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.
Of course, that's Corporate. Perhaps those Silicon Valley types don't understand the diff between Corp's and individuals?
Don't bet on it.
I don't know who you are other than a very full of himself jerk, but nobody is making you screw your secretary over now, are they? I guess it just comes natural to you...you sound like a lawyer.
This sounds like an issue you should take up with the union, not the fund. The union is paying the fund manager to vote your shares. Your unhappiness with the action of the fund manager are a direct consequence of the dictates of your union, one way or another.
My second favorite slogan is : F... Europe.
Marxists like to ignore a fact: Production creates wealth.
I don't know much about Sweden --in fact I thought it was a country with a good enough standard of living ---but it seems fertility rate doesn't correlate one way or another with the poverty rate. In Mexico, the fertility rate is very high and yet there is much poverty, in Sweden it's apparently low and still there's poverty. Standard of living must be the result of government policies. Less socialism and less government leads to a higher standard of living.
We aren't "slipping" anywhere. The question addressed was whether "redistributionism" was "socialism" or not. That's not a mathematical determination -- not a production efficiency determination. Socialism is when society determines how an individual's productive output is utilized. Individual capitalism is when the individual himself decides how to utilize the rewards of his production.
Superior? Probably not. Harder working? Probably, but define "Harder working". Do I dig ditches in 100 degree weather here in Houston? No, but I do work 7 days a week and am on call 24 hours a day if a client needs me.
I know of jobs that one cannot really excel in though one can fail quite easily. I have to assign them to people. I often drive by people doing jobs that make me cringe. Men repairing roofs standing on a ledge 50 feet above the pavement and its not a beautiful day. Every cop I see has a tougher job than I. How about those guys flying jets off of carriers fighting our war or the kids that service and launch them.
If I was working at a job I felt I could not excel at, I probably would find another job.
I know a Mexican gentleman, (he calls himself Mexican, not Hispanic. Says he's from Mexico, not Hispanio.) He and his wife came to this country legally about 15 years ago with nothing. Didn't speak a work of English. Started working as a roofer's helper. Now he has his own company with 75 employees. And he still works on the roofs with them.
I know others who started out with a beatup pickup and an old lawnmover, and now have successful landscaping businesses.
You wanna measure your worth by money go ahead, but in the end you, if you are at all intelligent, will realize money does not a man make.
Never said I measured my worth by money. We were talking about people being laid off, and I gave an example of turning the layoff into something better.
BTW, since you ask, I measure my worth by the fact that I've been married to my beautiful wife for almost 35 years, we have 2 great kids, and a great 8 yr. old granddaughter. I have a job that lets me spend 3 days a month back in Alabama looking in on my 83 year old mother.
I measure my worth by the fact that when my father-in-law died 9 years, we were able to move my mother-in-law up from FL so she wouldn't have to live alone.
I still believe that a person in this country who wants to work hard can build a successful life for himself and his family
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