Grèce : l’agneau sacrificiel
►https://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/monica-m/260715/joseph-stiglitz-grece-lagneau-sacrificiel
Après avoir passé toute la semaine dernière à Athènes en conversation avec des citoyens ordinaires jeunes et âgés, ainsi qu’avec des officiels d’aujourd’hui et d’hier, j’en suis venu à penser qu’il s’agit de bien autre chose que de la Grèce et de l’euro. Source : The NY Times via Le blog de Monica M.
Greece, the Sacrificial Lamb - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/opinion/greece-the-sacrificial-lamb.html?smid=tw-share
Joseph Stiglitz, avec quelques exemples, montre que “l’accord” néo-colonial Merkel-Hollande est destiné à détruire les petites entreprises grecques au profit des grandes firmes européennes et internationales :
"Consider the case of milk. Greeks enjoy their fresh milk, produced locally and delivered quickly. But Dutch and other European milk producers would like to increase sales by having their milk, transported over long distances and far less fresh, appear to be just as fresh as the local product. In 2014 the troika forced Greece to drop the label “fresh” on its truly fresh milk and extend allowable shelf life. Now it is demanding the removal of the five-day shelf-life rule for pasteurized milk altogether. Under these conditions, large-scale producers believe they can trounce Greece’s small-scale producers.
(...)
Normally, the I.M.F. warns of the dangers of high taxation. Yet in Greece, the troika has insisted on high effective tax rates even at very low income levels. All recent Greek governments have recognized the importance of increasing tax revenues, but mistaken tax policy can help destroy an economy. In an economy where the financial system is not functioning well, where small- and medium-size enterprises can’t get access to credit, the troika is demanding that Greek firms, including mom and pop stores, pay all of their taxes ahead of time, at the beginning of the year, before they have earned it, before they even know what their income is going to be. The requirement is intended to reduce tax evasion, but in the circumstances in which Greece finds itself, it destroys small business and increases resentment of both the government and the troika.
This requirement seems at odds, too, with another of the demands with which Greece has been confronted: that it eliminate its cross-border withholding tax, which is the withholding tax on money sent from Greece to foreign investors. Such withholding taxes are a feature of good tax systems in countries like Canada and are a critical part of tax collection. Evidently, it is less important to ensure that foreigners pay their taxes than that Greeks do.❞
#fiscalité #Grèce #grande_distribution #industrie_agroalimentaire
