By David Francis, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on November 13, 2007, Printed on November 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67723/
"Comparisons are odious," that is, hateful, according to a popular phrase about seven centuries old. Comparison, however, is one of the tasks assigned to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, an international body of 30 of the richest countries. It tries to compare its members' economic and social data, a difficult, perhaps even odious, job.
Sometime back it broadened statistically (for comparison purposes) the definition of the average workers in its member nations while trying to examine relative tax burdens. The result was "monumental," reckons Jacob Kirkegaard, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The OECD ranked the after-tax income of the average worker in the United States as 15th among its member nations. The richest middle class, if measured in terms of the purchasing power of their income, was Britain.
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