Posted on 05/04/2002 3:41:42 PM PDT by l33t
STOCKHOLM - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically-deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed yesterday.
The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the center-right opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy, following decades of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.
The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had 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.
Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, 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, HUI's study showed.
"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's president, Fredrik Bergstrom, and chief economist, Robert Gidehag, said.
International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden, while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.
"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest, measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households, while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.
This means that Swedes stood "below groups, which, in the Swedish debate, are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over 6 percent, while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet, but the trend is clear."
According to HUI figures, during the period 1998-1999, U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden, while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.
The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services that are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.
According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the center-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.
I am not adverse to facing reality but extending a little help is not an inhuman thing to do. Darwinian rules are very unforgiving, it is unlikely you would be the only to survive.
I have been laid off 3 times in the my life. The first two times I found a better job within 2 months.
After the 3rd time I started my own business, and now make much more than I ever have working for anyone else.
I care for my Grandmother and I was just putting her to bed and explaining the topic we have here.I tried telling her (Torie) that people that work a 35 hour week are more productive. She is obviously old-school but reality dictates that if I do the same job as someone else but work more hours, I GET MORE MONEY!
I only have seven employees so I cant comment on large scale economic factors. I can tell you what I do and what happens to us. The problem with your analysis is you think that the bigger an enterprise is, the more those paradigms apply.
That is untrue, huge corporations can HIDE unproductive workers and use more productive ones to fill the workload but the human instinct is still the same. Large entities tend to attract abstract analysis but they are still motivated by the same things that anyone else is motivated by.
I will put it to you this way, I pay workers who work 50 hours a week a HELL of a lot more then those that work 20. I a familiar with the "Dismal Science," but I prefer to speak of my own experience rather then economic models because that is REALITY.
The Laffer curve is not a fraud. It may be a tautology, a truism, or self-evident, but it isn't a fraud. The question merely is at what tax rate produces maximum revenue to the government over a period of time. The curve exists, and depending where the maximum is, tax cuts might result in increased revenue.
Two additional points:
(1) the rate that produces maximum government income probably is not universal, but changes for a given society based on a variety of social factors.
(2) You're wrong to focus purely on a person's marginal incentive to work. High taxes distort the economy and reduce growth in other ways--primarily be diverting investment from the most productive use to other uses that are tax favored or to consumption. Therefore, a reduced tax rate may not affect hours worked but still increase government revenue due to greater economic growth than otherwise would have occurred.
Yet, I HAVE a voice in relation to the shares I purchased.
That's because you own shares of the fund and not the companies owned by the fund. You do get to vote on fund management, auditing, etc.
You pay the fund manager to exercise his expertise in your best interest, including voting the shares owned by the fund in the way the manager thinks is in the best interest of the fund. The manager shouldn't give a damn about how you would vote the shares if you owned them directly.
Well, some of US do.
Doesn't it strike you as just a bit odd that parents would take their baby to a restaurant and leave the child on a sidewalk, outside, while they munch salmon, brie, and rye bread?
Either leave the kid with old (enough) siblings, or with a responsible sitter AT HOME, or take your baby INTO the restaurant with you.
Crime or no crime, the sidewalk is NOT a place for infants and toddlers alone.
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