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Four countries, four economies.......

The world isn't looking all that good economically.

Overnight the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has taken a razor-blade to the country's budget - as Yahoo News reports:

"Britain outlined the sharpest cuts to public spending since World War II on Wednesday — slashing benefits and cutting public sector jobs with an austerity plan aimed at clearing record debts that swelled during the global financial crisis.

As many as half a million public sector jobs will be lost, about 18 billion ($28.5 billion) axed from welfare payments and the pension age raised to 66 by 2020, earlier than previously planned."

Across the Channel, the French are facing their own economic, and political woes - as The New York Times reports here.

Down Under, Australia has largely avoided the GFC - except that underlying the economic prosperity, as the Salvation Army reveals in a Report just released, there are many who are not sharing in the wealth of the country:
  • 2 million Australians now live in poverty -- 1 in 10 of us
  • 70% of poor children in Australia live in jobless families
  • Australia now has one of the highest levels of joblessness among families with children in an OECD country
  • 12% of all children aged 0 to 17 live in ‘relative poverty’
  • At least 80,000 Australians needed the Salvation Army's help for the first time last year
  • 57% of single parent families interviewed said they could not pay utility bills in the past 12 months and 12% went without meals.
And whilst the American economy looks decidedly sick on many levels, in a piece "The Perfect Storm That Threatens American Democracy" on his blog, Robert Reich writes:

"First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us."

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