Nanny State? Part of the article... U.S. Ranks Dead Last In Overall Social Spending http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x911021
Social Security and Medicare spending is about $1.5T of a $14T GDP. That alone is more than 10% of GDP. I guess DemocraticUnderground.com doesn't consider those two things (among others) to be social contracts. All I can say to that is:
This article is a little misleading. The U.S. is pretty close to the bottom but technically not dead last. Australia, Slovak Republic and Israel are worse. As are Iceland Estonia Chile Turkey Korea Mexico Brazil Russian Federation South Africa China and India It's an interesting report if you guys want to look at the report and actually learn something. We're at 16.20% of GDP for public social spending and 25.6 for net social spending (which includes private donations, I think). France is #1 with 28.40% Public social spending
Another report. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Unemployment-Rate.aspx?Symbol=FRF The unemployment rate in France was last reported at 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. From 1983 until 2010, France's Unemployment Rate averaged 9.54 percent reaching an historical high of 11.80 percent in March of 1994 and a record low of 7.30 percent in February of 1983. (More unemployed need more social services, no?)
The original writer has corrected his numbers: Which brings the US to 25th of 34. I went to EQ5.xls on this page to look at the underlying data. It seems, for all the talk of health care (insurance?) reform, we're spending almost exactly the same as everyone else on "public health", whatever that means, while spending the same amount of GDP on "private health". Which means we're at least doubling the health spending by GDP of every other country. We're spending much less on "pensions" and "working age support" than the countries above us, which makes sense when you think about how many other countries have more government workers as a % of workforce.
I'm sorry, i posted the wrong link. http://www.politicususa.com/en/u-s-ranks-dead-last-in-overall-social-spending
The point of the article is that our deficit is not caused by high social spending, because countries with high social spending (per capita) have much less deficit (per capita) than us. When you compare nations, there is no correlation between social spending and deficit.
The point is wrong. Using an exaggerated figure of $1T for military spending, Obama proposed to spend nearly $4T overall, $3T of that being social spending, and at a $1.6T deficit. So if we eliminate the armed forces entirely, along wit DHS and DoE, we'd still have a $600B deficit.
A canned response. Did anyone read the actual article? Here's an article I just saw, perfect for you idiots. It has big colorful simple graphs. See Spot. See Jane with Spot. No, Jane, no! http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/taxes-richest-americans-charts-graph
The original one or the corrected one? I think I'll wait until it's fully corrected, or maybe the movie comes out.