Your theory revolves around "snapshots" of people/pay/hours. Adults seldom stagnate in one income class their entire lives.
I don't believe a body of politicians should have the power to create income floors and ceilings with my tax dollars. An individual's actions determine whether he/she will climb up or down the economic ladder. If you're willing to pony up more of your money towards "public assistance" there should be a way for those that disagree to opt out of paying those taxes.
Who/what says minimum wages are a good thing? Take Europe. Half the countries have minimum wage laws and half do not. Those that do (Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Luxembourg) have much higher unemployment rates than those that don't (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland). As for the U.S., minimum wage laws aren't typically used to increase the standard of living... they're used to curry favor with constituents and, therefore, their vote. Targeting the 1% by implementing a pay "ceiling" and rewarding the 99% by raising the pay "floor" would lead to nothing more than our society being put in a sort of "economic solitary confinement" (of stagnation, inefficiency, etc.). See USSR.
You've listed 18 countries in your two halves of Europe. The EU has 28 countries [1], and including sovereign states that are not part of the EU, there are 41 [2]. How did you decide what small subset of these to include in your comparison?
Here are a couple of lists that may be useful if you wanted to to a more complete comparison.
the non-state group ISIS seems to have a decent cyber warfare capability. The pwning of a "significant number of SOHO-routers" in Iraq could have been prevented had an adequate pen test been performed on the SOHO networks across the country. :) Should nation states force either: a) their citizens, or b) their ISPs to ensure networks are "secure?"
I don't believe a body of politicians should have the power to create income floors and ceilings with my tax dollars. An individual's actions determine whether he/she will climb up or down the economic ladder. If you're willing to pony up more of your money towards "public assistance" there should be a way for those that disagree to opt out of paying those taxes.