Actually the 20% poorest in the US has it better than the average EU middle class. Ref: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20...
And, you know, access to health care :-)
It’s almost as if it’s part of a pattern, where the top 75% in the US do better than France, while the stronger French safety net is better for the bottom 25%.
If you scroll two comments up, you'll see the most crucial difference: free healthcare. Healthcare-related expenses can bankrupt an entire family in the US, even with great health insurance...
Then there is free education, but let's leave that aside for now.
Medicaid simply isn't the healthcare panacea for the poor that some make it out to be when they say, "But the poor already have coverage!". And it ignores the fact that there's millions of people just above the income cutoffs whose state of poorness is pretty indistinguishable from those that get coverage, but they're still completely on their own.
The tax burden is higher because education, public transport, agriculture and social (mostly retirement) are paid in tax rather than mostly privately.
US has the private system for retirement plans and it sometimes fails utterly. The nationalized one does not, though it may not be as big of a payout. And education saddles people with debt, as well as causes cost (admin) inflation.
First: 400% of the poverty line is not very high, so premiums for people just over that line can still be very unaffordable.
Second and more importantly, ACA coverage is generally not very good, especially at the low silver tier covered in that %10 income cap. Pointing at the ACA ignores the fact than plenty of people with coverage still are faced with insurmountable debt, sometimes loss of home, and often bankruptcy. As long as hundreds of thousands of people each year have bankruptcies tied to medical issues, there's nothing about the US system you can point to, be it Medicaid, Medicare, ACA subsidies or anything else, that can surmount the argument that the US system fails people in this respect when compared to other countries with universal coverage.
I'm not saying those countries are always better in every respect, but one thing they have is that they don't cause their citizens to lose their entire way of life, their home, and ability to live above poverty levels when faced with treatable medical issues.
Now, because the US has a weaker safety net, some people fall into gaps where they make too much to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to have good health insurance, or go bankrupt despite having good health insurance. But that happens to a small percentage of the population. Most people do fine with their employer paid insurance or Medicare, and get to spend their extra money on more consumption.
As to free education. If US colleges were like French ones, we could have free college too: https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_1160/s3/spen.... We spend more government money in higher education, as a percentage of GDP, than France. We still have to charge people tuition because our colleges are far more opulent. Most French universities are what Americans would consider commuter schools. Focused on instruction rather than research with most students staying local and living at home. Even then, free college just isn’t that valuable of a benefit. The average tuition at a public school in the US is $10,000 a year. The total cost of a degree is $40-50,000. And remember, most Americans don’t get a college degree (and neither do most French.) Over a career, the value of tuition free college for the average American comes nowhere near the extra taxes and lower income they’d have in France.
To pick a statistic, their maternal mortality rate is 1/3 of the US.
Because the US is a wealthier country overall it can waste more money and receive worse results. That isn't an argument in favor the US healthcare system.
Also, do you realize that the graph you are citing isn't tracking the cost of US healthcare to a US citizen, it is literally saying Americans spend 5% of their personal income on health insurance. It is not counting the taxes they already pay, the cost to their employers, etc.
Note also that trying to compare health outcomes between countries is extremely difficult. Asians in the US live longer than Asians in countries with excellent healthcare systems like Japan.[1] Puerto Rico has a similar life expectancy to Denmark or Germany, even though if it were a US state it would be the poorest.
Maternal mortality rate varies by a factor of 10 between US states. The maternal mortality rate in West Virginia is only a somewhat higher than Germany and the UK, while the rate in New York is twice as high and New Jersey is four times higher. Massachusetts and California are lower than France.
[1] Asian American men live longer than white women.
Did you use PPP to evaluate value?
That's so bullshit.
What matter is of course not the difference between tuitions fees than taxes.
What's matter is that everybody, even the ones that can't afford the tuitions fees can access university. Which you can in France, which you can not in Europe.
I am the living example of that. I come from a family what would never have been able to afford me US schools tuitions fees. And still I am engineer, thanks to the European systems.
Here is the more fixed one :
> Over a career, the value of tuition free college for the average American comes nowhere near the extra taxes and lower income they’d have in France
That is so bullshit.
What matter is not, of course, the difference of cost between tuition fees and taxes.
What matter is that everybody, even the ones that can not afford the tuition fees can access University and proper education. Which you can in France and most of European countries, and which you cannot in USA.
I am the living example of that. I come from a family what would never have been able to afford to pay US schools fees. And still I am engineer, thanks to the European system.
I tend to prefer a system where you fail because you are not good enough, to a system where you fail because the pockets of your parents are not deep enough.
The stories I have been told of difficult classes in the EU are mind-bending. They seem to be incentivizing ~80% of the class to drop out. There is no way the majority of people are not suited for, say, IT. They may not want to do it, but that doesn't mean they are not capable of doing it.
Private insurance is a tiny cost of average 30 Euro and reimburses you for damages. Does not pay for healthcare. Entirely different kind of insurance.
In US, a single copay with health insurance can take triple this, most common ones are few hundred USD, baseline insurance is still expensive. However, yearly it's... Still more expensive as double the percentage of GDP than France.
Please try to understand the specific statistic I am citing. I’m talking about non-premium out of pocket costs: https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/OECD-Focus-on-Out... (chart on page 1).
The reason I quote that figure is because there is a myth that even though Americans mostly have private health insurance paid by their employer, they somehow still spend all this money on deductibles and co-pays.
The other figure I’m citing (the 5%) are not what Americans pay in total, but what Americans have to pay out of their salaries. The reason I cite that is most Americans have employed-paid insurance, which is not counted in their income. So if you just take income and subtract the total cost of healthcare per person, you get an incorrect number, because people don’t pay most of that cost out of their income. You have to look at what people pay out of pocket on premiums and copays.
As for education per percentage spending paints a distorted picture. A more thorough comparison is needed accounting for the cost of education, population size, absolute numbers as opposed to percentages. Otherwise I agree that the US has fancier, more exclusive higher education institutions and that professionals with a degree are paid much better than in France.
I grew up in the lower middle class in France, and I have what's considered great healthcare in the US. In France, I would never think twice before going to the doctor (i.e primary care) when I had a medical issue. In the US, I still think it twice even though my copay is not a big dent in my budget. And that's not counting WTF happens in the US if I loose my job.
That’s the point of co-pays, and that’s why France has them. According to the OECD statistics I posted elsewhere in this thread, per capita expenditures on non-premium out of pocket expenses (things like co-pays and deductibles) are the same in the US and France.
There’s more than an order of magnitude between those two numbers here. You can look at your OECD statistics, or look at the experience of people who’ve actually lived there.
Growth is not tied to employment policy, but only cost of labor. It correlates almost 1:1 as selfish big businesses move or outsource where it's cheaper. (Including big tax breaks. USA doesn't have these enough to balance very expensive employment.)
Example from EU: Poland has 4,6% and France 1,8%. Switzerland 1,1% and Finland 2,6%. The number for France is not too dissimilar from USA and not anything special. Poland has baroque labor (improving) and especially tax laws.
Medical bankruptcy was a big problem, but under the ACA the yearly out of pocket max has all but eliminated these.
Is the statement in some way unclear? Care to suggest a rephrasing?
A better phrasing would be "subsidized healthcare".
Not any more [1]. The Trump administration has sufficiently weakened ACA that you can now get insurance that isn't sufficient to prevent you from getting a huge bill if you have the temerity to have a heart attack or something else expensive like that.
Or you might not even have insurance, since they also killed the tax penalty for not having insurance.
Fiber optical connexion cost +- 30 euros and "unlimitted" 4G LTE mobile data plan cost +- 20 euros(including roaming). It's a lot more affordable than what AT&T or Comcast offer...
That's not a typo. salt.ch/fiber
Also I think the average hides a wider disparity in the US.
On top of that, it does not account for things you may need in one nation but not in another. E.g. cars spring to mind. In the US you need a car in most places even the bigger cities, to get to work for example. In a lot of places in the EU you don't.
The "I don't need it" argument only goes so far. You can't go shop a lot of groceries. You can't transport bigger items. You can't go on a road trip. You travel according to whatever public transport affords you.
I might just as well say "I don't need it" in regards to healthcare. You don't need it until you do, but then you can't afford it.
For example, you can have a high standard of living without owning a car (and all the 'consumption' that goes along with that), in cities that have good public transport, and a good infrastructure/environment for walking and cycling. In much of the US, that's difficult or impossible.
And Europeans are hardly ascetics. It’s fair to assume that in both places, if people had more means to consume they would.
Not the parent commenter but why do you think they would if they could?
Consumption habits across borders aren't as obvious to me because of advertising, culture, etc.
Yes. But my point is that not all consumption can be considered equal in terms of the wellbeing and quality of life that it provides.
For example, if I was spending $5000 per year on car payments and fuel for my commute to work, that's a lot of 'consumption'. But it isn't something that makes me happy or feel fulfilled.
On the other hand, suppose I live in a city where I can walk, cycle, or ride a tram to work. My quality of life might be equal or better - yet I'm consuming $5000 less.
The humidity is the main attraction to the show and cares little for shade, peachtree, sycamore or otherwise.
I'm not a fan of cars. It'd be nice if they were toys for the rich and Australian cities were built around everyone walking around or catching public transport.
Living centrally in Paris, London etc is not cheap.
http://datatopics.worldbank.org/consumption/detail
I wouldn't be surprised if the American value was grossly inflated by things like expensive healthcare and education, while the study in for example Sweden possibly didn't even count free healthcare visits, free college education, free school meals for everyone, free public transit for kids or free kindergarten as household consumption.
https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...
* How we do in terms of relative consumption along the percentiles, since that reveals how well we distribute consumption among working people. I believe that by moving savings into consumption we increase aggregate welfare, as spending by the people that receive the cash injection will end up generating more consumption than there would have otherwise been. However, I suspect that the current level of income inequality is also what's preventing massive inflation from occurring so it's something of a wash.
* As well as how our even lower percentiles compare to other economically developed countries. 5% of America is something like 15 million people, or ~two Washington State's
* Lastly, it might be interesting to look at what people have to do to earn the consumption they get at the 20th percentile. A lot of people in America are out their working 80 hours in minimum wage jobs to do that.
As a soap box: imo the biggest issues with American socioeconomics today are more about mobility and safety nets than about how much the poorest can absolutely afford. Like, do we do a good job of enabling people to improve their situation and do we do a good job of helping people stay there once they have made it through e.g., helping with substance abuse problems, mental health, and unexpected debt burdens, among other things.
So all it says it that the poor from US consume more than middle class in Europe. Of course, being to the US and seeing how they replace things disregarding the environment I'm not surprised by that conclusion.
I'm earning six figures in London and I'm consuming a lot less than the poorest in US and try to reduce it as a maximum so my carbon footprint is small.
When I went to France I saw so many people bringing their own containers to the supermarket which was great because it reduces consumption.
"The high consumption of America’s “poor” doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace, like Spain, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. "
this is actually a huge negative and flips the result on it's head if you look at it from a climate change perspective. EDIT: if they have to consume so much more, surely they are not having it better
"The high consumption of America’s “poor” doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace"
EU has absorbed many eastern countries that where under USSR influence
What I'm saying, is the proper response to a criticism of lynching, is to agree with the criticism, not argue that the crimes (no matter how horrid) of those who are making the criticism renders the criticism invalid.
Maybe we should look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
So what are you talking about exactly?
This literally does not happen in normal operation (because train stations security or police aided by social workers will direct people to homeless shelters, or make them leave if they refuse homeless shelters), and only happened a few times during the height of the refugee crisis in the big cities with new arrivals coming in at a rate where the refugee and homeless shelters in those major arrival cities were overloaded and bureaucracy was too slow to process and re-distribute these arrivals quick enough to avoid some camping in train stations.
The wikipedia article explicitly states:
> This is a list of countries (not all 195) by the homeless population present on any given night. Different countries often use different definitions of homelessness, making direct comparisons of numbers complicated.[3]
For Germany it further states: >*Includes around 350000 refugees in temporary housing or awaiting asylum.
Temporary housing might be shit, but it's still better than living in a cardboard box on skid row. Unless your government provided temporary housing is a literal cage, of course, but we don't have those here.
In Germany "homeless" includes all people who do not have a permanent residence, i.e. people living on the streets but also people who e.g. temporarily live with relatives or friends, e.g. because they have a hard time finding an affordable place in the overcrowded big cities.
PS: I was "homeless" for about a year in Germany. I was looking for a new place after uni, couldn't find one due to overcrowding in the city I was looking in, and stayed in my parents' house during that time, just like I did in my youth. I had a better life incl more privacy there than I previously had with some roommate arrangements. But I was technically homeless under the definition they use for the stats.
I can't believe this is true. They must have different definitions for homeless.
When?
City name?
Station name?
Did you call an ambulance?
Why not?
Lower than France, Germany, and the UK, Sweden, Canada, and Australia. Equal to the Netherlands.
They're semantically European but syntactically not. :-)
i.e. in the OECD countries..
E.g. if you scroll in the article you will find that Germany reports as homeless: "Living temporarily with family and friends due to lack of housing", "Living in institutions"
"Living in institutions" is clarified as: "Including people who stay longer than needed in health institutions needed due to lack of housing; and people in penal institutions with no housing available prior to release".
The US does not count these categories.
Now, it would be interesting to see how the numbers would change if the US actually counted all the millennials who moved back in with their parents because they could not find an affordable place, and all the prisoners and parolees who stay with relatives.
> About half of the surveyed countries also cover people living in non-conventional dwellings and people living temporarily with family and friends due to lack of housing,
> In Sweden the official figure given by the National Board of Health and Welfare includes lots of people who don’t have a permanent home but aren’t living in shelters or on the streets. For instance, Sweden includes people set to be released from jail within three months and have nowhere to go
In both cases, as a tourist, I never go too far away from the popular places and never been there for most than 3 or 4 days.
Don't know the reasons (honestly) but the homelessness and poverty I've seen in the US is nowhere to be seen in Europe. I repeat, in "popular" places and vicinity.
How do they come out with such numbers? Is the impression of a tourist wrong? Where are the poor and destitute in Europe compared to the US?
Different countries define and count "homeless" in different ways.
Some places will only count rough sleepers, and they'll do that by once a year sending people out to count people who are sleeping on the streets. This obviously severely undercounts those who are homeless.
Other places will have a definition for "statutorily homeless" which will include people living in bread-and-breakfast style accommodation - emergency short term lodgings funded by the state.
https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+colonias&sxsrf=ACYBGNT...
That’s not to say we shouldn’t “do something” about their living condition, just that your post is a non-sequitor. When Sweden accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees, the median income of the country almost certainly went down. But that doesn’t mean everyone became poorer.
To your stuff about Sweden and refugees, income and wealth are related but separate concepts.
Minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour. A full-time minimum wage worker in Texas can surpass the average Bulgarian's monthly wage in under 2.5 weeks.
And that's just the average wage. More than half of the 7 million residents live below that. For every cherry picked colony in Texas, there's several even poorer villages in the post-Soviet states to cancel it out.
Another example is Czech Republic, which has the lowest poverty rate in EU - under 10% before Finland and Netherlands. And yet it's way after them in the wealth list.