The Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell devoted a column to a popular Washington pastime: trying to get young people angry at their parents and grandparents so that they are not bothered by the enormous upward redistribution of income taking place in this country.
There is no guarantee that Greece will be as successful with a return to the drachma, but there are reasons for optimism. First and foremost, the country now has both a primary budget surplus and a trade surplus. The primary budget refers to the national budget without counting interest payments. Greece is running a primary budget surplus of more than 3 percent of GDP (the equivalent of $500 billion a year in U.S. GDP). This means that if it didn’t have to pay interest on its debt, it would not need to borrow to make ends meet.
