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Europe What Are The Top Two Or Essay

Europe What are the top two or three reasons why Europe is facing a mid-life crisis?

The NPR story by Eleanor Beardsley -- published in 2010 -- begins by pointing to the extraordinary benefits that citizens in Denmark and France are entitled to. The author says that healthcare is free in many EU countries, and education is also free, and if a couple has a child there are stipends in that eventuality as well. But is this "welfare system" sustainable? The government of France is borrowing to be able to continue to pay for the social programs that all citizens enjoy, but in France, Germany and Spain -- and elsewhere -- the money is just not there to continue shelling out benefits for healthcare, education, unemployment and other social needs.

Reason #1: One of the top reasons why Europe is facing a mid-life crisis: social spending simply cannot be sustained at the present rate because the economic crisis has hit many EU countries very hard. Things were going along very smoothly and there was plenty of money to continue the many social programs but with the financial crisis sacrifices and other changes must be made.

Reason #2: Because it is not easy to fire a worker in the EU that...

Part of what makes economic growth possible is when private enterprise can create jobs and hire new people. While the U.S. economy was expected to grow by 3% in 2010, in the European Union the growth was projected to be just 1%, Beardsley explains.
Reason #3: The EU population is "aging" and that means more people will become dependent on free healthcare, which will exacerbate the current economic crisis. Whether or not Europeans want to change the system, it is clear that adjustments must be made and will be made.

TWO: How did the demise of communism alter the path that Europe was on, and ironically how did the fall of communism hasten the debt crisis?

The path that Europe was on amounted to a tense, divided continent, part democracy and part communism. That all changed shortly thereafter as freedom of speech and freedom of the press emerged in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia (and later Romania) (Thompson, 2010). When communism was still a political reality in Eastern Europe there was very little migration into those countries between 1960 and 1988 (Jennissen, 2004). But…

Sources used in this document:
Works Cited

Beardsley, E. (2010). Can The European Welfare State Survive? NPR. Retrieved January

21, 2014, from http://www.npr.org.

Gifford, R. (2010). In Europe, Obstacles To A More Perfect Union. NPR. Retrieved January

21, 2014, from http://www.npr.org.
Demand Media. Retrieved January 21, 2014, from http://classroom.synonym.com.
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