Posted on 06/19/2004 9:13:29 PM PDT by quidnunc
The growing split between the U.S. and Europe has been much in the news, mostly on foreign policy. But less well understood is the gap in economic growth and standards of living. Now comes a European report that puts the American advantage in surprisingly stark relief.
The study, "The EU vs. USA," was done by a pair of economists--Fredrik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag--for the Swedish think tank Timbro. It found that if Europe were part of the U.S., only tiny Luxembourg could rival the richest of the 50 American states in gross domestic product per capita. Most European countries would rank below the U.S. average, as the chart below shows.
The authors admit that man doesn't live by GDP alone, and that this measure misses output in the "black" economy, which is significant in Europe's high-tax states. GDP also overlooks "the value of leisure or a good environment" or the way prosperity is spread across a society.
But a rising tide still lifts all boats, and U.S. GDP per capita was a whopping 32% higher than the EU average in 2000, and the gap hasn't closed since. It is so wide that if the U.S. economy had frozen in place at 2000 levels while Europe grew, the Continent would still require years to catch up. Ireland, which has lower tax burdens and fewer regulations than the rest of the EU, would be the first but only by 2005. Switzerland, not a member of the EU, and Britain would get there by 2010. But Germany and Spain would need until 2015, while Italy, Sweden and Portugal would have to wait until 2022.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Yeah, I was in Germany in Dec., and I could still smell all those coal fired power plants. Not to mention the fact that the Rhine is a chemical sewer.
Paris' smog rivals the worst in the US.
In the meantime, sturgeon are running again in the Hudson, and the amount of forested land in the Eastern US is reaching levels not seen since before the first Europeans arrived.
I'll concede they have us beat on vacations.
"According to a recent study, however, the cat is out of the bag. Relative to household in the United States, Swedish family income is considerably less. In fact, the study concludes, average income in Sweden is less than average income for black Americans, which comprise the lowest-income socioeconomic group in this country. The research came from the Swedish Institute of Trade, which, according to Reuters, "compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999." The study used "fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data," and found that "the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800, compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households." Furthermore, the study points out that Swedish productivity has fallen rapidly relative to per capital productivity in the USA."
This news is hardly suprising....I'd imagine the left are having a cow over this...given that Europe is so superior to us unintelligent, rude, arrogant americans.
I would suggest that NOBODY click on that damned link!
It locked up my computer THREE TIMES (I couldn't believe the WSJ was doing it!) It was attempting to place a java based cookie (??) on my computer.
I finally saw part of it -- it ws an ADVERTISEMENT trying to sell a pop-up blocker supplied by the WallStreetJournal!
damned pigs at the WSJ!!
The USA - home of the richest "poor people" in the world! Yeah they are soooo down-trodden that they only richer than 95% of the rest of the world!
Arkansas could run ads saying "Come to Arkansas for a vacation that's like living in Europe."
There might have been a time...back in the 1970s or 1980s that Europe would have been ahead of the US. But having lived here in Germany for 10 years...one can see a country on the downside of the scale. The tax burden on every citizen...from an income tax and a VAT tax (16 percent), with $4 a gallon gas tax, a $250 tv tax, etc...has enveloped the whole society. They can't make budget cuts because each agency crys to the public about how they will suffer...so they keep inventing new revenue schemes or taxes. The two newest ones...an interstate highway tax on all truckers (which they simply pass onto consumers and the money doesn't even support the interstate system), and a $2 tax on liquor ice cream pops (to halt those teenagers who get drunk on ice cream...but they buy it anyway).
They all brag about the poor US educational sector, and yet the US is now rated above Germany in most tests. They talk about the environmental controls...yet the US established alot of environmental standards back in the 1960s, way ahead of Europe.
What browser are you using? It's possible that the page is using a recent java extension you don't have installed. Don't wig out.
I saw a guy on Dennis Miller the other night who said (without citing the source), that America has been the richest nation (per capita) since 1740, and hasn't looked back. There's a lot to be said for liberty and capitalism...
God help us!! Just think about that a minute. Worse than a terrorist attack :)
No BS, I know a person who is a tradesman and part-time pig farmer. He just got back from visiting his Peace Corp. daughter in the former Soviet Georgia, He also had a one day layover in Paris. This was his first trip out of the US. The two things that struck him the most was the poverty in Georgia and the filth and stink in Paris. Imagine that, a part-time pig farmer thinks Paris stinks.
unfortunately IE6 latest with xp-pro
but I do have excellent security against BAD CODE! especially these new pop-ups that can inject browser-hijackers onto your computer.
Maybe when they start to hang these virus writers - especially the ones in wall street - we'll be able to browse peacefully again.
Not really. The problem is the nature of IE. Internet Explorer is a shell. It is a program that runs programs, just as Windows is a program that runs programs. The reason MS integrated the web browser into Windows was because they wanted to try and stay in front of the Web. They rightly see it as a potential (even likely) replacement for their OS (as bandwidth gets better and more and more is handled on the server side and delivered to end users in HTML that any browser can read on any computer).
The consequence of this is that Explorer is 'powerful' in the sense it has high level access to your computers resources, and there is no end to the ingenuity of hackers. They will forever find holes in IE's security.
I highly suggest you check into using a different web browser. There's no better defense than not being a target, not to mention browsers like Opera and Firefox simply can't perform the functions hackers can get IE to on your computer. I've seen nasty hacks executed against IE, patched up to date as of two weeks ago. One of my users at work apparently clicked on a bad link, that took her to a page that not only reset her homepage, but it set it to a page that had code that would open a command prompt, established an FTP connection, and began downloading trojans to her machine (I watched this happen). Fortunately the virus scanner picked them up in memory, and wouldn't allow them to execute, but I still had to remove her profile to 'undo' the hacks.
I pity the average Joe out there using IE, and recommend, just to remove hassles, that no one use it UNLESS the webpage they are accessing is trusted, and uses extensions that another browser can't handle.
Ha HA Ha Ha....jealousy by the Europeans has stunk up the place for years and years...It is what they get for being a socialists dreamland...high taxes, no work ethic,little desire to succeed, and generally a stupidly reflex view of history and the world. And the left in the US wants us to be more like Europe? No thanks
And you actually think any of the lamestream media will so much as whisper this news?
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