nor pay the bills.
I received a rather smug document today telling us that unemployment is at its lowest point in Germany since 1991. Good!
But nowhere near good enough! The figure is still close to 3 million! If the figure had fallen below 2 million I would have described it as moving in the right direction, but it is still far, far too high. Recall during the Adenauer/Erhard years of the economic miracle, the figure was 300,000! There is a very long way to go.
There was also a record in the last month of the number of people working, some 41 million, the highest ever. Good - so what is stop us getting to 44 million and wiping out the scourge of unemployment entirely?
One less smug statistic was the information that I picked up off the Web the other week that the number of people living here in poverty is also at a post-war record high in percentage terms.
Which sounds like more people are taking badly paying jobs (McDonalds and Burger King must be on a hiring binge - obviously people cannot afford to eat elsewhere!), while the cost of living (see the rise in energy prices in the last two years) soars rapidly upwards.
What is needed is adequately paying jobs for all people working and realistic solutions to meeting people's living needs. We cannot subsidise energy costs (gosh, what would the oil companies think?), but we need far more imaginative solutions to make them affordable. As things stand - and with the serious prospect of a conflict with Iran - things look likely to get even worse in this respect.
And no smug statistics will hide the reality of that situation!
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