In the utter nonchalance of the masters who have plenty and can’t even imagine what hunger might mean, the Troika of the IMF the EU Commission and the ECB, seem to have thought the best way to solve the Greek deficit/debt crisis would be to throw more and more taxes on the heads of the lazy, undeserving, useless, lazy Greeks.
When you are about to inflict pain on people it is always best to paint them as the scum of the earth. It assuages your conscience if nothing else. Classically like the rape victim who always ‘asked for it!’ now didn’t she?
Now, our own ‘governors’, terrified by the prospect of going bust have so far simply gone along with anything proposed by this Troika however outlandish, however absurd.
Such as the taxation ‘policy’ (well of course it isn’t a policy at all! Just cruel and inhuman punishment hitting those least responsible for the mess worse.)
After raising indirect taxes to high heaven, thereby pricing all heating fuel out of our ability to pay (and in one of our coldest winters, just like 1941), hurling an extortion tax on property on top of all other property taxes, to be drawn from every nook and cranny that has electricity no matter how poor or small, the crowning moment is looming round the corner, with the brilliantly inventive new income taxation that has been imposed.
However, this has metamorphosed into something not remotely related to income tax at all. Your real income is not taken into account. Instead the state has decided that if you are alive, then automatically you are earning 5000 Euro a year, regardless of whether you may be unemployed, destitute or even dying of hunger. Now, if you happen to be living somewhere at all, even if only in several square meters of space, you are again assumed to be earning even more, determined by the size of the house you are living in, regardless of whether it is your own or rented.
So for a start, anyone alive who happens to be living in some kind of dwelling rather than in a box or on the street is automatically assumed to be earning something like 10000 Euro a year. More and more being added on to that if you happen to have an old jalopy you can’t afford petrol for.
As a result, at a time of rising unemployment, slashed incomes for those who still have them by way of salaries, wages and pensions, the Greek State has decided that since it has solved all our problems, we are now all earning so much more than ever before and shall be taxed on this vague assumption of theirs at high rates.
So here in Greece Income tax is no longer income tax at all, but merely a fiction hitting the worse off worst. I wonder what will happen when all these poor unsuspecting people start getting these exorbitant bills to pay tax on income they have had no way of earning?
Enough is enough! And they better think about it before all hell breaks loose. And hell to pay will not be confined to Greece alone.