GRECIAN EARN – AT 7:48 P.M. ET:  Ah, to be unmarried in Greece.  Well, assuming you meet certain conditions.  Reader Joseph J. Gallick alerts us to a glimpse into the workings of a nanny state on the brink of financial collapse:

Sophia Constantinidou works as a teacher in a private school in Athens. She also has a more lucrative job: remaining unmarried.

The 52-year-old gets 400 euros ($496) a month from the Greek government, part of her late mother’s state pension. Under the current system, Constantinidou qualifies to receive the payment for life as the only surviving child of a deceased civil servant, provided she doesn’t tie the knot.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to get married,” Constantinidou, whose mother died 20 years ago, said in an interview. “But after I turned 40, I realized I wouldn’t be getting married and that thankfully I had this.”

As the European Union, International Monetary Fund and bond investors scrutinize debt-ridden Greece, they need look no further than the pension system for a prime example of how the country is living beyond its means. Greek pensioners on average live on 96 percent of the salary they had when they worked, more than twice the proportion of earnings as Germans, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Greece “is a classic case of entitlements granted by short-sighted governments that didn’t bother to secure financing sources,” said Miranda Xafa, a former director at the IMF and now a senior investment strategist at Geneva-based IJPartners. “The political benefit of pension entitlements granted is immediate, but the cost will be incurred later.”

COMMENT:  The Greek government is now working on "reforms" that will presumably make the system more sane.  But European "reforms" are often greeted by riots in the streets and the destruction of an impressive number of vehicles by members of the agitated and oppressed proletariat.  So let's see how far these reforms will actually go.  Maybe BP or the Obama administration can give advice on how to run things.

June 19, 2010