Thoughts from a country in crisis

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me an e-mail with the following content (my translation from the Spanish original):

Facts for thought

Will you have sex? The government will provide you with condoms.
You already had sex? The government offers you the day-after pill.
She got pregnant? The government garantees an abortion.
You got the child? The government gives you a cheque worth 2.500 Euro.
You are unemployed? The government will pay you an assistance.
You are lazy and don't like to work? The government will guarantee your survival.

Now, try to study, work, produce something and look what will happen:
the government will increase your taxes to pay for all the above mentioned.
We learn: f***, abort, be lazy as ****, but never ever think about working hard; that won't be paid by the government and you will have to sustain all the lazy folk in Spain.

I don't think that it is that extreme yet but the government is really only prolonging handouts, trying to remedy the effects but not the causes of the actual crisis. Spain is the only big country in the OECD that is still in recession, and on the verge of an unemployment rate of 20%. Last week it was about to be called equal to Greece, and the finance minister went to London to "educate" the Financial Times about the reality as she sees it. The Wall Street Journal encouraged the Spanish prime minister to put up more resistance towards the trade unions that are fighting more or less everything that looks like change. The trade unions are good institutions for those that have jobs but they don't seem to mind the young and/or unemployed. Spain will have the oldest population in Europe by 2050 and there is no way but to reform the pension system. The government wants to put the retirement age to 67 which makes sense; when Bismarck invented the modern old-age pension system, if I am not misled, the retirement age was set at 65, but hardly anyone reached that age. Today most Spaniards and Catalans live until their mid-80s...

I hope to find more time to ramble on more positively in the near future.

Exercises in translation (II)

from: Avui, October 11, 2009, p. 23

Spain will continue being the EU's leader in job destruction

Editorial office, Barcelona

At year's end, 3 of every ten new unemployed in the EU will be Spanish. According to the "labor euro-index," elaborated by IESE business school and temp-work agency Adecco, Spain will continue leading the job destruction, though it will be more moderate if compared to earlier trimesters. The report analyses the job market's evolution of seven European countries: Spain, France, Germany, Ital, Portugal, United Kingdom and Poland (similar to Spain in population). Taken together, these markets have registered three million people less in employment, double the number than in the three months before. "Never before in a twelve-months span our group of seven countries had destroyed so many jobs," the authors of the document stress. Germany is the country that has had a better evolution, while Spain's is the most "dramatic."

The future jobless rate
Spain has lost within a year 1,480,000 jobs, a fall of more than 7%. That means it has counted for nearly one in every two jobs lost in the EU during the past year. As to the unemployment rate, the study published by IESE and Adecco calculates that the European community rate will rise by 2.5%, as as to be at 10.3% at year's end. That means an increase of 3% in two years. If you took out Spain of this calculation, the increase would be smaller, 1.8%.

(The original in Catalan is as confusing as to numbers and semesters, trimester, years,... observed...)