Me and the Dingbats

 

I regularly go to the Huffington Post and comment on various articles. A conservative is guaranteed an exchange of comments there whereas, if you comment on a more conservative site, you may get one or two “True dats”.  Much more engaging to joust with the other side.  It usually results in me being called “uncaring” and other names.

Yesterday, there was a post there about AT&T taking a $1,000,000,000.00 charge to pay for Obamacare and as you would expect, HuffPo readers just think that is awful of that big, evil company to do that and to warn that some cuts in benefits or people would have to happen in order to adjust to this new reality.  (I covered this below.)  I went there and pointed out to them a point that I have made there before:  It’s fine to aspire to European-style healthcare, but they need to be prepared to live with a European-style economy; permanently higher unemployment, social stratification, etc.  My comments begin here.

So I found this nifty little website that nicely summarizes various statistics for any country that publishes stats, www.indexmundi.com .  Here is how the US unemployment rate compares to France, Italy, Canada and that paragon of Liberal pining, Sweden.  I’m using 2007 as my comparison because my argument is based on historic rates of unemployment, not current and because that was the last full year before the global meltdown began.  You know, back in the good ol’ days.

2007 Unemployment Rates, the evil US vs. Socialist Nirvana

US=4.8%.

Sweden=5.6%, 14.3% higher than the US.

Canada=6.4%, 25% higher than the US.

Italy=7%, 31.4% higher than the US.

France=8.7%, 44.8% higher than the US.

The US’s current rate is about 9.7%, my home state of North Carolina is over 11%.  Prior to the meltdown, NC hovered around 4-5%, but the losses in the finance business have really hurt us, particularly Charlotte, our biggest city.  My guess is that if this ever straightens out, the nationwide number will settle somewhere around 6-8% on a permanent basis.  We will become Canada or Italy.