I take your "facts" with a heaping pile of salt, considering that Sweden has one of the highest tax rates in the Western world, Latvia's economy is smaller than most U.S. states and is smaller than the economies of NY, LA, Chicago, or Atlanta, and China's government has spent more in the past decade to rev up its economy and keep it going than the rest of the world combined. China spent billions on the Olympic facilities alone, not including the hundreds of billions they spent on other infrastructure projects of the past decade, or the subsidized loans to factories, farms, bio-tech companies, and real estate developers that would generally be considered illegal under various WTO pacts and accords if China was considered a 1st-world nation. (Most major Chinese corporations are government-owned; in some industries, all of the major Chinese corporations are government-owned.) China's recent (within the past 6 months) reduction in government spending has virtually killed it's construction and real estate sectors, and it has a huge debt bubble which is on the verge of collapsing.
