Laudato Si
as seen in Britain:
‘The real lesson from Europe,” wrote Paul Krugman in January 2010, “is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.” Here are some postcards from the social democracy that works.
• In Britain, 239 patients died of malnutrition in the country’s public hospitals in 2007, according to a charity called Age U.K. And at any given time, a quarter-million Britons have been made to wait 18 weeks or longer for medical treatment. This follows a decade in which funding for the National Health Service doubled.
• In France, the incidence of violent crimes rose by nearly 15% between 2002 and 2008, according to statistics provided by Eurostat. In Italy violent crime was up 38%. In the EU as a whole, the rate rose by 6% despite declines in robbery and murder.
• As of June 2011, Eurostat reports that the unemployment rate in the euro zone was 9.9%. For the under-25s, it was 20.3%. In Spain, youth unemployment stands at 45.7%, which tops even the Greek rate of 38.5%. Then there’s this remarkable detail: Among Europeans aged 18-34, no fewer than 46%—51 million people in all—live with their parents.
• In 2009, 37.4% of European children were born outside of marriage. That’s more than twice the 1990 rate of 17.4%. The number of children per woman for the EU is 1.56, catastrophically below the replacement rate of 2.1. Roughly half of all Europeans belong in the “dependency” category on account of their youth or old age. Just 64% of the working-age population actually works.
I could go on in this vein for pages, but you get the point. Europe is not a happy place and hasn’t been for nearly a generation. It’s about to get much worse.
– WSJ
Oh, you thought the economic problems were almost over, like the government and media have been saying for over a year? I promise you, this is just the beginning…