Too many scroungers?

The problem with the Western world, I have read many times, is that there are too many people out there milking the system.

They don't want to work, they just want to freeload while others provide the means for them to do so.

It is not limited to one country or to the usually conservative commentators or politicians within them. The former FDP leader in Germany, Guido Westerwelle, rightly pointed out that the wealth has to be created by someone (who is arguing with that?), before he started laying into the loafers and scroungers usw.

The point is though - to get people off what the Americans call "welfare" two things are absolutely necessary.

1. The work has to be there!
2. The work has to pay sufficiently well to allow people to live without state handouts (which, I would add, are nothing like as generous as some people would have you believe!)!

I cannot unfortunately quote the stats from Europe, though I know for a fact that there are dozens of IT specialists out of work in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, and trying to get a job in that area (particularly if you are an older worker like myself) is like trying to find a crocodile beneath the Polar ice cap.

But from the US - a couple of related figures.

Case 1 - for every job vacancy there are five people unemployed.
Case 2 - most of the jobs being created are flipping burgers.

In case 1, do you take someone who is not working and doesn't want to - and give them priority over people who do want to work? If there are more jobs available than people unemployed, then you can attack the welfare problem. If it is the other way round, which is the usual story, as far as I am concerned getting the industrious, the intelligent, the dedicated back into the workplace is the priority. The loafers and deadbeats would only foul up the environment anyway.

In case 2 - I have go on for seemingly ever about the "McDonalds economy", but the point remains relevant!

How do you come close to paying all the necessary bills (accommodation, heating and other utility bills, food usw) on the junk wages for the junk jobs paid by the junk food companies? Or on the money that you get stacking supermarket shelves? As a second income, or a starter job for a 16-year-old with no qualifications - OK.

For someone with a degree, 20+ years experience in high-powered intellectual environments and the ability to get by in four languages like myself (as an example)? Forget it. You cannot live, you cannot save, you cannot even hope to get any job satisfaction. Such work is just about as pointless as it gets for a large percentage of the unemployed! As a first income, it is simply no-go!

What is also scary is that with the removal of jobs to China and India at the current rate the already ludicrously high rate of unemployment of people over 50 (twice that of people under 50 - another often conveniently forgotten stat) will increase.

So whereas in the past you took a not particularly well-paid job when you were 20-odd in the knowledge that later in life your experience would pay off ..... These days you better earn quickly and have built your pile of retirement cash by the time you are 45, as after that, given current employer attitudes, you will become virtually retired anyway, like it or not (and I don't!).

And if you haven't (and how exactly would you expect to do it anyway? You're supposed to be earning less than used to be the case, otherwise how do you compete with the Chinese and the joke money they pay!) ....

But then of course you will be written off as just another scrounger, won't you????