Shovel ready?

Hey look where we're headed. Euro-Regional ministers agreed to bail out the Greeks with a 110 billion Euro package. That's about 146 billion in real US money. 146 Billion - YGBSM. That's no stimulus. When Scrawny and Grand Nan sneeze we spend (i.e. waste) twice that much.

Are there no shovel ready projects in Greece? When we visited Athens, every tourist site we saw was in desperate need of repair. Why just repairing the Acropolis alone could employ 1,000s for decades. Ms. Lex tells me, "It's supposed to be that way."

Look when someone or something knocks down our buildings, with the exception of the World Trade Center and other places like New Orleans that are run by by Liberals, we get busy cleaning up the mess and putting something back up in their place. Galveston, San Francisco, Chicago were devastated by natural and man made disasters. We cleaned up the mess and rebuilt. Those Greeks have had fallen columns and dilapidated buildings laying around in disrepair for centuries.

OK,OK,OK I'm just kidding about repairing the Acropolis. Frankly, I think it's just too far gone. They have put off the necessary repairs for so long now, they'll probably need to tear it down and just start over. But, from what I saw, every citizen in Athens could be given a broom and ten hours of work a day for about a month. In America, we could cut the national unemployment rate to .005% cleaning up the dump known as Philadelphia.

But anyhoo, the Greeks are getting bailed out. In return the for the dough, the Greeks have promised to make "savage" cuts in the public sector pension funds. Under the current system, Greeks get 80% of their pay for 14 months a year. Huh? There are 12 months in a year. Yeahbut, the Greeks get 14 - 80% payments. So the Greeks decided that their public sector pensioners would join the rest of world and admit that in fact there are only 12 months in a year. As a public sector pensioner myself, I can tell you that is "savage."

What's next, admitting that there are only 24 hours in a day? If you do that, how do you manage to get 28 hours of quadruple overtime on Sundays? Where does it stop if you start down that slippery slope? Next thing you know they will be requiring time sheets and making you fill out expense reports. Like showing your ID to the police in AZ when you get pulled over for going 50 mph in a school zone, while intoxicated, with a car load of 57 "workers," these Gestapo like policies have to stop.

The good news for us is that we might be smart enough to see what happens when government unions aided by a spend thrift government run a country into the ground. This episode should also run a dagger deep into the heart of any ideas about a "one world currency" or even the the thought of an "Amero." Then again, common sense has never been the strong suit of anyone in Washington D.C.

The extremely bad news for us is that we won't have Germany to pay our bills. We will have to rely on the Communist Red Chinese. But what could go wrong with that set up?