Thread: What caused the recession?

Originally Posted by riooso

The rest of the world has free health care. Britain, Greece, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and almost all the rest of the EU are going broke. Health care or, anything else, that is handled by a bunch of bureaucrats will never fare well! Yes we need to fix our health care system but it is not all that broken, just expensive.

It's true but you forgot the examples that are not favorable to US. Counting who's broke and who isn't is better measured by something like say the ratio of external debt/GDP. US owes 1 year worth (same as Italy), Canada 7 months, Russia 4 months, China less than a month.

Originally Posted by riooso

Parts of Europe are letting old people go without operations because it is not "cost effective".

I read in the news that a week or two ago, part of US decided to let young people go without operations, because there was no money. As far as leaving people go due to cost effectiveness, that's been going on in US for decades, except that the decision is made by private insurers rather than government employees. Somehow I don't think the person who gets the short end cares too much who cuts the pay check to the 'decider'.

Originally Posted by riooso

We produce more goods, GNP, than any country in the world. 2.5 times Japan, 6 times Britain.....

As I posted earlier the relevant numbers are per-capita. Then there's the question of whether you can just call GNP goods, or if it's a good measure of useful stuff. For example Qatar and Luxemburg have almost twice the GDP per capita of US, but I'm not so sure that by itself is meaningful. Luxemburg, for example, has external debt worth 40 years.

I agree that on average the US workers work longer, but that doesn't translate into a resulting better quality of life. The thing is that when you strip the political hot buttons and ask questions about the substance of things only, the answers people give are very different. The free market is nice as pure ideological concept, but just as socialism, when put to practice most people don't really like the results.

Of course, you're perfectly entitled to your rant, but I thought it would be worth correcting some misrepresentations.