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If only the economy worked in the way you described.. There would be no problems left, sure, but we're still far from it, really far. You cannot just take an amount of billions of euros, divide it with the number of people you want to get employed, and come up with their annual salaries.

And aren't these projects really going to cost us a single dime? You suggested to "spend on decedent housing, education, transport infrastructure". Let's assume that all this is doable, even if I'm more than doubtful about that--since we're talking as if Europe was the most underdeveloped region of the planet, so thatit needs 450 bn, that's BILLIONS, of euros spent on infrastructure building. You found out that 450bns spent on that, would create 9 million 50,000 euros jobs. That's a bit ingenuous, isn't it? If you just pay the workers with the 450 billions, where are the raw materials going to come from? Who's gonna pay for that? Who is going to pay for everything else included in this huge project, except than the labor costs, that according to your statistics would be just about 450 billions? What if the total cost doubled, or tribled?

To begin with, what does "We all know that our wealth in the EU is 1000 trillion euros higher than the US GDP of 11.6 trillion USD" really mean? Are we talking about countries with same population? Wouldn't it be much wiser to talk about per capita GDP than simply, GDP?

And even if you had the numbers right, where exactly should Europe get this kind of money from? Subtract it from its military budget? I'm not that sure, that EU has such a high military budget, but let's assume that it is up to 450 billions, and we'll cancel it alLtogether, just to implement your imagined projects. Will this not account for new unemployment? Who's going to pay for all the people employed in the military business who will lose their jobs, from simple soldiers to high-rank officials and military industry workers?

And even if there was such an (unrealistic) possibility of totally cutting off Europe's military budget in order to finance you job-creation plans without job losses elsewhere, are we that convinced that we'd like a European Union without military at all? I, as a European, feel really ashamed of our failure to protect 7,000 innocent victims in Srebrenica, for example, and many people argue that the reason for that was that the military employed there was not strong and organised well enough. Would it be moral to let this happen lots of times again in the future, just to employ people in infrastructure-building projects that would cost a huge sum of money?

by vassilis on Sun Nov 6th, 2005 at 06:02:24 PM EST
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