SACRE BLEU! :

Making U.S. More Like Europe : The war on our economy. (Daniel J. Mitchell, 7/1/02, National Review)

Two years ago, politicians and bureaucrats at the European Commission announced their intention to turn the 15 nations of the European Union into "the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010." This is a tall order. Smothered by oppressive tax rates and burdensome regulations, Europe trails the United States by a wide margin.

Thanks in large part to the Reagan tax cuts and other free-market policies, per-capita national income in America is now 50 percent higher than it is in Europe. Our growth rate over the last decade has been about 60 percent higher, and our unemployment rate is about 50 percent lower. Tax policy is America's biggest advantage. Taxes consume about 29 percent of economic output in the United States. This is too high, but America is like the Cayman Islands compared to Europe, where tax collectors seize 42 percent of gross domestic product.

The whole article is worth reading but those numbers just jump off the page. They make it even more difficult to understand why people would pull money out of our stock market and dump it down the Euro rat hole. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2002 11:41 AM