> > I doubt any amount of benefits and socialism can solve this problem.

This

> Most EU countries are higher up the list

How do you know you can trust that list?

When you look at both the average and the median income, even adjusting for PPP, IIRC the poorest US state is richer than the richest EU country, which says a whole lot about "the degree of poverty in EU".

Of course, Europeans don't like that so they try to tweak the rankings by doing various adjustments for happiness, or insisting on healthcare stuff (etc.) and how they have many transfer payments.

The europoors doth protest too much, methinks :)