the one for argentina while you are at it. Here is brazil's external debt. Increased 250% in 10 years.
That number is irrelevant, look at the composition:
I guess that settles it then. Maybe you shouldn't talk about the economic situation of a country you seem to know nothing about.
> Foreign investment != external debt.
Indeed, but foreign investment creates local stocks of capital, lowering internal interest rates and allowing for the government to borrow internally without significantly impacting businesses and households.
> But you wrote that it was quite the opposite just a sentence ago? I'm saying that korea, taiwan, japan and china did not depend on foreign borrowing. You conflate foreign investment with borrowing. Then you contradict yourself.
As you said yourself, Foreign investment != external debt. Forgot about that?
> Well then they need to increase their savings rate or limit their borrowing?
Both. Increasing savings rate takes many years to generate a stock of capital. In the meantime, they need to reduce government spending and borrow internationally.
Yeah, it's quite interesting how the parent skirts over all the history of US involvement in Latin American during the Cold War, while at the same time ignoring any inconvenient counterexamples.
What disaster do you see in Argentina? During the last years It cancelled all of it's debt with the IMF (in one payment, and this debt was generated many years ago) and also with the Paris Club. It's Central Bank is in relative good position. A monetary issue is the high inflation rate, but I wouldn't call it an "economic disaster" since unemployment is relatively low, if we compare it with historical levels or with unemployment of other LatAm countries.
Almost a decade of average zero growth, declining quality of life, crumbling infrastructure. It is sad to see the state of destruction the country was left in after Christina left.
> Almost a decade of average zero growth (...)
> It is sad to see the state of destruction the country was left in after Christina left.
And the state of the country when she arrived?
Let's not forget what happened between 1998-2002.
From your last article:
>Many of Argentina’s problems are familiar. Inflation has plagued Argentina for much of the past decade; it still grew by an average of 5.6% from 2005-2013.
Not a fan from Christina, but the situation is way more complex than just one (or 2 with Nestor) president.
Don't agree here:
- Growth has been relatively high
- Infrastructure improved
- Quality of life improved
- The state was not left in a state of destruction.
It's only sad that people still trot out the 'crowding out' thesis ten years after it proved to be false.
Poland has its own currency which its banks create as required.
There can be no shortage of financial capital in a country with a free floating exchange rate and no dollarised sovereign debt. There can only be a shortage of stuff.
I'm curious to see what happens next. Economics is quite complex and often the same policy applied in a different country gives quite different results.
On the other hand, borrowing in a foreign currency risks being ruined by exchange rates if the currency collapses. As happened to businesses in many Asian countries not that long ago. Also: Iceland.
Yes but the example given was Iceland where the opposite happened: debt (and more importantly interest payments) was denominated in a currency that appreciated against the currency where the revenue to pay the debt was being generated.
Japan is a developed country (low capital requirements) with a huge stock of capital which it has exported around the world. It can borrow plenty internally before there is a shortage of capital. It has $1.3 trillion in foreign reserves.
Poland is a developing country (high capital requirements) with no accumulated capital and negative savings, its foreign reserves are 10% of Japan's.
Inflation is a tax on wealth but not income (which rises with inflation.) As such it’s a progressive tax since wealth is so unequally distributed. Close to two decades of low inflation in the US and Western Europe has greatly increased inequality. Hyperinflation is destructive and must be avoided but there’s a strong progressive case for increasing the 2% inflation targeted by most central banks.
More specifically, unanticipated inflation is a "tax" to creditors (usually wealthier) who have invested loans and a benefit to their debtors (usually less wealthy).
"One important redistribution of income and wealth that occurs during unanticipated inflation is the redistribution between debtors and creditors.
a. Debtors gain from inflation because they repay creditors with dollars that are worth less in terms of purchasing power."
5% of the value held in the bank account of a poor person is worth more to that person than 5% in the account of a wealthy person, even if the absolute amount is less. Inflation is one of the most regressive taxes.
Part of wealth that's stored in cash or fixed-rate debt instruments. Most other assets - real estate, equities, floating-rate debt instruments - adjust accordingly.
Grotesque. Inflation is a tax that is first spent by the government, from the government to governments interests. Its a terrible tool of wealth distribution, and to the extent that it behaves like one it redistributes from everyone into the pockets of those who get the money first.
"The problem with Poles is they don't want to save," Borowski says.
In 2001 so called 'Belka's Tax' was imposed, which is annulling the capital gains tax (19% or something). This makes any placing to actually lose money (even more if you count inflation in).
So saving money in sock's drawer is out of question because of inflation, in banks it's even worse, that's been going on for 17 years. How we're suppose to save then?
It's 19% of the capital gains, not of the invested money. The parent comment makes it seem like the tax is absurd. Here's a list of countries that implement this tax, including Poland:
Right, I might phrased it imprecisely. Anyway let me show you screenshot from my bank taken today (sorry it's for some reason only in polish):
https://imgur.com/a/ISthS
so putting 10k PLN (2k EUR) for 24 months in, you'll gain 50 EUR and small text at the bottom says it's BEFORE taxation!
Average gross wage depends on region, but it's around 1k EUR per month. I cannot find median, values but it's much lower, most people here don't have two cents to rub together not to mention to put twice the average salary for 24 months to get 50 EUR
If you compare the cost of a mortgage, and a rent, they are very similar in Poland. So after 30 years you can sell the flat/house and you will get half of that money back. It's better than nothing.
Half, because usually the total mortgage cost for 30 years is about 100%.
In Portugal renting is more expensive then the cost of a mortgage due to tenant ultra-protective laws. Landlords are literally afraid to rent. Economically this is a disaster.
Is that mortage cost in real terms? If interest rates are close to appreciation rate, you might break even in real terms (apart from tax/maintenance costs).
That's what I saw in simulations for a 30 year mortgage shown by multiple banks. The amount of what I'd pay was twice the house cost. The interest rate was then around 3-4%, the appreciation rate about 2%, if I remember correctly.
So generally 100% more is a lot. However after 30 years you can sell the house, and what you get is still much more than renting, when you get nothing at the end.
I would say that widespread renting is actually quite terrible. It means that property is kept in the hands of class of landowners (and when wealth is concentrated, this also tends to concentrate power); that instead of investing one's income, renters are basically paying off the owner's mortgage; that generally, people prefer to own, and so widespread renting is a sign of being unable to participate in the real estate market; that it generally is associated with a rentier economy.
Caveat: please ignore taxes, emotional value and a few other country-specific details.
When you're buying a home, you're doing 3 independent things:
1) Borrowing money (optional)
2) Making a capital investment into an illiquid, immovable asset
3) Renting an asset that you own to yourself for you own usage
Give how much little money you have (compared to a company) and how your earnings and spending might oscillate, having so much of your assets locked up in an illiquid, immovable, single piece is a bad idea. It prevents you from moving around and taking a new job, for example.
Also, given your individual risk, you have to pay interest rates much higher than what you'd expect from an institutional investor. Also, you don't have any economies of scale for renting out, selling, doing maintenance, etc.
Now if an institutional investor bought a large stock of housing and rented it out, it is:
1) Borrowing money at lower rates than you
2) Making capital investment in thousands of individual, immovable assets
3) Renting an asset to you
With a much larger scale, the institutional investor has massive gains in economies of scale on selling, buying, renting, fixing, etc. Also, it is able to spread the risk of a single house or resident across its entire base, essentially transforming the individual risk into a financial cost to the renters, reducing the exposure to extreme events.
Finally, renting increases an individual's mobility, allowing for better allocation of jobs to different places in a country, improving economic growth and enabling the economy to adapt faster to changing situations.
PS: NIMBYism fucks this up. This only works if new housing is allowed to be built freely based on supply and demand, which is not the case in the most "progressive" parts of the US (Bay Area, for example).
I couldn't help but notice that you didn't address anything I wrote. You also ask me to ignore important factors like property tax which, frankly, can make owning land unprofitable for landlords if people move away. Also, an economics stripped of human beings and divorced from the social and the political is not economics, just some Procrustean nonsense cooked up in an armchair. Economies exist to serve their participants, not the other way around. Anyway...
First off, immobility is a problem only when there is a scarcity of jobs. It is a bad sign when lots of people have to move frequently to get jobs. Optimizing for mobility is kind of like treating a symptom instead of the cause and will likely deepen the problem because, hey, we can always count on people moving. People don't generally move around just to move around. Appealing to "better allocation" and "adaptation" as ways to defend mobility is, again, the result of having adopted some kind of dehumanized economics that treats people like units of goods in a distribution chain. Mobility is really not the thing you should be most worried about.
Second, it's not an either/or proposition. We can have renters and owners. Renting can cater to those who are mobile. But when a market is dominated by renters, then your market is fucked (see above).
> You also ask me to ignore important factors like property tax
Property tax is highly variable from location to location. But if you give me an example of property tax, I can tell you which makes more sense.
> an economics stripped of human beings and divorced from the social and the political is not economics, just some Procrustean nonsense cooked up in an armchair
Sure, and if I don't like the law of gravity, it should be abolished!
> immobility is a problem only when there is a scarcity of jobs
Which in the long term is everywhere.
> Appealing to "better allocation" and "adaptation" as ways to defend mobility is, again, the result of having adopted some kind of dehumanized economics that treats people like units of goods in a distribution chain. Mobility is really not the thing you should be most worried about.
You argument boils down to: "I don't like what you're saying, you're mean". I don't care, that's how life works. Not liking it won't change it.
> Second, it's not an either/or proposition. We can have renters and owners. Renting can cater to those who are mobile. But when a market is dominated by renters, then your market is fucked (see above).
Sure, that's the ideal market. Don't provide any incentives to owning or renting, and let people decide freely.
If you're borrowing at a fixed interest rate (or buying outright), you're also locking in price for housing against future rent increases.. and, currently in CA, against uncontrolled property tax increases too.
It doesn't really prevent you from moving to another job, one could always rent out the owned property and rent in your new location. (Though if the area you own in has crashed in prices that's a more difficult proposition...)
> If you're borrowing at a fixed interest rate (or buying outright), you're also locking in price for housing against future rent increases.. and, currently in CA, against uncontrolled property tax increases too.
Again, that's irrelevant from a financial perspective. The rates are priced to account for the risk of increase, and in this case the markets are liquid and competitive enough to allow correct market pricing.
> It doesn't really prevent you from moving to another job, one could always rent out the owned property and rent in your new location. (Though if the area you own in has crashed in prices that's a more difficult proposition...)
There is a large overhead cost to renting out, which is significantly higher than the overhead cost of renting a home. Renting out is essentially a part-time job.
> Again, that's irrelevant from a financial perspective. The rates are priced to account for the risk of increase, and in this case the markets are liquid and competitive enough to allow correct market pricing.
The markets can be irrational for longer than you can stay solvent. You can pull out silly tropes like some concept of "correct market pricing". Which means "correct" according to some group of concerns vs some other group of concerns. Rarely do we get to directly design markets, and designed changes often go vastly wrong with unintended side effects.
It's not irrelevant from a life stability perspective if you get priced out of your domicile for rent increases, vs keeping it for an owned property. People can individually value that stability or not, but it's a real consideration.
There is also large overhead in not choosing the time that one wants to move if rents increase uncontrollably.
> The markets can be irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
Cute quote, now show me the data.
> You can pull out silly tropes like some concept of "correct market pricing". Which means "correct" according to some group of concerns vs some other group of concerns. Rarely do we get to directly design markets, and designed changes often go vastly wrong with unintended side effects.
Correct market prices are the cost plus risk-adjusted returns. Essentially, the point at which economic profits are zero.
> It's not irrelevant from a life stability perspective if you get priced out of your domicile for rent increases, vs keeping it for an owned property. People can individually value that stability or not, but it's a real consideration.
That only happens if there is an artificial constraint in supply, generated by NIMBY policies.
> here is also large overhead in not choosing the time that one wants to move if rents increase uncontrollably.
Again, with freedom to build, prices won't move like that.
(2) is where your argument falls apart. Everyone wants to buy houses nowadays- it's not illiquid. In large cities, most houses only stay on the market for a few days. Buying houses with cash is becoming increasingly common also.
I never understood that. I keep hearing about landlords ultimately sucking all the earnings of the society that lives on the land they own (see the Bay Area for an example, where a mattress in a wardrobe costs you $1k or whatever).
It's complicated, there are pros and cons of each. The fewer landlords you have the better, but at the same time, situations like the United States-- where half the country has gigantic mortgages and relies critically on their home being an always-appreciating asset-- isn't great either. Economists have argued about this forever and there's no clear right answer.
Charging rent doesn't necessarily have to be rent-seeking. The Bay Area suffers from a severe and self inflicted housing shortage, meaning that landlords and property owners are actively rent seeking by not letting housing change to match demand.
>> "Poland: reasonable strategy roiled by leftist impulses."
The current government is a far right Catholic party that has just enacted a law partly denying the Holocaust (somewhat related to this, one of their senator sparked a scandal by posting actual Nazi propaganda online), and the country may have its EU voting right suspended due to the administration's attacks against the judiciary. But yeah the most important thing is that one of their economical policy happens to be left-leaning.
On the economist Thomas Piketty:
>> "Last month, the anti-capitalist economist wrote about ..."
Piketty is left-leaning, not "anti-capitalist".
Caption of a Piketty photograph:
>> "Only academic. Until now."
Piketty has been a (prominent) advisor for politicians on the French left for at least a decade.
Pump your breaks there kid - the only thing that is being denied is that occupied Poland had anything to do with the installment of the holocaust by the Germans (they were next in line to the chimney). As much as I don't like the asshats from PiS, I do understand where they are coming from, after seeing "Polish concentration camps" in the western press on a monthly basis. To your other point - most of the polish judiciary has roots in the communist prosecution apparatus and is actively shielding all of the assholes that had a soft landing after the "toppling" of the communist government. Fuck'em.
> most of the polish judiciary has roots in the communist prosecution apparatus and is actively shielding all of the assholes that had a soft landing after the "toppling" of the communist government
I was under the impression that most of the people that were working as judges during the Soviet occupation are now dead or retired..?
He didn't say they were all judges. He said they had roots in the Communist establishment (his focus is on the deeply embedded secret police, but it goes beyond that). You also have Communist/post-Communist dynasties and clans where power is inherited and shared through ties and nepotistic practices stemming from the Communist period.
It's nice to think that the fall of Communism automatically led to the wholesale liquidation of the Communist establishment, but that's fabular, and after you think about it, quite a silly thing to expect. It would be disastrous to simply remove them without having prepared to replace them. When a certain establishment had been running the state for half a century, with all its ties and knowledge and competencies, you couldn't just expel them all just like that. They and they alone have been running the state for almost 50 years! (Especially given that the pre-War elites were either exterminated by the Nazis and the Soviets, or fled the country, or whatever, but outsiders unless they joined the ranks of the People's Republic).
So, unless you manage this transition somehow with the end goal of reducing if not disrupting the continuation of that corrupt establishment[0], an establishment known for profiting for its own selfish gains[1] and trained by Moscow to function as essentially colonial puppets of foreign interest, you still have a problem.
[0] Not everyone in that establishment was corrupt, of course.
[1] Hence the actual way in which state assets were privatized, often for funny money to foreign owners, sometimes for liquidation and removing domestic sources of competition, and in ways where former party apparatchiks and the like profited from their sale.
Would you compare the change from being part of the USSR to a republic to a change of government from Monarchy to republic? I think you just start over.
I'm not Polish so I don't know the situation exactly, but it's also been 30 years. I live in Poland and I see nothing even remotely resembling communism (besides the ugly Soviet buildings they haven't demolished yet). I think the government is using this as a scapegoat to push their agenda, but that's just an impression.
Poland was a part of the Eastern Bloc, not the USSR.
It is incredibly naive to think that a regime change somehow means all of the social and status networks just magically change. That is as silly as believing that a change in President == a change in bureaucracy.
I dream of living in Poland, or Czechia, someday. I know it isn't perfect, but it seems honest.
Most of the supreme court judges still hail from the old system (not sure of the average age but it's got to be around 70). Communism/socialism was in a slow decline when they started their careers, but that does not change the fact that they swore their fealty to the communist party.
So you really think that because they swore to the Communist party 30 years ago they still push that agenda, even though it was a foreign power, that doesn't even exist anymore..?
They're national socialists. They don't like aliens, want to be in control of everything they deem important and are perfectly willing to break the rule of law for the good of society. They gave everyone with more than one child free money. They also call everything 'national' instead of 'public'. They think that the EU is a hindrance and an enemy, as if Putin didn't exist (that the part I can't understand the most.)
Because there's no third option. It's either the EU or Russia; there's no independent in-between possible. NATO won't help with a self-inflicted economic and geographic squeeze.
You're parroting an extremely twisted line touted by some media sources. You must realize how absurd it is to call them national socialists given the accepted meaning of that term. It's actually quite clownish.
W.r.t. aliens, that's nonsense. Even the article mentions Ukrainian immigration. For the record, Poland took in what were effectively ~1 million Ukrainian refugees and immigrants because of, you know, that war still being waged by Russia that the West keeps forgetting about. Germany and other Western countries didn't take in any Ukrainians. Poland refused to take in migrants during the migrant crisis for a number of reasons, including: refusal to acquiesce to Merkel's dictates after having she had utterly bungled that affair (most migrants aren't even Syrian refugees); migrants who had arrived in Poland and elsewhere eventually left and moved to Germany or Sweden anyway; Poland is largely homogeneous and having witnessed cultural-religious friction in the West decided not to subject itself to that experiment esp. given the precarious geopolitical place the country occupies; Poland diverts significant funds to efforts on Syrian soil to help Syrians on the ground; Poland is already in the Schengen zone and so what's this business with no aliens?
> perfectly willing to break the rule of law for the good of society
The current judiciary is full of law-breaking and less than savory people with ties to the old Communist establishment. That whole affair with the Tribunal (a Communist invention instituted by Jaruzelski during martial law to protect Communists, basically) is more complex. Every party had put its own candidates in and the previous ruling party, the Civic Platform, just before office, had exploited incoherent and unsatisfiable laws to create a situation that could only be resolved it seems the way it had been. Needless to say, it is far more complex than the way you claim it is. There is a general problem with Polish laws looking like Swiss cheese and issues with the Polish constitution. And even if it were the case that the rule of law was being violated for "the good of society", then perhaps there's a problem with the system if it needs to be violated to make necessary changes?
> They gave everyone with more than one child free money.
Not everyone agrees with that policy, but what is so wrong with it that you had to mention it as if it were an evil thing? The goal is to help slow or counteract the negative birth rate of the country. Europe in general is facing serious demographic issues. "Importing" large numbers of people from totally different cultures is not a great solution (see Germany, France).
> They also call everything 'national' instead of 'public'.
No, they don't. And when they do, so what? That's how state-owned institutions and programs are often labelled in Poland and elsewhere outside the US. The National Theatre, the Polish National Opera, the National Institute of Remembrance. What a silly grievance.
> They think that the EU is a hindrance and an enemy, as if Putin didn't exist (that the part I can't understand the most.)
They don't have issues with the European Union as such. They have issues with some ways the EU operates today and the way it relates to the countries of the former Eastern bloc. And who do you think makes up a good chunk of "Poland's owners" in this article? Hint: they're on the other side of "the river" and they own 80% of the Polish media. The current party, if you'll recall, signed the Lisbon Treaty in 2007. And w.r.t., Putin, Poland, and this party, are more keenly aware of the threat Putin poses than anyone, hence being one of very few countries actually meeting NATO defense quotas, hence trying to increase NATO presence in the region, hence pushing for the Three Seas Initiative with American support, hence previous attempts at installing a missile shield. The EU has done little to counter Putin. The West shows little solidarity with the countries most threatened by Putin. For example, Germany continues to carry on with its backroom deals and gas pipelines circumventing Poland, even though it would be cheaper to run the pipeline through Poland instead of through the Baltic.
So, I really have no idea what you're talking about.
As somebody who followed closely some of the issues mentioned here, especially the Tribunal one, seeing the legislative procedures being fearlessly broken and actually listening to the parliamentary debates, being able to pin-point the carefully crafted manipulative messages that weren't even internally coherent as soon as you gave them more attention than usual media coverage does, I can see you mindlessly repeating all this stuff right now. Try to diversify your opinion, read various sources, and especially don't buy into the completely stupid "they tried to do bad stuff and failed, so we'll now successfully do twice as bad stuff as they wanted to, cause we're in power now and nobody will stop us and hey, they were baddies too" argument.
> a Communist invention instituted by Jaruzelski during martial law to protect Communists
"W okresie PRL ustanowienie sądu konstytucyjnego stało się postulatem formułowanym przez wiele środowisk w okresie przełomu politycznego lat 1980–1981[2]. Powołania TK domagała się m.in. adwokatura oraz Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy „Solidarność”. "
Yes, someone does not have the idea what they are talking about, the Tribunal was established because Solidarity movement wanted it. A lot of the information you posted is at least inaccurate to high degree and can be verified easily.
> The current judiciary is full of law-breaking and less than savory people with ties to the old Communist establishment.
Can you name at least a few high profile members of judicary that would fit this description? I can name a few in PIS Kryże, Piotrowicz (you know the communist era prosecutor that now reforms law in Poland... oh the irony) - even people like Cenckiewicz the historian clearly state that they should not be there.
> And even if it were the case that the rule of law was being violated for "the good of society", then perhaps there's a problem with the system if it needs to be violated to make necessary changes.
I agree, can you point me to the parts of the laws that will improve the system for the citizens instead of currently ruling party?
One of the sources Morawiecki draws from is Catholic social teaching, which, as can be expected, is not particularly friendly toward morally bankrupt, exploitative, and unrestrained incarnations of capitalism. So, really, opposition to that variety of destructive capitalism is not a left/right wing issue as it is erroneously often thought of in the United States. (The Church is also opposed to socialism as an inherently perverse model, but it is not categorically opposed to some government social programs, though I would suspect they are viewed as less than idea, preferring saner business practices and charity).
I would honestly like to know how clarifying the historical accuracy of claims is somehow denying the Holocaust. Your comment has been flagged so it is obvious the Cowards of Dang's Round Table have decided your invective inspired to much vitriol for their liking, but I think your self imposed mental illness should be given over to the light, not pushed into the shadows to fester in the minds of the inadvertently as well as willfully ignorant.
Polish history is fraught with calumny and misunderstanding. Sometimes they are apathetic, anti-Semitic fools, other times they are reasonable and intelligent hosts of a hard pressed diaspora population. None of this has any bearing on the fact that the Poles are in a three-way tie for most fcked up by WWII. IMO they were hurt the most. On top of the travails of WWII they were then thrust into the Soviet sphere. I know this will seem like a reprehensible statement, but if you want to learn about a group fuked by their neighbors and shunned by the world with their history erased and their culture besmirched internationally, it is the the children of Rejtan, not Judah. Consider that both groups lost roughly the same numbers (gross total) but one group gained a Homeland as well as an upward trajectory that apparently has no ceiling while the other was doomed to the orbit of the worst political and social experiment in recorded history.
So, I say to you: before you vomit up some BS you acquired on r/postcapitalism look into the deep history of a person, place, or people when they seem to act atypically or illogically. Sometimes the history can illuminate.
If you think my remonstration is misplaced or my recounting of history sloppy or inaccurate, I'd love to carry on a deeper conversation.
... assuming I'm not shadow banned for thoughtcrimes ;)
I only wrote about their history in regards to why they would like for the world to stop acting like they were complicit in the Jewish Holocaust. Does it ever get tiring calling your opponents some flavor of crazy, only to watch them sweep you out of power even as you eat your own in a reckless purity spiral? Thanks for Trump, BTW. We never would have been blessed by him if you fellas didn't exist.
Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when posting here? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work." Doing that dumbs this place down, and we're hoping for better.
Sad to read this. Most LatAm leftist governments tried the same formula over the past 2 decades, with disastrous consequences. Focusing public borrowing on the domestic market means that the government will compete with households and businesses for capital, which have a much harder time raising capital internationally.
This will make it much harder (and raise interests) for households and businesses to secure capital for new investments (especially when the domestic savings rate is so low), restricting supply growth and possibly leading either to inflation or to an increase in imports.
That, coupled with a low or nill savings rate, an over-reliance on government for retirements and a low retirement age, means an economic disaster, exactly like the one in Argentina and Brazil.