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Comment by dkopi | Hacker News Reader

They see social democracies in Europe, and cherry pick the policies they like (broad government spending), ignoring the ones that actually allow Europe to generate enough wealth to support their welfare states.

Also - something to realize about Europe: The poor in the US are RICHER than middle class in much of europe.

"A person at 60% of median income in the US still has a larger income than the median household in Chile, Czech Rep., Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and several others. And the poverty income in the US is very close to matching the median income in Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK."

https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...

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While that may be true, I would speculate that due to higher spending on social programs, the European poor enjoy I higher quality of life than their American counterparts. Don't discount things like tax-funded transportation, healthcare, and education, and the luxury of not maintaining a massive standing military.

Hmm, lower incomes where health care and university is provided by the government, higher income where it is not.

And if you take the cost of health care and university out of the US statistics, do you think they would remain higher?

back of the envelope math says no:

Its less than 10 thousand dollars higher, US health care is estimated at 5k per person on average. Given that these are household incomes youd have to multiply that by average family size, which is like 2.3 people

Its 2.3*5000 more expensive to have healthcare per family in the US

That already has wiped out the entirety of the 10k gap.

If you include free university it is even more one sided.

You are comparing pears with apples, because you assume those numbers are net values after all taxes which is not true. Europeans usually pay ~80% of they gross GDP/capita at some form of tax (health insurance (personal + company level), income tax, VAT, mandatory pension plan, extras on petrol and alcohols, duty fee, etc.

totally fair point - i didnt take taxes into account at all, i just ran with my first thought after reading the linked source

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