[PassedOut]

kenberg, on Jan 11 2010, 06:31 PM, said:

If you go to the article Y66 cites and then follow on to the comments, you get quite a variety.

Seemed to me that there was quite a difference in the comments from people living in the US compared with those from people who had lived in both the US and Europe.

I strongly recommend that folks from the US travel extensively in Europe, socializing with Europeans and taking the time to see how life really is there. And ask about health care.

[P_Marlowe]

hotShot, on Nov 3 2009, 02:47 PM, said:

To understand Angela Merkel you need to understand her background.

Quote

.... she studied physics from 1973 to 1978.
....
Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990.
....
After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry she worked as a researcher.

Research in the GDR meant that you did not have access to foreign high-tech and that you usually could not get required replacement parts.
So among the researchers there was a big number of "MacGyver" like experts who could improvise a solution for almost anything.

So basically she is not (very) ideological but pragmatic.
Expect her to evaluate solutions in categories "working" and "not working", rather then "left" or "right".
If she can't convince others to go all the way at once, she will make any small step that can be made, hoping/expecting that time will prove she's on the right track. Letting the facts convince the others later.

Yes, I think this is a very good description.

Merkel did study science, which means her analytic skills are well trained,
and being pragmatic is a feature, one sees a lot, if one compares "East"
Germans with "West" Germans, there are other examples.

With kind regards
Marlowe (..., was born and raised in "East" German, but would never vote
for Merkels party, but thinks she does a reasonable job.)

[P_Marlowe]

jkljkl, on Nov 3 2009, 12:37 PM, said:

<snip>
Hello,

imo Appelbaum's article is acceptable even if it suffers a little bit due of the fact that it is quite short.

Even if I would never vote for her party I am happy to see how the positions of the CDU (her party) changed under her leadership and consider her a plus for germany (a country that has still a lot to do about gender mainstreaming).

I will not bore you with an analysis of the outcomes of the elections, it may suffice to say that germany has become a state with a 5 parties (from former 2) so the winning of Merkel was that CDU went from 13.136.740 votes 2005 to 11.828.277 2009 while the socialist SPD went fom 16.194.665 to 9.990.488. (The CDU does not get votes in Bavaria they go to the sister party CSU)

<snip>
ciao stefan
germany

The numbers comparing the votes the CDU got and the votes the SPD got
need some explanations.

The "lost" SPD votes did not go to the CDU, but to (newly) party, the "Left",
which origins from the former SED (the governing party in the GDR).
This characterisation of the "Left" needs to be taken with a lot of "salt".

Nevertheless the SPD did split in two parties, this happened due to some
necessary reforms, which the SPD triggered, as the SPD was governing.
Those reforms were needed, but seen as unsocial, and the SPD was the
leading "social" party.

The SPD (together with the FDP) did have a similar split around 1980, the
year it was decide to install nuclear weapons in (West) Germany, the SPD
was the governing party.

And another point is, that although the CDU did win lots of direct mandates,
we have a mix direct mandates like in Britain and proportional mandates,
this is misleading, lots of won seats, were won with just 30-35% of the votes,
because the three "left" parties were not able to align them self.
=> This led to add. seats for the CDU, since they won more direct seats then
seats according to proportions.

If you look at the numbers, than you have
CDU 34%
FDP 15%
......................
SPD 23%
Left 12% (6-7% of those 12% are due to the SPD split)
Green (11% - the Green party was created 1980, see above )

So if you add the above numbers up, you have 34% for CDU and 30-31% for
the SPD, and 49% "conservative" parties vs 46% "left" parties.
I did some rounding.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[helene_t]

kenberg, on Jan 12 2010, 12:31 AM, said:

If you go to the article Y66 cites and then follow on to the comments, you get quite a variety.

My two pence:

The conclusion is not implausible but saying that generous (relative to US) social benefits are not bad for the economy because Western Europe has a reasonably well-performing economy is quite a leap.

Europe and US both have a few obvious advantages and obvious disadvantages. And some debatable ones as well, one of them being the "welfare state" and the way the health systems are financed.

Maybe it is safe to say that those factors roughly cancel out. Probably many would say that regardless of what GDP and other key statistics say, they would much prefer to live on one continent over the other. In either case it is not, IMHO, safe to say much about the role of particular factors. From the GDP statistics alone, I mean. Of course one could have good reasons for preferring one health/welfare system over the other.

[P_Marlowe]

helene_t, on Jan 12 2010, 08:09 AM, said:

kenberg, on Jan 12 2010, 12:31 AM, said:

If you go to the article Y66 cites and then follow on to the comments, you get quite a variety.

My two pence:

The conclusion is not implausible but saying that generous (relative to US) social benefits are not bad for the economy because Western Europe has a reasonably well-performing economy is quite a leap.

Europe and US both have a few obvious advantages and obvious disadvantages. And some debatable ones as well, one of them being the "welfare state" and the way the health systems are financed.

Maybe it is safe to say that those factors roughly cancel out. Probably many would say that regardless of what GDP and other key statistics say, they would much prefer to live on one continent over the other. In either case it is not, IMHO, safe to say much about the role of particular factors. From the GDP statistics alone, I mean. Of course one could have good reasons for preferring one health/welfare system over the other.

I agree, but ...

I heard a story, that a factory got build in Canada instead of the US,
although the expected Tax rate in Canada was higher than in the US.

The reason is simple: Companies pay a lot for health care benefits,
those costs usually get ignored, when one does compare Europe with the
US.

In Europe you basically have explicit Taxes for health card on everyone,
in the US you have hidden taxes for health care. (Over Simplification).
GM went bancrupt not only because the made terrible cars, they had also
problems because the huge amount to finance health care was a big burden,
which wad destinate to kill GM.

As always: Know how a specific statistics got compiled, than you understand
how to compare two different statistics.

[y66]

Where is Canada's "Silicon Valley" and how's it doing relative to California's Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 Corridor? If David Leonhardt is right, it should be growing somewhat faster than it's southerly competitors.

Quote

December 16, 2009
ECONOMIC SCENE
If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Greg Woock is the chief executive of Pinger, a fast-growing Silicon Valley company that makes iPhone applications. So Mr. Woock spends a fair amount of time interviewing job applicants. In almost every interview, he told me recently, the applicant asks about Pinger’s health insurance plan.

Now think about that for a minute.

In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says. Health insurance, Mr. Roeding adds, “is distorting the decision-making.”

It is impossible to know how much economic damage these distortions are causing, but they clearly aren’t good. Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses.

This link between insurance and innovation isn’t relevant merely for the obvious reason that Congress is in the late stages of debating health reform. It is also relevant because the United States is suffering from an innovation deficit.

Rest of story