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tweakz

The U.S. is not the richest country in the world, at least not anymore.

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Who cares. This "actually, we're not #1" pedantic bs is just a distraction from the problem.

The point was we are VERY rich and could afford to not have our citizens stress about healthcare.

It's not "you" who is very rich.

>It's not "you" who is very rich.

Oh no? I'm in top 0.2% in income in the world, and I'm sure there are people here doing far better than I am. How about you?

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

And this pedantic distinction does nothing whatsoever to diminish the outrage that the parent poster rightly feels.

Pointless. New York state, New York city, etc. which feature in the article are the among the wealthiest regions in the world. You are not talking about a coal mining company in rural Kentucky or a mom and pop hardware store in Alabama. This is Amazon, which on paper at least, has the wealth to implement humane policies.

The US has the highest total GDP in the world by a fairly large margin. That's a pretty reasonable measure of "richness".

So California is 75 times richer than Vermont? Vermont might be a terrible place to live... it's even poorer than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

> So California is 75 times richer than Vermont?

California is also, like, 75 times bigger than Vermont in pretty much every metric, so I'm not sure why you seem so surprised by such an implication.

My point, in case it's not obvious enough, is that GDP is not a good definition of richness in the context of a discussion about how can these things happen "in the richest country in the world".

Except that GDP is a perfectly fine definition for that. A national healthcare system is something which is strongly inflenced by things like economies of scale; measuring by any metric other than GDP and government budget would make very little sense. If the DoD can afford to burn trillions on a jack-of-all-trades fighter that sucks at pretty much all the jobs it's meant to take on, it can almost certainly afford to give every American free healthcare, free college educations, and at least two moon colonies to boot.

The point of the "richest country in the world" remark is that the U.S. could very well afford to be the most progressive modern society if it chose to do so. Instead, it opts to sink money in failed fighter projects and nebulous "terrorist"-hunting surveillance and drone strike programs.

I'm not saying that total GDP is necessarily the best metric for "richness" of a place, but it is a commonly used one.

I think per-capita GDP is clearly a better metric, putting the US around 10th, but total GDP isn't an awful one for broad strokes.

Yes it is, by far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_wealth

If you're calculating by nominal GDP, yes it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...) By PPP GDP China is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)) By per capita GDP Luxembourg is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...)

Yes it is. The US is 4.6% of the global population and holds about 40% to 45% of all global wealth.

US households alone hold $85 to $90 trillion.

This is from 2010, US assets have massively rebounded since then, likely pushing this figure even higher.

"Some 39 percent of the world’s wealth belongs to Americans, while Western Europe accounts for another 31 percent."

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/americas-domina...

Irrelevant. We're close enough to the top that it makes no difference to the person's point. It should be absolutely unacceptable that this happens in a civilized nation.

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