My wife is wondering what she'll look like and I'm wondering if she speaks English.
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.
Gee, that sounds like the Swedes are living in Le Pen country...
My wife is wondering what she'll look like and I'm wondering if she speaks English.
You're just too brilliant for us mouth breathers.
I will give you an example out of my life. I was going to buy a condo and rent it as an apartment. After my accountant ran the figures, I WOULD make a profit. However, after taxes it would amount to 100 bucks a week.
Now, I could deliver Pizza two nights a week and make 200-300 Dollars TAX FREE! Of course, I am a bit too old but doesnt that tell you something?
What is the point of me investing capital on that scale and risk to get less then a PIZZA BOY!
Of course, I am looking at other states with less restrictive codes. So, my home state loses out on ANY revenue from my ventures.
I am familiar with the LAffer Curve and basic economic theory but the things I am describing are NOT thoery, but reality.
BTW, I am not trying to be antagonistic, I just come across that way. :D
Besides that, if the Swedes have their "quality of life" enhancing qualities such as low crime and longer vacations, the U.S. must have it's own, such as climate, geography, and social mobility which probably counter balance many of the advantages the Swedes have.
You're assumptions are based on the mythical man month.
If it takes a woman 9 months to produce a child, 2 women can give birth in 4 and a half months?
People provide skills to a team that are either valuable to the team, or they are not. If the person doesn't find a way to add value, the team can and should lower his compensation. Ignoring someone’s value to a team and affixing their compensation to irrelevant external parameters makes the team less productive and less competitive.
Just the other day one of my Swedish colleagues was lamenting the fact that the murder rate in Stockholm is no different than the US (worse than current US statistics actually, or so I was told). The overall stats for the country are lower, but approaching US levels pretty quickly. He says the level of youth violence is barely under control there, due in no small part to the pervasively pessimistic outlook on life in the younger generations.
It has Sweden's murder rate at 10 per 100,000 and theft rate at 7,865 per 100,000. Swedish rates
It has our murder rate at 7 per 100,000 and our theft rate at 1,145 per 100,000. US rates
We do, according to D-K, have a higher rape rate.
I don't think he meant that these guys were Swedish, just that the Swedes and Norwegians keep electing jerks like Mondale, Dashole, Wellstone, etc., etc., etc . . . . .
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