In Europe, unlike the US, people are not sacrificed for the sake of higher profit margins and soaring shareholder value. Europe, Americans are told, suffers from excessively high wages, tight regulations, powerful trade unions, high taxes, lavish welfare payments, and long vacations. Few commentators bother to explain what they mean by this. American workers would be surprised to learn how much their counterparts in Europe earn. Rates of economic growth in Europe and the US are about the same.
Labour productivity is about the same.
It is an extraordinary fact that in 1999 42.6 million people had no health insurance in the United States. No advanced economy has an income distribution as unequal as that of the United States. Nowhere else is there a poverty rate as high as 12 per cent. German CEOs make only 13 times the average manufacturing wage. To be sure, the US boasts a low unemployment rate - 4.2 per cent.