If you want to live the American dream, move to Denmark

I found this interesting TEDx talk that discusses the effects of wealth and income inequality on society. In particular it focuses on the effects of inequality in Western Liberal Democracies, ranging from Japan and Norway on one hand, to the USA and Portugal on the other.

The results are astonishing, but to the rational thinker they shouldn't be surprising
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www.youtube.com...

Essentially, the results show that increased wealth and income disparity tends to exacerbate negative social conditions, such as crime, mental health issues and so forth. It was found that in developing countries, GNP is not an accurate measure of economic health, in fact quite to the contrary. In fact, a better measure could be inequality (i.e. the Gini coefficient and the Lorenz diagram).

I saw it last week along with the other controversial TED speech.

The funny thing is that I live in Denmark and the American dream is dying here as well. It worked back when we werent deeply involved in the EU and obligated to save the worlds refugees. But now things are spiralling down.

Our red government just awarded a 3% company tax reduction based on the idiocy that lower taxes creates jobs.

On the social side the EU means that eastern Europeans come here in numbers and work for wages that makes the unions of workers spin their heads. That means job loses for regular danes, less buying power duebto lack of salary into less demand into less production and more job loss.

We also face a huge crisis due to us having the lowest birthrate in 80 years and in 10 years the largest generationin 100 years will leave the job market to live on state pension, ie not contributing to the once so great welfare state. We have not seen the worst yet........

Currently our government is doing its best to destroy the young generations with reforms in education and teachers education.
We used to have a great system which keeps the students in Denmark to their books by awarding what we call SU. The SU system is like a monthly allowance paid from tax money and makes sure the students don't have to overburden themselves with work after or during class.

The number of months you are allowed to receive this is now being reduced... This is for students of 18 years or older.

At the same time our "supposed to be red" government is attacking our school system for the young kids (6- 15 years old).
We used to have normal school hours which would be bell time at 8 and then most often get off at 15. If your parents weren't home yet, we had nice after school activities in which no obligatory behavior was forced down over kids heads. This would either be at the school or at a "club" near by....

Now our government wants to enfore full time schools, where kids after school are told what to do and play... totally unacceptable.
While school hours are fine to teach kids elementary stuff like spelling and calculus, its during these once so casual hours of play that they learn social abilities and evolve their creativity.
Kids are not supposed to be taught to be salary slaves!!!

Add to that... this full time schooling system will mean less teachers, less preperation time and more work hours = BAD BAD conditions for teaching kids the elementary stuff...

So what a great combo we're looking at: worse teaching for unhappy kids........

The fact IS... right now there's a union battle going on and the teachers union is being backed now by the communal employees union and soon an unlikely partner in the Danish flight attendant union will back them up.

The union for the communal administrations are on the opposite side and have announced that the teachers will be locked-out after April 1st.... how ever... the teachers union has announced that their strike money will last them a total of 50 work days, or in short, until the Danish summer vacation.
If the administration union enforces the lock-out, the communal workers will enforce their own strike along with the cabin crews on Danish airlines.......


Denmark...... CANNOT releave the American dream!