They remain, if you will, fundamentally conservative in their efforts to preserve their well-established welfare states.
In Germany and Scandinavia the centre-left parties share a desire for equality and generous welfare states.
Those generous welfare states that preserve people's incomes tend to blunt incentives to take new work.
Indeed, most of the welfare states of the developed world have scapegoated the wealthy.
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The average in the social welfare states of the European Union is even less than that.
That is why the OECD, whose membership consists largely of European welfare states, is once again attacking tax competition.
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For wealthy countries, welfare states acted as a buffer to the economic shock, even at the expense of growth.
As the welfare states have matured, more and more people found ways to get more and more out of it.
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Mr. Santorum argues that the cost of Europe's massive welfare states made it too expensive for young people to have families.
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Thanks to decades of reckless spending by European welfare states, the newspapers are filled with headlines about debt, default, contagion, and bankruptcy.
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Result: Many fewer new jobs, with a higher structural jobless rate, much as Europe has experienced as its welfare states have expanded.
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Since then many countries have been creating an illusion of continual progress by running up hefty debts to finance their welfare states.
Both of these countries must be considered traditional social welfare states, but at least show some degree of moderation in their socialist practices.
But now that other world powers are rising, Europeans fear that unstoppable competition may take away their jobs and undermine their welfare states.
In other words, the bureaucrats at the OECD and governments from decrepit welfare states like France both saw a benefit in creating a tax cartel.
The big European and Nordic welfare states are undoubtedly expensive.
Welfare states were designed when most women stayed at home.
G7 that we need to act to improve employability and to tackle social exclusion by ensuring that our welfare states are equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
France and Germany, with their expensive welfare states, are loth to cut corporate tax rates to the low levels of countries like Ireland, so they want the Irish to raise theirs.
Modern economists have raised similar concerns about today's redistributive welfare states: by subtracting from the rewards of work and adding to the consolations of idleness, social transfers sap economies of their vigour.
The incremental approach mitigates the risk of the kind of dependency that welfare states had unwittingly fostered in the poor in the past and doesn't undermine slum dwellers' sense of personal agency.
Most American intellectuals and U.S. politicians are hoping Americans will get used to permanently-higher government spending as a share of GDP, and eventually, higher tax burdens, if even on the middle class (as exist in the dysfunctional European welfare states).
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He also called for sending all federal welfare programs back to the states with the same welfare block grant reforms adopted in 1996.
What may unnerve ministers most is that Tesco has come out against the government's welfare rule which states that benefits can be cut for people whose work experience placements do not proceed well.
The new welfare law requires states to move at least 20 percent of people receiving public assistance into jobs -- public or private -- by the end of this year, but is silent on what people should be paid.
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But the truth is that under the 1996 welfare reform law, states and Governors do not need a waiver to increase work for those on welfare.
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Actually, cash welfare has been reduced almost eight-fold and many states use the federal welfare money for other programs.
Biometrics is quickly becoming the weapon of choice against welfare fraud in eight states, including California.
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