Quote:
Originally Posted by Manfap
German workers are expensive, but they would have ended up even more expensive if you'd kept the DM, you couldn't keep upping prices on exportable goods to cover the currency growth.
By switching to the euro you stabilised your manufacturing cost.
Hourly labour cost is similar in France and Germany, but you are more efficient.
France can drop costs by taking an axe to parts of it's welfare state, but there is no way that is going to happen, he backed down after 4 weeks of protests, the French people know he will never pass a difficult law again, but if he does they will rightly or wrongly blame the EU on the cuts.
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but look the MAJOR idea behind the EU is to keep every country balanced.
THIS is the reason why there are net payers and net receivers.
if a country is stronger than others this country have to pay to the EU and germany, france and britain have paid BECAUSE the benefit more than others and if they are doing bad one day they have the right to receive.
I donīt know how you can see this as a competition it is completely the opposite of that.
germany is in a better condition than others because
1. the people went through a hard time in the crisis and they worked even harder to get out of it.
2. pensions and welfare did not rise in that time - even infrastructure was effected by that.
3. in germany it where NOT the private people that get the money and the easy loans. Germany had a programm for the tax paying companies and helped them with cheap money and forced them to invest.
since 2013 the german economy is in plus and they still pay back all the debts.
in the bad times the dept to GDP was at 81% now it is at 64 (what is already called "a healthy debt")
actually germany gave also a lot of credit to other countries for that because there is still an ammount of 1,2 trillion euro in GIVEN loans to other countries - away from the money that they have paid INTO EU.
but all that have nothing to do with the EU - it have to do with the mentality.