Don't believe the hype!

Barroso and many fellow politicians (Bolkestein, Blair, McCreevy, Verheugen, Kroes, Van Rompuy, Daems, Berlusconi , Balkenende, the list goes on & on) want the European labor market to take their cue from the U.S. because it's much more dynamic and flexible. After all, the official unemployment rate in the euro area is 8.8% , compared to only 5.5% in the U.S .However, the official figures are painting a rosier picture than the actual job market situation:

• the number of Americans without a job for more than 6 months has more than doubled over the past 3 yrs to 1.6mln
  
• the share of unemployed without work for more than 6 months has stayed above 20% for the past 18 months.
  
• The U.S. manufacturing sector has lost 2.8mln jobs over the last year
  
• Since spring 2003 the average duration of unemployment is 19 weeks, the longest since 1948!!
  
• 5.5% is the official unemployment rate but over 12% of Americans live below the poverty line; many people need to take up 2 or even 3 jobs to keep their heads above water, they are called the 'working poor'.
  

Economic liberals rightly claim that it is not fair if people are on welfare and they don't have to work because they live off the fruits of labor of all the others. But what about all those people who do work in the U.S. and who are still poor? Isn't that even less fair??

The article below by George Monbiot illustrates that the wellfare state canbe effective, as the example of Sweden shows.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/01/11/punitive-and-it-works/