Saturday, July 14, 2007

France....Always France

From DW-World:

The 13 EU members of the euro zone agreed in April to balance their account books by 2010. Though Sarkozy voiced his commitment towards that goal in Brussels, he also stressed it could only be achieved if France's economic growth was higher than it has been so far.

In other words, he gave himself the go-ahead to violate the EU's budgetary rules that lay down that the budget deficits of member states should not exceed 3 percent of GDP.


Does anyone but me wonder why "grow really fast" and "have huge domestic fiscal deficit" are synonyms in the minds of politicians?

ATSRTWT

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One possible way around this time horizon problem - punish politicians out of office for creating these messes. If we can throw CEO's in jail for things after the fact (but not after a statute of limitations) why not apply the same to politicians. "Growing" the economy through deficits with long-term consequences would be punishable by time in jail, or maybe time living in Indiana.