Forum Post: What America could learn from the success of the German social democratic model

Germany has faired relatively well in this recession (depression?). They do not have the serious structural issues that we here in the states face. The average German worker makes $48/hour (while their American counterpart makes $32/hour), has free healthcare (our system is the leading cause of homelessness), and has free college tuition (we saddle our kids with debt that is inescapable without dying). By law, their employees get an equal number of seats on the board as management. In addition, they have municipally owned savings banks that are required to restrict their lending activities to their own local geographic area. Interesting article by Harold Meyerson back in January entitled "Business is Booming".

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=business_is_booming

Had we had policies like this in place 30 years ago, we could have avoided many of the practices, such as off shoring of production, that have caused the economic imbalances that have led to this crisis. Maybe we can learn from this and hopefully enact much needed progressive reform.