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Greece Plans New Austerity Measures

September 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Greece’s so-called troika of foreign lenders — the European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund — have required the measures as a condition for releasing the next installment of $11 billion in aid that the country needs to meet expenses starting in mid-October. Fears of a Greek default have shaken world markets and revealed deep fissures in the European Union.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told Parliament on Wednesday that Greece had no choice but to continue with its austerity program in order to appease the financial markets. “The markets are blackmailing us and the circumstances are humiliating us,” he said.

He added that the government would do everything possible to keep the country “out of danger.” In a rare about-face, Mr. Venizelos, a Socialist Party stalwart who is widely seen as holding the reins of Prime Minister George Papandreou’s government, said that Greece was fortunate to be under foreign supervision.

“The Greek people are suffering, the country is upset and depressed but also dignified and proud,” Mr. Venizelos added.

Coming just months after the government passed an earlier package of unpopular austerity measures, including tax increases and wage freezes, the new measures are wildly unpopular and touch for the first time on two pillars of Greek society — the civil service and family homes — further squeezing a society in which one in five workers is employed by the public sector.

A growing number of Greeks are increasingly confused and upset by the ever-evolving and expanding measures. On Wednesday, Greece’s two main labor unions called 24-hour general strikes for Oct. 5 and 19.

“Last year, we were prepared to make these sacrifices, we recognized the need,” said Antonis Karanikas, 48, the head of a public-sector entity that evaluates insurance claims made by farmers, as he participated on Wednesday in a peaceful protest by public-sector workers in Athens.

“But what the government is trying to do now is without a real plan,” he added. “It’s creating a sense of panic among a large segment of the Greek population.”

After a seven-hour cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the government issued a statement detailing the new measures, but it failed to confirm, or flesh out, a new property tax announced earlier this month. Originally, Mr. Venizelos said the tax would range from 50 cents to about $14 a square meter, or 11 square feet, depending on the value of the property and the building’s age. But there has been some debate about increasing the top of the scale to $28.

The tax would be levied through electricity bills in order to thwart evasion. But the powerful union that represents the public energy utility said it would oppose the tax, making its implementation uncertain.

On Wednesday, the government also announced that it would lower the threshold above which income is taxed to $6,800 annually from about $11,000. It would also cut pensions above $1,600 a month and pensions above about $1,400 a month for retirees younger than 55.

On Wednesday, the government said it would move ahead in October with placing about 30,000 civil servants — or 3 percent of the public work force — on a so-called labor reserve program in which their wages would be cut for 12 months, after which their positions could be terminated.

Labor unions and the center-right opposition have criticized this as a back door to firing. Under the Constitution, public-sector workers cannot be fired.

Ilias Mossialos, the government spokesman, said that talks between Greece and its foreign lenders would pick up again next week when the foreign inspectors return to Athens. Talks broke down this month when the lenders said they were unconvinced that Greece could meet its deficit reduction targets in view of the slow pace of carrying out the austerity measures.

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Portugal Praised for Progress on Financial Overhaul

August 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But as international lenders were delivering an upbeat review of Portugal’s progress, the country’s finance minister announced a steep increase in the tax on electricity and natural gas consumption to ensure that Portugal cuts its budget deficit this year by more than a third.

Vitor Gaspar, the Portuguese finance minister, warned that the government was still short of its deficit-to-gross domestic product goal for the full year, by about 1.1 percentage points.

To be on track, he said Friday, the government needed to increase its tax proceeds by an additional 100 million euros ($142 million) in the fourth quarter by raising the value-added tax on electricity and natural gas to 23 percent from 6 percent.

Still, officials from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank said during a televised news conference in Lisbon that they were confident Portugal would meet its goal of reducing its budget deficit to 5.9 percent of G.D.P., from 9.1 percent in 2010.

“We have observed some public expenditure overruns, but we don’t expect these to continue in the fourth quarter,” said Jürgen Kröger, the chief negotiator for the European Commission.

Analysts at Barclays Capital wrote in a note to investors that the review was “marginally positive news” and added that new spending controls would be needed eventually. Offsetting spending increases with one-time tax increases is “certainly not helpful at a time when economic activity is in the process of declining to an already large planned fiscal contraction,” they wrote in the note.

The officials representing international lenders were in Lisbon this week to complete their first quarterly review of Portugal’s progress since they agreed on the terms of the bailout in May. Their favorable assessment paves the way for the government to receive another installment of financial assistance in September, of 11.5 billion euros ($16.4 billion).

Portugal has already received about 20 billion euros ($28.4 billion) of the bailout financing, which the previous Socialist government requested in April to meet debt refinancing obligations and avoid a default.

The international lenders also insisted that Portugal’s three-year overhaul program was not under immediate threat because of the deepening concerns about the euro debt crisis and the financial difficulties of larger European economies like Italy and Spain.

“I am very confident that there will be no need for new money” for Portugal, said Poul Thomsen, who has been leading the bailout negotiations on behalf of the I.M.F.

Mr. Thomsen also argued that “even if the headwinds are stronger,” Portugal’s position had been strengthened by the agreement in July among Europe’s leaders to ease financing terms for Greece and other rescued euro economies.

“The decision of European leaders means that the ball is in Portugal’s court,” Mr. Thomsen said. “Europe will do whatever it takes as long as Portugal pursues the reforms.”

The jump in the natural gas and electricity tax comes as Portuguese households already face a recession that the government and other institutions expect to last until the end of 2012. The decision could also raise concerns that the center-right government was relying heavily on punishing tax increases rather than on spending cuts to improve its budgetary situation.

To stick to the deficit target, Pedro Passos Coelho, who was elected prime minister in June, also recently announced a one-time tax on the traditional Christmas bonus paid to Portuguese employees, to raise 800 million euros ($1.1 billion).

Still, officials representing the lenders said they expected the government to put much more emphasis on spending cuts next year as more structural changes are made. Over all, they noted, Portugal is committed to delivering about two-thirds of its budgetary improvement through spending cuts.

“Without comprehensive structural reforms, there is a clear risk that the program becomes all about cutting and not growth, which is what it should be about,” Mr. Thomsen warned.

The international lenders also praised Portugal’s efforts to strengthen its banking sector despite unhappiness among domestic bankers about having to meet by year-end core capital requirements that are above those set under international banking rules.

“The authorities are off to a good start,” said Rasmus Rüffer, an official from the European Central Bank. “It is important to continue to strengthen the capital buffers of the banks and bring about an orderly deleveraging.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/business/global/europe-likes-portugals-progress-on-financial-overhaul.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bipartisan Plan for Budget Deal Buoys President

July 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The bipartisan proposal from the so-called Gang of Six senators to reduce deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the coming decade — and its warm reception from 43 other senators of both parties — renewed hopes for a deal days after talks between Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders had reached an impasse.

Financial markets rallied on the news. And with time running out before the deadline of Aug. 2 to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, Mr. Obama’s quick embrace of the plan left House Republicans at greater risk of being politically isolated on the issue if they continue to rule out any compromise that includes higher tax revenues.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader who has led opposition to any deal including tax increases, later issued a statement saying the bipartisan Senate plan includes “some constructive ideas to deal with our debt.”

But Mr. Cantor stopped far short of endorsing it. And House Republicans passed legislation on Tuesday evening calling for deep spending cuts and the adoption of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. Though the legislation has no chance of passing the Senate, the 234-to-190 vote was a symbolic statement by conservatives heading into the end game of a confrontation whose economic and political stakes are hard to overstate.

The Senate group’s plan, modeled on the recommendations last year of a bipartisan fiscal commission established by Mr. Obama, calls for both deep spending cuts and new revenues through an overhaul of the income-tax code.

But while its sponsorship by staunch conservatives as well as liberals suggested enough flexibility within both parties to get a deal eventually, it would be all but impossible to turn it into detailed legislation — at the moment it is a four-page outline — and pass it in less than two weeks. Both parties were considering ways to use the proposal as the basis for a broader budget agreement if they can find a way to get past the immediate pressure to increase the debt limit.

Tuesday marked the return to the bipartisan Senate group of Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican of Oklahoma, two months after he abandoned the effort by two other Republicans and three Democrats to reach a deal, saying it would not cut spending enough. On Monday he had laid out his own $9 trillion debt-reduction plan, but acknowledged it could not be passed.

Mr. Coburn’s willingness to sign on to the bipartisan approach signaled that at least some conservatives, having made their principled point, might now be ready to bargain.

And Republicans increasingly are showing signs of splintering. Some conservatives within Congress and outside have become increasingly vocal in asserting that the party is at risk of putting ideological purity ahead of the chance for a major deficit reduction that includes substantial Democratic concessions, including cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending.

In appearing in the White House briefing room just hours after the Gang of Six went public with its proposal, Mr. Obama sought to use the development to increase the pressure on House Republicans even as they moved toward a vote on their bill.

The bill passed by the House would slash spending for next year, cap future spending levels and advance a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. Its passage was a rejoinder of sorts to a plan hatched by the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that would allow Republicans to accede to a $2.4 trillion increase in the government’s debt limit without actually voting for it, but also without the dollar-for-dollar spending cuts that House Republicans had demanded in return.

The House bill “isn’t the easy choice,” said Representative Rich Nugent, Republican of Florida, “but it’s the right choice.”

House Democrats excoriated the Republican plan, which they said would devastate entitlement programs though the mandatory spending cuts as a result of the cap. “Regardless of what other parts of this bill say,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, ”there is no way to meet these goals without destroying Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, veterans’ programs, and military preparedness.”

Democrats are certain to make the House Republicans’ proposal an issue in the 2012 elections, along with the House Republicans’ budget passed earlier this year that would remake Medicare and Medicaid. But most attention shifted to the Gang of Six blueprint, and the reaction to it from the White House and Congressional leaders, who were cooler to it than Mr. Obama.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

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Economic Scene: Big Business Leaves Deficit to Politicians

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

If you want to understand why cutting the deficit is so hard, you can’t do much better than to look at the Business Roundtable.

The roundtable is one of the more moderate big-business lobbying groups. Its president is John Engler, the former Michigan governor, and its incoming chairman is James McNerney, the chief executive of Boeing. When roundtable officials talk about the deficit, they use sober, common-sense language that can make them sound more reasonable than either political party.

But the roundtable is actually part of the problem.

Rhetoric aside, it consistently lobbies for a higher deficit. The roundtable defends corporate tax loopholes and even argues for new ones. It pushes for a lower corporate tax rate. It favors the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. It opposes a reduction in the tax subsidy for health insurance, a reduction that was part of the 2009 health reform bill. Oh, and the roundtable also favors new spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

It’s easy to look at the squabbling politicians in Washington and decide that they are the cause of the country’s huge looming budget deficit. Certainly, they deserve some blame. The larger problem, though, is what you might call roundtable syndrome.

In short, there isn’t much of a constituency for deficit reduction. Sure, plenty of people and special-interest groups say that they are deeply worried about the deficit. But they are not lobbying for specific spending cuts or tax increases. They aren’t marshaling their resources to defend politicians who take tough stands, like President Obama’s 2009 Medicare cuts or Rand Paul’s proposed military cuts.

Instead, many of the officially nonpartisan groups in Washington are even less fiscally responsible than the partisans. Public sector labor unions have fought changes to pensions and work rules that could lead to less expensive, more effective government. Private sector unions — along with the roundtable — have defended the huge tax subsidy for health insurance, which drives up health costs.

Labor groups have at least been willing to push for some tax increases. Today’s business groups struggle to come up with any specific deficit plan. Last year, the Business Council — a group of top corporate executives headed by Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase — and the roundtable released a 49-page plan that simultaneously warned that projected deficits would “retard future growth” and called for policies that would add hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the deficit. That’s the essence of roundtable syndrome.

When I ask roundtable officials and other lobbyists about this contradiction, they show an impressive ability to avoid specifics and stick to their talking points. Mr. Engler, by e-mail, said, “A simpler, flatter tax system can be enacted in a fiscally responsible manner that better serves American workers and supports economic growth.”

Taken by itself, this statement is entirely accurate. The corporate tax code is a mess. A better code, say both conservative and liberal economists, would be flatter — that is, have a lower rate and fewer loopholes. Companies would then waste less time complying with the code and could still help reduce the deficit.

But the roundtable is not pushing for the simpler, flatter, fiscally responsible code that Mr. Engler mentions. It’s pushing for tax cuts for its members: a lower rate, the continuation of existing loopholes and the creation of new ones, like a permanent credit for research and a tax holiday for overseas profits. Mr. Engler and his colleagues, in other words, are lobbying for a more complex, less fiscally responsible tax code.

Given how much we’re going to talk about the deficit, I’d suggest requiring any self-proclaimed fiscal conservative to give specifics. You’re against the deficit? Great. How do you want to cut it?

The fact is, naming specific ways to reduce the deficit is no more technically challenging than naming new spending programs or tax cuts. To take the current debt ceiling negotiations as a benchmark, White House officials and Congressional leaders are looking for about $200 billion a year in deficit reduction. They could get it any number of ways.

Two different bipartisan groups — the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission and the Sustainable Defense Task Force — have called for roughly $100 billion a year in cuts to the military budget. Getting rid of farm subsidies would save about $15 billion. So would cutting the federal work force by 10 percent.

Allowing the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000 a year would raise about $60 billion a year. The expiration of all the other Bush tax cuts would bring in another $200 billion or so. Various changes to Medicare and Social Security — raising the retirement age, reducing benefits for the affluent, cutting back on some forms of health care — could cut spending even more. In the long term, with projected deficits well above $1 trillion a year, such changes will surely be necessary.

By the standard of specificity, a few of the most prominent politicians in the deficit debate end up looking more serious than many outside groups. Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who heads the House Budget Committee, has called for the effective elimination of Medicare for everyone under 55 years old. Mr. Obama favors some Medicare cuts, the closing of several modest tax loopholes and tax increases on the affluent.

There are many potential objections to the Obama plan and to the Ryan plan. And neither would eliminate the deficit. But both plans would at least reduce it, which is more than you can say about corporate America’s deficit plan.

The deficit is one of those national challenges that will require tough choices and courageous leadership. Many of those choices and much of that leadership will have to come from politicians. But I’m guessing we won’t solve the deficit until the politicians get some help — and simply calling yourself a fiscal conservative doesn’t count as help.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com; twitter.com/DLeonhardt

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Some Greeks Fear Government Is Selling Nation

June 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

And then comes the mandated deeper round of austerity measures, which will slash the wages of police officers, firefighters and other state workers who are protesting in Athens, and raise the taxes of citizens already inflamed by a recession-plagued economy and soaring joblessness.

After winning a pivotal confidence vote on his new cabinet on Tuesday, Prime Minister George Papandreou now has an even tougher task: to carry out a radical remedy of forced auctions and fiscal austerity for a sickened economy already in a deep slump.

The European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, known as the “troika,” say that is the only way out for a heavily indebted Greece, while some economists say the program resembles medieval bloodletting — a dose of pain highly unlikely to revive the patient.

Mr. Papandreou’s first task is to persuade his governing Socialist Party to pass a bill that would save or raise about $40 billion by 2015, equivalent to 12 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product, through wage cuts and tax increases, at a time when the economy is shrinking.

To put that in perspective, spending cuts and tax increases of a similar scale in the United States would amount to $1.75 trillion, considerably more sweeping than even the most far-reaching proposals for reducing the American federal budget deficit. And Greece has promised to generate another $72 billion by selling off prime state assets, which many Greeks consider a fire sale of national patrimony.

While the commitment to austerity will allow Greece access to a fresh infusion of international aid, a growing chorus of economists say that the government’s new program will at best delay default and a restructuring of its debt, which is already more than 150 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Steeper budget cuts and tax increases, they say, are the enemy of economic growth, which Greece desperately needs to make its debt burden lighter.

“You cannot keep on milking the cow without feeding it,” said Konstantinos Mihalos, the president of the Hellenic Chamber of Commerce in Athens.

In fact many economists fear Greece has already entered a “debt trap,” where paying the interest on its mound of debt requires more and more loans. “The Greeks have been told to accept more of the medicine that has already failed to treat the disease,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London.

The Greeks have already reduced their deficit by five percentage points of the gross domestic product, “unprecedented cuts in a modern economy,” Mr. Tilford said. “But the cuts have had a much stronger negative impact on the economy than the troika imagined, and fiscal austerity has pushed the economy deep into recession. Debt can only be paid out of income, and that means growth.”

Greece does not have access to many tools to fight recession, like devaluing its currency or cutting interest rates, at least as long as it remains a member of the euro zone. Its monetary policy is controlled by the European Central Bank.

Some independent economists accept that Greece has no choice but to try a fresh round of cuts. Edwin M. Truman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington said Greece had to go through more pain because it had run a budget deficit even before making payments on its debt, meaning it needed loans to pay off its loans.

Only after Greece reorganizes its budget, tax collection and labor market and is running a surplus — not including interest payments on the debt — can economists begin to calculate how much in debt payments Greece is actually able to afford, and then figure out how big a debt restructuring it needs.

“As long as they’re running a primary deficit, they need to keep tightening the belt,” Mr. Truman said. “Rescheduling now doesn’t relieve Greece of the burden of fixing the economy to create a surplus.”

Rachel Donadio reported from Athens, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/europe/23greece.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Obama, to Curb Deficit, Urges Cuts and More Taxes on Rich

April 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

After spending months on the sidelines as Republicans laid out their plans, Mr. Obama jumped in to present an alternative and a philosophical rebuttal to the conservative approach that will reach the House floor on Friday. Republican leaders were working Wednesday to round up votes for that measure and one to finance the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

Mr. Obama said his proposal would cut federal budget deficits by a cumulative $4 trillion over 12 years, compared with a deficit reduction of $4.4 trillion over 10 years in the Republican plan. But the president said he would use starkly different means, rejecting the fundamental changes to Medicare and Medicaid proposed by Republicans and relying in part on tax increases on affluent Americans.

The president framed his proposal as a balanced alternative to the Republican plan, setting the stage for a debate that will consume Washington in coming weeks, as the administration faces off with Congress over raising the national debt ceiling, and into next year, as the president runs for re-election.

Mr. Obama named Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead the negotiations with Congress, which the administration hopes will produce the outlines of a deal by the end of June, though a detailed agreement might have to await the outcome of the 2012 election. Mr. Biden played a similar role in talks that averted a government shutdown at the 11th hour, over issues far less thorny than those on the table now.

In a 44-minute speech to an audience at George Washington University that included Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the author of the Republican plan, Mr. Obama was often combative and partisan, saying the Republican approach would hurt the elderly by driving up the cost of medical care, deprive millions of health insurance and starve the nation of investments in its future.

“These are the kind of cuts that tells us we can’t afford the America that I believe in,” he said. “I believe it paints a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic.”

“There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” the president continued, as Mr. Ryan sat stone faced. “There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

Yet Mr. Obama acknowledged that the rising medical costs and the mounting debt required action. And he warned Democrats that his administration would have to cut cherished programs and strictly limit the growth of Medicare and Medicaid. “If we truly believe in a progressive vision of our society,” he said, “we have the obligation to prove that we can afford our commitments.”

Mr. Obama said he would meet his $4 trillion deficit-reduction target by cutting spending across a range of government programs, from farm subsidies to federal pension insurance.

He called for cutting $400 billion more in military spending — twice what his defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, told Congress was the largest cut he could recommend.

In a sign of the tensions the plan may cause within the administration, officials at the Pentagon said Mr. Gates was not told of Mr. Obama’s proposal until Tuesday. In a statement, a Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said that “further significant defense cuts” would reduce the military’s capability. “It is important that any reduction in funding be shaped by strategy and policy choices, and not be a budget math exercise,” Mr. Morrell said.

Republicans criticized the plan, both for the cuts in military spending and for what they said was an overall lack of detail.

“Republicans, led by Chairman Ryan, have set the bar with a jobs budget that puts us on a path to paying down the debt and preserves Medicare and Medicaid for the future,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. “This afternoon, I didn’t hear a plan to match it from the president.”

Mr. Boehner repeated a threat to refuse to raise the $14.3 trillion ceiling on the national debt, which the government is likely to breach in early July, unless the administration agrees to rein in spending and deficits. The administration has sought to keep the debt ceiling issue separate from the broader budget debate, and Mr. Obama addressed it only indirectly on Wednesday.

“If our creditors start worrying that we may be unable to pay back our debts,” Mr. Obama said, “that could drive up interest rates for everyone.”

Still, in what some analysts said was a gesture to Republicans, Mr. Obama said his plan would contain a trigger to require across-the-board spending cuts if, by 2014, the federal debt was still projected to be rising as a percentage of the total economy.

The trigger would apply not only to spending but also to what the administration calls “tax expenditures” — essentially payments to taxpayers for deductions for charitable donations or home mortgages.

The use of the phrase “tax expenditures” allows the administration to lump tax-related issues into the spending category. Mr. Obama was more direct in his call for allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for higher-income Americans to expire in 2012.

The president agreed to extend the cuts last December, as part of a budget deal with the newly elected Republican majority in the House. Now, with the economy getting back on its feet, Mr. Obama attacked the demand by Republicans to make the lower tax rates permanent as emblematic of their plan to enrich the wealthy on the backs of the elderly and poor.

“They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 30 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I am president,” Mr. Obama said, his only line that drew applause.

While Mr. Obama’s plan does not detail specific cuts, analysts said it offered enough detail to set off a substantive debate with Republicans. Some said the proposal for capping the annual cost increase in Medicare and Medicaid to just above the economic growth rate was surprisingly conservative. Others said they were pleased that Mr. Obama had called for overhauling Social Security, even if he was vague and said it was not a leading culprit for the deficit.

“It looks like Ryan smoked him out, so to speak,” said Rudolph G. Penner, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Mr. Penner said Mr. Obama’s plan hewed closely to the recommendations of his commission on deficit reduction. Mr. Obama did not explicitly endorse those recommendations when the commission submitted its report in December — a decision that fueled criticism from Republicans and some Democrats that he was not facing up to the tough choices in the budget debate.

The co-chairmen of that commission — Erskine B. Bowles, who was a chief of a staff to President Bill Clinton, and former Senator Alan K. Simpson — were in the audience Wednesday, along with Mr. Biden. At one point, Mr. Biden appeared to nod off, closing his eyes for 30 seconds.

Jackie Calmes, John Harwood and Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

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