Fascinating & important stat from Merkel:
Eurozone - Echoes of the crisis
Monday 17 December 2012
Europe will have to “work hard” to keep its welfare system, says Merkel: Europeans will have to “work very hard” to keep their welfare system and remain competitive internationally, said Chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview in The Financial Times, published on 17 December. “If Europe today accounts for just over 7% of the world’s population, produces around 25% of global GDP and has to finance 50% of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life,” said Merkel. “I am concerned to see that many in Europe simply think that Europe and the United States are the only references for the world, that Europe is traditionally strong and that the world is waiting for us,” she added.
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Similar conclusions on the unsustainability of the welfare from Janet Daley & Peter Hitchens.
P Hitchens here:
"Britain cannot possibly afford its welfare state for much longer. Most people do not realise that state handouts (£207 billion a year) mop up every penny we pay in income tax (£155 billion a year).
Everything else, the NHS, schools, transport, police, defence, interest on the debt (nearly £50 billion a year, by the way) must be paid for by other taxes, including the vast sums raked in by so-called ‘National Insurance’, or by more borrowing.
As we are more or less bankrupt as a country, such generosity is not noble but plain idiotic. Yet we will not stop doing it. Change is politically impossible."
And J Daley here:
'Members of the Cabinet are now falling over one another to warn that present entitlements and universal benefits must be regarded as a thing of the past: that it is not only the workless dependency culture that needs to be dismantled, but also the system of automatic payments, which has expanded to encompass the entire population regardless of need."
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