At some point in your life, you have to decide whether to rent a home, or to buy a house.
For 54% of us Dutchmen the choice has been to buy a house, as CBS shows us, about 43% of the estimated 6.9 million houses is rented.

For me, the choice is not that hard: I like the idea of utilizing my own house as a bank-account, and while my girlfriend and I both have jobs (now and in the future ) it is financially possible to do either of both.
The bigger problem is finding a home which is to our liking, and affordable. Unfortunately, NVM recently reported a 4.3% increase in price for the houses sold in the third quarter of 2007 compared to the same quarter of 2006. The average price paid nears €250.000, which is a very steep price, in any respect. On the shorter term: the Kadaster, the Dutch cadastre, reported a 2.04% decrease in price, to an average of €252.649 over the month september. In comparison with the previous year though, there has been a 4.8% increase over the same period.

Also recently, money suppliers have reached an agreement on what the ethical limit is to lend money to people with an income. It is set to about 4.5 to 5 times the gross annual income, depending on the circumstances. To achieve the average price, the annual gross income of anyone trying to buy their first house has to be at least €50.000, which drills down to a gross monthly income of €3850. (€50.000 / 1.08 / 12) That is not what is considered to be average.
The guideline stated above leaves room for the lending parties to up the multiplication-factor to 6, which leads to an income of €3215, which is better, but still a bit high.
Since I’m currently exploring my possibilities to buy a house, I’ve come to the following conclusion: You have to live together, and earn two incomes to buy a house these days. You could settle for less room, and thus a lower price, but since appartments go for around €140.000 in the urban area in Holland (de Randstad), the monthly income should be €2160, which is about €200 higher than the modal income. It is far more reachable for most of us, yet it still places a big burden on your expenditures, monthly fees of around €650 don’t leave much room for anything else.

You would all be expecting me to come up with a (slightly liberal) solution to the above posed problem of high prices, but I have to disappoint you.
There is no easy solution.

One could lower or abolish the "hypotheekrenteaftrek", where the interest you paid can be deducted from your annual income to lower the net taxes you have to pay. This seems a strange method, but the tax-deduction is one of many reasons the houses are and stay this expensive. It has significant downsides though: it completely takes away any possibilities for "starters" on the housemarket: while prices will decrease gradually instead of instantly. Which kind of defeats the purpose on the short term.

A second method could be the introduction of a system called "flat taxes" but we are far from being ready to even consider this. With flat taxes, there are no compensation rules, everyone pays the same percentage of tax, for instance 35%. Which is lower than currently for many of us, and would increase the net income, and thus increases the amount of money to be spent on housing. It too has serious side effects: quite a few people will not benefit as they pay less than 35% on taxes and leaves them in a worse position.
Also, flat taxes do not fit our ideology of income leveling (nivelleren) where "the toughest shoulders bear the most weight".

All in all, it kind of sucks. And I can’t do anything about it.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it happened.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 has been awarded to a guy dedicated to telling us how bad we are for the environment, and what disasters we have spelled upon us.

Each year the Nobel Prizes are awarded to people and organizations who have made considerable contributions to their field of expertise.
A total of six prizes is available: Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Literature and Peace.
The first three of them are undisputed, every year the prizes for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry are awarded to people who have definitely made a considerable contribution to their profession. Also, this contribution has been validated and recognized by their peers and the official committee from Danish universities. Also, the laureates have been proposed by their peers, which acts as a great filter for any less important proposals.

The grey area starts with the prize for Economics, where there has been some controversial awarding in the past, and the award is always a little political. The "left" wing, or keynesians argue when the "right" wing of monetary economics get an award, or vice versa. Economists think despite this that, even though the laureate comes from "the other side" the quality of the work is and has been high. The Nobel Prize for Literature often seems to be awarded with regards to other qualities besides the ones named: race, skin color, origination and sex often appear to play a role.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize however is different. The list of laureates brings us to this notion: Palestine rebel leader Yasser Arafat (1994), former president of the USA Jimmy Carter (2002) or even former president of the USA Henry Kissinger (1973).
What have they done for global peace? Arafat who led a pack of Palestine terrorists to fight for their right to use the same land as the Israeli? Or Kissinger who was jointly responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands Cambodians in 1969 and 1970?

This list is topped by the most recent laureate: environmentalist Al Gore.
He advocates accountable use of our environment to preserve that what is left of our world for future generations. In fact, a very nice goal, although judges in the UK have rules that schoolchildren in the UK must be presented a warning not to believe everything that is being said in Gore’s movie "An Inconvenient Truth". Gore kind of overdoes it with this movie, so to speak.
It holds a (part of a) truth, but exaggerates and dramatizes the facts and possible results. For example: Gore tells us the sea-level will rise 6 or 7 meters when the icecap over Greenland completely melts. This is true, as there are staggering amounts of water being stored there by nature, Gore however fails to tell us that research done by the IPCC reports that the melting would take a considerable time, up to several thousands of years.

The biggest problem of the awarding of Gore might very well be that the entire world now thinks global warming is the biggest threat to our world. Yes, it is a threat that could have considerable implications; it still is not clear whether we have a lot to do with this global warming, or even if global warming is occurring at all.
People tend to forget that there are other, maybe equally important issues to be solved in the world nowadays.
The battle against malaria, or the fact that hundreds of millions of people still don’t have clean, fresh water at their disposal; money spent on the environmental issues like the one described in the Kyoto Protocol could be spent otherwise to resolve these two.

In this light: Al Gore might even be a threat to world peace.
Quite a few conflicts reside around (the lack of) water, and he is diverging our attention to the real problems that have to be solved for us to live peacefully together on our green and blue planet.

In contradiction to what you may think, I’m not going to fulminate on how people living on a pay equal or slightly above minimum wage are not putting in enough effort and as a result only get low wages.
I am going to talk to you about this group of people though, yet the lower effort comes not from the employees but from the employers.

Ever since the first wave of guest workers came to The Netherlands, the Dutch have had unforeseen problems. The guest workers did their jobs good, and too cheap for local workers to compete. This has resulted not in the desired gross-income growth, but in a higher unemployment-rate. The guest workers simply took over the places of local workers who have had less education, or have a worse work-mentality or productivity.

No i’m also not going to tell you about our current government who has made the exact same error of opening the borders to Romanian, Bulgarian and Polish workers who are pushing lower skilled Dutch and people who have lower productivity from the labour market.
The, in the world almost unmatched, level of minimum wage is the subject here, it’s the second highest next to Luxemburg.

In Holland, the legally enforced minimum wage is $10,72; where as an equally skilled worker has the right to earn at least $5,15. Yes, that is in US Dollars, and yes, it is less than half of what the Dutch would earn! Luxemburg tops us by only 7 cents, but we still remain one of the world leaders. Why is this bad? I hear you ask.

Because of this high price on lower skilled workers, Eastern-Europeans, younger people and people in the social security are competing with each other to get a job. So far, the Eastern Europeans are winning the battle with ease. All groups are entitled to the same wage, it is however productivity and work-mentality wich puts our Polish friends in favor. They are much more willing to put in some extra hours, and work much faster with less hassle for the employer.
Young people however are less affected by this, they have a separate agreement to adhere to: if they are under the age of 23, there is a minimum youth wage which is lower than the regular minimum wage, making them more attractive for employers.

The main issue here is that the rest of the workforce has a problem: as they are too expensive employers don’t have a drive to take them in. There always is a better equipped or better performing person for the job, like the Polish. In 2005 around 70.000 Polish guest workers arrived in The Netherlands, nearly all of them are working in the agricultural or construction sector; area’s formerly dependant of lower skilled local workers.
So: if this is true, what should be the solution?

Yes: it is quite simple: lower the minimum wage and lower the taxes for lower incomes. This results in lower costs for employers, a better chance for lower skilled workers and people in the social security and an impulse for the latter group of people to gain a notch in income; as this is nowadays not the case due to high taxes.
Ahmed Aboutaleb (PvdA, State Secretary for "Sociale Zaken", the ministry of social matters) and Piet Hein Donner (CDA, minister of "Sociale Zaken") have recently urged employers to take on the task of employing people who now get their income from social security, in an effort to get more people to work. I seriously doubt whether employers will adhere to this call, the laws on the free market of labour tend to dictate otherwise…