"The U.S. spends so much on just Medicare and Medicaid compared to other nations because these other First World nations do not spend such a disproportionate amount of money on the military and periodic bail-outs."

How does that have anything to do with what I said? We pay more for medical care than other nations, and we pay more for the military than other nations, but not because.

And the fact that Medicare and Medicaid have considerable restrictions does not say anything about the basic problem: our public spending on healthcare, per capita, is higher than almost any other nation - and then we have to pay that much again in private spending. The problem is not that we don't spend enough, but that we have a severely dysfunctional healthcare cartel that has been enabled by our government.

"Yet we charge an arm and a leg for college tuition, and private elementary and high schools are quite popular here."

Yes, just as with healthcare, we spend more public money on education than other countries ... and then we have to pay for it again privately if we want to get a good education. Once again, government intervention has increased prices, and what is worse may have even decreased quality.

You might also note that the countries that fully fund higher education don't let everyone attend college. They have a much smaller portion of their population attend college, so it should not be surprising that they can pay the full cost of those few students who attend.

"Not according to readily available stats," etc.

Your links do not address the issue. They show overall stats rather than stats adjusted for ethnicity. I was specific about adjusting for ethnicity - you even quoted that part!

America has many different ethnic groups, and these ethnicities have different qualities. It is a simple fact that, even after adjustments for class, education, and income, some ethnic groups live longer than others.

This leads to some great ways to lie with statistics. Swedish-Americans live longer and enjoy higher incomes than Swedes living in Sweden; Nigerian-Americans live longer and enjoy higher incomes than Nigerians living in Nigeria; Japanese-Americans live longer and enjoy higher incomes than Japanese living in Japan - and the list goes on; but persons of European descent live longer than persons of African descent, and persons of Asian descent live longer than persons of European descent, regardless of where they live in the world - and America has a much larger population of persons of African descent than any other developed nation. This will always bring down overall stats regardless of the stats by ethnicity which show a very different picture.

The same holds true within the United States: white Texans have better educational outcomes than white Wisconsites; black Texans have better educational outcomes than black Wisconsites; Latino Texans have better educational outcomes than Latino Wisconsites - but Texas has much larger proportions of blacks and Hispanics than Wisconsin, so Wisconsites as a whole have better educational outcomes than Texans as a whole and progressives thumb their noses at the Texans for being backwards and racist and not as cool as progressive Wisconsin which does worse by its citizens.

Another example is healthcare in Hawaii. Hawaii has the nation's largest population of Asian descent, and Asians live longer than whites and blacks. What's more, almost all the whites living in Hawaii have relatively high incomes, which correlates with better healthcare and longer lives. So progressives like to point out that reliably progressive Hawaii has the greatest longevity in the United States!

But they never notice that persons of Asian descent live longer lives in Alabama than in Hawaii.

When it comes to income there are several ways to lie with statistics; for example, a small proportion of high income residents can obscure the picture (as you rightly noted in another post about Chile). It is also necessary to adjust for what is called purchasing power parity (PPP). That is, having twice the income denominated in dollars does you little good if prices are four times as high. Curiously enough, adjusting for median income to get a better view of reality, and adjusting for purchasing power, only a few European nations can even beat the American average; and New York state, which many Americans regard as a wealthy area, is actually the poorest state in the nation - below even Mississippi.




Baldur