[pauldenton]

Originally Posted by UNDERBYTE

Interesting economic breakdown on the EU vs US. - The US Poor are not the same as the EU poor and like I said our poor are on par with the EU middle class

http://www.timbro.com/euvsusa/pdf/EU_vs_USA_English.pdf

All of the EU faces the same economic problem as france -

hmm - a quick skim suggests that at least some of his stats are definitely wrong! (for example on page 16 he claims that only 3 percent of UK households have a car! - according to the 2001 census this should be 73% or so, which is considerably more than the US figure of 57%...)
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2...es/housing.asp

he seems to include Switzerland, but not the 2 other EFTA countries Norway and Iceland (both richer than switzerland, and in the case of Norway richer than the USA also...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...PP)_per_capita

i'm dubious about his comparision of 2000 (US) and 2005 (elsewhere) GDPs when they are at PPP - in 2000 a $ was worth more than 1 Euro, whereas now it is under 0.86 - so the ppp adjustment figure will be wrong.....