That's a pretty interesting thought. I did a bit of digging and found, at least with the pandemic, Germany has a fundamentally different approach to unemployment than the United States. Rather than incentivize people seeking unemployment benefits, the German government has subsidized the payroll of businesses to encourage nonessential workers to stay home while keeping them on their payroll.Rate This wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 1:03 pmPar for the course around here. On a non-inflammatory note… it would be nice if we had a real introspective look at how we get people into the workforce and encourage them to better themselves or not. Germany provides one model of a path to a career from the time one is ready to enter high school. I’m not sure how they determine who goes where but far fewer are left to dangle in the wind.jadednihilist wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 12:37 pmWhat has been a potentially substantive conversation has devolved into yet another hopeless flame fest... sigh.
More broadly, Germany has enjoyed a steadily decreasing unemployment rate in the 21st century, including a dampened impact from the 2008 financial crisis. One potential issue, with respect to wealthy European nations, is that upward mobility in Germany (while much better than the US) is still limited. However, income inequality is less of an issue, so lower income earners are better off than they are here. I have to wonder if that's due to their marginal tax burdens don't peak for middle income earners like they do here, but is rather even/flat (which conservatives here should love) at about 45% (which conservatives would hate. However, increased tax revenues does mitigate H*** expenses like healthcare.
With respect to education, this link provides a solid qualitative description of the differences between US and German education. In summary, it seems like German education emphasizes personal responsibility -- something not really implicitly taught here until college. Interestingly enough, Germany spends fractionally less on education than the United States - and teachers are paid comparably. The overall results for students are fairly mixed according to the 2018 PISA rankings. Judging these rankings, Canada would probably be a better proxy for what American education could look like with the proper reforms.
I'm not sure what Canada does differently than us or Germany; perhaps TurkeyTop could enlighten us. Otherwise I'll skim over that a bit later.