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Ayn Rand would be crying right now if she weren’t dead and/or a sociopath. The Neoliberal experiment America started in the 1980s has now yielded results, and they are poor.
From Bloomberg View’s Hardheaded Socialism Makes Canada Richer Than US:
On July 1, Canada Day, Canadians awoke to a startling, if pleasant, piece of news: For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American.
According to data from Environics Analytics WealthScapes published in the Globe and Mail, the net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, while the average American household’s net worth was $319,970.
A few days later, Canada and the U.S. both released the latest job figures. Canada’s unemployment rate fell, again, to 7.2 percent, and America’s was a stagnant 8.2 percent. Canada continues to thrive while the U.S. struggles to find its way out of an intractable economic crisis and a political sine curve of hope and despair.
But it gets worse!
Canada’s Socialist Healthcare System (and that’s actual socialism not Obamacare) has proven superior to America’s insurance industry cartel system.
From Reuters:
Canadians live about three years longer and are healthier than Americans, and the lack of universal healthcare in the United States may be a factor…
A healthy 19-year-old Canadian can expect to have 52 more years of perfect health versus 49.3 more years for Americans.Canadians have a universal healthcare service, which is free at the point of care, whereas Americans’ access to health insurance is usually based on employment, income through Medicaid, or age through Medicare, and not universal, according to the study.
If it is any consolation US insurance companies make more money.
But Canadians don’t have the American Dream! They don’t have the opportunities to work hard and get ahead, to have it better than their parents had it. To move from one socioeconomic position to another…
From Sutton Trust & Carnegie Corporation UK and US much less socially mobile than Australia and Canada:
Children from poorer families in Australia and Canada have a much greater chance of doing well at school, getting into university and earning more in later in life than children in the United States and the United Kingdom…
The latest international research findings, compiled for a two-day summit on social mobility in London organised by the Sutton Trust and Carnegie Corporation of New York, are the first to compare and contrast education and social mobility levels in the four major English-speaking countries. Many of the key findings are based on a new book Parents to Children published to coincide with the summit by the US-based Russell Sage Foundation.
Australia and Canada are around twice as mobile as the UK and US, according to the analysis produced for the summit by Professor Miles Corak from the University of Ottawa, one of the world’s leading experts on mobility.
Hmmmm well, you know America is still awesome and stuff, uh, freedom. Hot Dogs… bedazzle.
From New York Times:
Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.
But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage…
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints…
In 2006 Professor Corak reviewed more than 50 studies of nine countries. He ranked Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark as the most mobile, with the United States and Britain roughly tied at the other extreme. Sweden, Germany, and France were scattered across the middle.
Interesting. It is almost like anywhere people let Banksters run amok they have a lot of inequality and social rigidity.
So did Socialism win? Calling Canada socialist is not derogatory especially concerning its healthcare policies. Which begs the question – if socialism leads to better outcomes in wealth, health, and opportunity why shouldn’t Americans adopt it? Riddle me that teabaggers.
Now I will engage in one activity America surely leads the world in – preemptive strikes!
Progressives want to improve America not move to Canada (side note: it’s really hard to emigrate to Canada) so the point is not to drag America down put adopt policies that can lift it up. If a country is doing better than us in some areas we should understand why and make changes
17 Comments
You don’t understand the game. If there’re gonna be winners, there hafta be losers. See? That’s just the way God made the world. We can’t all win.
I think a lot of the social mobility thing depends on tuitions and student debt.
My father was agin me gettin the book larnin from a fancy schmancy University, so I ended up paying my own way by working at car washes and fast food restaurants. That was back in the mid ’80′s, my annual tuition + books was < $5000. I'm much better off than he was/is because of my degree and the opportunities it opened up for me.
I can't see anyone being able to put themselves through school nowadays without incurring a huge student debt; and we are taught to avoid debt so that would discourage a lot of bright young people who would benefit greatly from continuing education. That leaves only those whose parents can afford to help them out or just outright pay for it.
Great Diary lets see the GOP defend capitalism when Socialist Canadians have more cash and live longer:)
Those numbers are “means” (i.e., averages), which are dominate by the net worths of the 1%. Here in declining order are the median (midpoint) household networths for 19 countries, including the U.S. and Canada:
Australia $220,000
Italy $160,000
Japan $125,000
United Kingdom $120,000
Switzerland $100,000
Ireland $100,000
France $90,000
Canada $89,000
Norway $83,000
Finland $80,000
Spain $75,000
New Zealand $72,500
Netherlands $70,000
Israel $65,000
China, Taiwan $60,000
Germany $60,000
United States of America $53,000
Sweden $40,000
Denmark $25,000
On Thursday (7/18/2012), Dylan Matthews posted these data in an article on Ezra Klein’s blog at the Washington Post. The data come from this Credit Suisse report (pdf), and I’m presuming that Dylan’s bar graph correctly reflects that data. The big factor here is that these numbers are “medians” (i.e., midpoints) rather than “means” (i.e., averages). A country can have high average wealth, even if 99% of the country have nothing, provided that the 1% are very, very wealthy.
Also, the median household net worth has dropped 40% since 2008. I doubt that the decline has been that sharp in Canada.
In any case, note that the median household in Canada has nearly twice the net worth of the median household in the U.S.
So does this mean we are looking more like a “3rd world” country to Canadiens? They might start there own “paypahs please” programs for illegal americans.
We’re looking like a third-world country to everyone, most especially the majority of our own citizens.
But just to get a quantitative picture of how bad it is. The Wikipedia has two lists of countries by inequality of wealth and by inequality of income. For each list there is a column called GINI, which is an index of inequality of distribution first used in biology. If everyone has the same the index is zero. If someone has it all the index is one.
At the top of the GINI column there are two little triangles. If you click them the list will be sorted by GINI. Look at where the U.S. ranks and whom we rank near.
I tried to emigrate to Canada, they just laughed in my face. There is no escape from this country , unless you want to go somewhere worse. It’s easy enough to go anywhere if you have enough cold cash ( you’ll need gadzillons though, a few mil. doesn’t cut it anymore), then everyone wants you. Better yet be a Dr. & they’ll pay you way. Old Americans like me though are unwelcome and they’re real clear about it.
Tick-tock…
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/26/the-trouble-with-bubbles/
There is probably no way at this point to deflate the bubbles in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. without causing considerable pain. It would probably still be better to take steps now than allow for even more people to become caught up in the bubble.
———–
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/26/nafta-on-steroids/
Mexico and Canada had been trying to secure a spot at the TPP table for months prior to the G20, and it became a leading story in both countries. Their anxiety played nicely into Obama’s hands, allowing the U.S. trade representative to put humiliating entry conditions on both countries — essentially giving these NAFTA neighbors a second-rate status, or what in Spanish is called convidados de palo (to be invited but without a say). Neither Canada nor Mexico will be able to see any TPP text until they finally join the negotiations in December, following the required 90-day U.S. congressional approval process. Once at the table, they will not be able to make any changes to the finished text or propose any new text in the finished chapters. There is a very real possibility that the existing TPP countries, the United States in particular, will use the following months to fashion a trap for the TPP latecomers.
Thanks for that input. I’ve been trying to make sense out of that data for a few days now and couldn’t get a clue. If you apply a 40% drop to Canadian wealth, it would put them almost identical to the U.S. But, that still wouldn’t bring Australia and the U.K. into line.
Search consumer/household debt levels for those countries as well.
We’ve seen this movie before?
And to think, a mouse set both countries on their trajectories.
Here, it was Mickey.
There, it was Mouseland.
Many Americans do not understand that the current, corrupt and non-defendable system of Health “Care” Insurance in the USA depletes a small business owner’s pockets in two separate but equally totally destructive ways. This is a problem the average Canadian does not face.
When an Americans who is self-employed or who works for a small business is forced to pay a huge amount for their health insurance, that is money right out of their pocket. But since other Middle Income earners face the same onerous problem, it also means that there is much much much less money for those other Americans to spend buying the product(s) that the small business owner or employee has placed on the American market.
This “tax” on Americans means that financially, we simply cannot make it. The “health care insurance tax” situation is devastating our personal economy. While adding a huge and overwhelming financial reward with which to enrich the already wealthy health insurance executives.
And of course, that hefty, mandated profit to America’s Big Insurers ensures their ability to continue to own Congress. Anyone who believes that the ACA was a “start” and that “soon” we will have ourselves a fully implemented Single Payer Universal HC plan is smoking a much stronger type of drug than I have available to me – and I live in Calif’s Golden Triangle.
My spouse’s small publishing firm survives only because of book sales to China. To China. To that nation I learned about at my parent’s dinner table, when I was told to lick my plate clean because kids in China weren’t getting food. Now the tables are reversed.
We’re still in pretty good shape, but the Harper termites are eating away at our socialist underpinnings and we may yet fall through the floor. Since so much of Cdn governing is done at the ministry level, ie, through regulations rather than laws. We have already lost a lot of services and funding has been cut in ways that fly under the radar.
Also, most Cdns aren’t really all that interested in politics (yes, even we find it boring) so they are astonished to find that, for instance, our troops aren’t peacekeepers, that our hospitals are becoming privatized, that many of our environmental and information programs are being cut (eg Experimental Lakes Area) or undermined (eg, Statistics Canada).
I’m a bit stuck on the ‘hard-headed socialisim’ meme, DS. I know the NDP made some great strides in the last election, but if it made any big changes to policy already, I’d be interested in hearing (not doubting, just don’t know).
In any event the piece did mention how much the income from the tar sands field (yukky oil to China) mattered, Martin ‘resisting the call of deregulation’ an explanation of mortgages not having such a large effect, but then the piece says:
“Martin also slashed funding to social programs. He foresaw that crippling deficits imperiled Canada’s education and health- care systems, which even his Conservative predecessor, Brian Mulroney, described as a “sacred trust.” He cut corporate taxes, too. Growth is required to pay for social programs, and social programs that increase opportunity and social integration are the best way to ensure growth over the long term. Social programs and robust capitalism are not, as so many would have you believe, inherently opposed propositions. Both are required for meaningful national prosperity.”
Did you read down to their immigration policy?
And Harper? Will he be able/was he able to effect all this?
Anyhoo, Reihan Salam thinks the numbers are wrong, and not apples and oranges, and agrees that things in the US would look pretty different if we instituted a mandatory one year prison sentence for ‘say, taking a job while over-staying a visa’.
Anyway, beyond health care, maybe a few other programs, Canada may have a more mixed economy that the author pretends. Strange piece, anyway. Wish we had more Canadians here to clue us in.
All these folks (here’s another Canadian at Huffpo)may be doing small hatchet jobs in the name of capitalism, but what we have here is anything but: we have lemon socialism.
I’m utterly in favor of ramped up socialistic programs/institutions here, and have been collecting links for a post, but I’d rather see clearer examples that the Bloomberg piece.
And I hope I don’t sound like a nit-picking grumpus, DW. I love the subject. ;o)
Mr.wd wondered aloud if resources in Canada have been nationalized (I’m for it) but it seems at least not the oil, some folks folks want that changed. This says the tar sands are 3/4 foreign owned, and yes; I should have known that from all the digging I did on the XL pipeline; shoot.
Anyway, I hope you’ll say which programs besides health care are publicly financed. We need good models, and to rethink socialist ideas, and sell them to Americans soon.
We once had a National Energy Plan (NEP) and our own nationalized gas stations, PetroCan, but the Alberta oil folks hated *hated* *HATED* that and eventually we got Alberta OilFriend S Harper who re-privatized all that.
Currently, there is not much nationalization. In Ontario we *used* to have a Provincial Savings Bank which actually turned a profit, but that was closed down by the odious Mike Harris. We have crown land, wherein the mineral and forest rights are retained by Her Majesty in right of Canada, but that just means the govt can ‘lease’ them out for pennies on the dollar — and future consideration (ie, directorships).
About the only real counterweight we have is the First Nations, whose rights the Cdn courts have consistently upheld. Although, S Harper does not seem to think that he has to pay any attention to them, Parliament or indeed, anyone.
There are a few Canucks here, eg, me, hpschd, mafr (Alberta, I think) and Petrocelli (who says he is in Toronto, but *really* he is in Mississauga).
Curse my broken memory, I knew some of those names.
So is the Bloomberg piece even close to the mark? At the other site I write, our Canadian friend is gone for now, or I’d have asked him, given his close relationship to the government. And really, I’d love to hear I’ve gotten it wrong, even knowing it may take too many issues, institutions, etc. to figure into the mix. Just want the record as close to the truth as possible, is all.
Thanks so much, hotflash.