Wesley Stevenson
speaker
1,470 appearances
54 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard May 2015
Wesley Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, let's not tar everyone with the same brush.
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Of course, some Greeks pay tax.
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In fact, most do.
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But income tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are only 4.7%, which is the lowest in the Eurozone.
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No, this is because for some people, what they actually earn and what they put on their tax forms are often quite different figures.
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As Horst Reichenbach, who's head of the EU task force offering technical help to the Greek government, said late last year, the amount of unpaid tax was estimated to be in the order of 60 billion euros or 80 billion US dollars.
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Which is about 2.6 billion dollars.
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Now I really like this one because initially when I looked at this I found an even more staggering figure that suggested there were actually 629,000 of these cars.
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Yeah, and also not true, not even slightly true.
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And rumours of these figures have been swirling in the Italian press for a while, which prompted a review by the country's Ministry of Public Administration.
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Now, this found there were only 72,000 vehicles operated by central, regional and local governments.
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Yes, but if you look at the detail, you'll see that the majority of these are service vehicles.
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So they're used for things like maintenance and deliveries and for staff to get around.
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So when you strip these out, you're left with 5,000 chauffeur-driven cars for the exclusive use of politicians and executives and 10,000 other cars with chauffeurs.
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Yes, but to be fair, they were only repeating what the Minister of Public Administration in Italy was saying when this article was originally written.
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There have been some criticisms of this figure, though, because some economists have suggested that the reason it's so high is because there's a big shadow economy in Spain.
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Yeah, that's right.
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But which came first, the shadow economy or the unemployment?
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I put this to Friedrich Schneider, a professor from the University of Linz in Austria and a leading expert on shadow economies.
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Yeah, even cooler than an undercover economist.
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Showing 1201–1220 of 1,470 · page 61 of 74
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