America is a lot more poor than these statistics let on when compared to the rest of the first world. Furthermore debt is not considered in many such analyses.
US wealth per adult is higher than Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
The median at any snapshot in time is materially better off, but also much more stressed out than people in other wealthy countries about whether they might end up in a very bad economic situation, due to how there is barely any bottom. Subjectively, middle-income Americans don't feel well off and don't feel secure in even what they have. For example, numbers vary based on the specific survey, but about 60-70% of Americans consistently feel high levels of stress about money. I'm not sure that's a course that would've been taken by a 50th-percentile person trying to optimize their own well-being?
One reason Scandinavian countries tend to come near the top of those "happiest countries in the world" surveys (though I don't like the term "happy" for it) isn't from any particular joyfulness, but because the typical household subjectively has very low levels of economic fear or stress. Some of the survey questions that go into that score include things like, do you feel economically secure, do you worry about losing your housing, etc. A huge percentage of even middle-class Americans spend a lot of their time worrying about that (including my family), while the majority of middle-income people from say Denmark don't consider it a big risk to worry about.
The US has consciously made that trade-off. See how even Sanders doesn't propose to raise taxes on people making under $250,000, and Biden is up at $400,000. The top income tax rate in the Scandinavian countries kicks in at around $70,000.
It’s not dissimilar from that of Germany (0.935 vs 0.939), and it’s higher than that of most other OECD nations.
As for average life expectancy: the average is brought down by outliers. In general, the US has a higher homicide rate, a higher motor vehicle death rate, a higher obesity rate, and a higher opioid/drug death rate. These external factors all bring down the average life expectancy number more substantially than in other countries: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/05/16/the-explanator...
Even if you assume the lack of a safety net causes the symptoms above, my point is that the lack of a safety net is deliberate, because even our left wing party promises not to raise taxes enough to actually fund a more robust safety net.
Apart from that, the life expectancy of white Marylanders is 80 years, just a bit shorter than for Germans (80.9 years). But 30% of our state’s population is from a minority group that was enslaved on Maryland plantations, and then denied civil rights until very recently. If bill gates had been born in the county where I live as a Black kid, he would have gone to a segregated school until middle school. Their life expectancy is several years lower, due to the legacy of those injustices.
Many of the differences between the US and European countries are misdiagnosed as matters of general policy (safety net, healthcare). But when you break it down, much of the difference is actually the result of the country’s history and large Black-white gaps in many indicators. The median white household, for example, has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household—a fact that plays a huge role in people feeling economically insecure. But those gaps can not necessarily be fixed with the same policy choices that European countries apply to their general populations. That wealth gap, for example, has not changed since the 1960s, when Maryland schools were still segregated—despite a large growth in general social welfare spending since that time. It is a unique challenge that requires targeted solutions, and there is no political will to implement those policies. These policy challenges simply have no parallel in Germany.
It's debatable if this is able to adequately capture all forms of non-cash transfers (like food stamps). To get around this, the World Bank uses consumption as a metric for well-being. By that metric, the poorest 20% consume more than the average person in most OECD countries[1][2], including Canada, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Japan, Denmark, New Zealand, and Iceland.
[1] https://www.nber.org/chapters/c12831.pdf
[2] https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...
The maximum US social security pension is $49,680 USD.[2]
Obviously it scales based on income, but at least for US tech workers, you're likely to get close to the maximum amount since you'd be earning over $110,000 for a significant chunk of your career.
The US has a much higher maximum pension amount than Canada, where it's $1,176 CAD or $889 USD. You do get an old age benefit on top of $613 CAD, which bring it up to $1,351 USD or $16,212 USD per year.
[1]https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1123&intPageId=47...
[2]https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/ssptw/2010-2011/ame...
It's complex, but if you have a high salary it looks like the basic pension is NOK 89 872, so another $9,889 USD, for a total of $42,105 USD?
What’s most relevant for this discussion is the system for people who are earning now for retirement in the future. The amounts are adjusted yearly, but the current maximum rate is about $14300. This is tax funded, and so doesn’t come out of your disposable income. Gaps from illness, unemployment, military service and caregiving are covered. When you start withdrawal, the accrued amount is adjusted for changes in the average national income and your life expectancy based on your age. I.e. the money is paid back to you at a rate that draws your balance to zero at the expected date of your death. If you live longer, it keeps going of course, funded by the people who die earlier. The maximum rate is therefore achieved by retiring at the oldest age (74), or roughly $97000/year with today’s numbers. This would require making well above the national average salary starting at age 13.
If you max out your income based pension described above, the base pension gets reduced substantially. Looks like it can go as low as $4300/year of benefits currently.
On top of these two pension types, your employer must save at least 2% of your income up to $134000, and pay for insurance that covers contributions if you become disabled. The employer must cover all associated costs. These plans vary a lot and have no maximum.
I will add that you need substantially less income in retirement in Norway since you won’t be paying for healthcare, and property taxes are extremely low.
That is demonstrably false.
I am not sure I fully comprehend the remark "The poverty line has not scaled with the increase in expenditures associated with modern living." It adjusts with inflation, and the inflation metric tries to stay relevant: the CPI basket includes housing, medical treatment and drugs, tuition, TVs, cell phones, etc. I guess the criticism comes down to the idea that somehow a cell phone should somehow adjust from an assumption of 0 from times before cell phones were popular?
If we do something like that, it sounds really hard to get things right (CPI is already pretty hard to get right). What would it mean to say that standard of living improvements are outpacing alleviation of poverty? That sort of metric seems something suited for sophisticated research, not a standard government metric.
Another important thing to do, one might note, that addresses some of the concern about losing track, is to take a fixed proportion of people - e.g. the bottom quintile of income earners - and study various aspects affecting their lives. This is, as I understand it, really widespread.
I know it has some areas that may be under-represented, but in general it tracks the same changes in the power of the dollar across multiple categories. Changing what the inflation metrics track would make it an even poorer standard for comparison/tracking.
What would make a better metric?
So the inflation rate doesn’t give you a good picture of the actual increase in the cost of living.
Source?
The US spends more on its social welfare programs, as a share of GDP, than Canada does, and it matches what Australia and Switzerland are spending. The US is close to the OECD middle and a bit behind the UK (OECD figures below):
https://i.imgur.com/5GnDdTp.png
And when it comes to improvements in poverty thanks to our vastly expanded social safety net, you can see that very strikingly represented when you drop out those programs from the calculations (childhood poverty shown below, with and without government aid):
https://i.imgur.com/hqTS3Ck.png
https://i.imgur.com/9aEi2sL.png
The same thing shows up in our homelessness improvement figures from the past 20 years. The housing first program implemented by the Bush Administration and sustained by the Obama Administration - aka a government program - was almost solely responsible for the huge decrease in US homelessness.
The US social safety net has expanded rather massively in the past 40 years. Structurally the biggest problem the US has when it comes to its social safety net, is it's all haphazard and often poorly administered. The US isn't very good at running social safety nets, it's chaotic and critical parts of it are managed in very different ways state to state. We're not getting enough bang for our buck on that spending, we need to do better. We're spending a lot of money and the results are often not good enough (which we frequently see with government spending in the US). For example, if the US were spending per capita on our healthcare system what the UK is, we could nearly double - maybe up to 40%-45% - the number of people we're covering with free healthcare at minimal additional cost.
US GDP is 21 trillion, social program spending is under a trillion.
Social expenditures are here: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2016-Social-Expenditure-Upda...
As defined by the OECD, social program spending includes social security, Medicare, and education (each of which are $700-900 billion expenses).
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted.
Typically, when someone is complaining about the lack of a social safety net in the US, they mean in terms of services received, rather than money spent.
As the above quote shows, you obviously know that because of various insane inefficiencies (often caused or abetted by perverse incentives at the interface between the public and private sectors) the point you're making of how much is spent in terms of % of GDP doesn't actually refute the complaints (about how little is being done for those in need) that you are objecting to.
So. We spend a heck of a lot, and we don't have a decent social safety net.
It's also worth noting that where social safety net programs are being poorly run by the government, this can sometimes be traced to politically motivated shenanigans and deliberate mismanagement.
When you measure that, the poorest 20% of Americans have a superior level of welfare to the average person in most OECD countries.
You can see on table 6.5 in the study linked below that lowest quintile households (by income) consumed an average of $57,049 goods and services per household, which is just under $22k per person. Putting the lowest 20% of the US in the top half of OECD countries for that year.