gross national hapiness index

[eppie]

I would like to know also from some of our Scandinavian posters also.

Yeah, this year (Sweden) I have 31 days (depends on age) And I work in the semi-private sector.
Of course besides that me and my wife are sharing 480 days of parental leave. (390 for 80 % salary)
This means we can send our kids to daycare when they are older than 1 year, which is a nice thing. Of course Sweden is the extreme case, but as you know Sweden is (especially for a country with only 9 million inhabitants) extremely competitive economically despite relatively high salaries. So this works pretty good.

But it is a choice you make. If you find it normal that Mitt Romney pays 10 % income tax, and if you find it normal that such a person gets rewarded by becoming presidential candidate, than you shouldn't worry too much about having only 2 weeks of holidays.......you have so little holidays because people like Mitt don't have to pay taxes.
Anyway this example also exists in Europe; namely Italy.
Politicians in Italy have the highest salaries in Europe but work the least amount of hours. But for some reason the people are not able to vote all those guys out of office.....once a rich upperclass has built a system that sets up different groups of people against eachother, everybody will forget about this rich class making their huge sums of money.
Most rich guys don't care if the next president is a rep or a dem they know that in either case they will keep their wealth. If the dems raise taxes to 50 % that means that Romney will pay 11 % next year instead of 10......hardly worth loossing a nights sleep over.


We have rich guys as well. (the Ikea guy, the tetrapak family and the H&M guys are usually in the top 100 of richest people on this earth) but they don't need to pay off political parties for that.