l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Warner Todd Huston August 25, 2014
Fraser Nelson of The Spectator did some number crunching recently and found
a shocking fact: Britain is poorer than every State in the USA but one.
As Nelson wrote on August 22, “if Britain were to somehow leave the EU and
join the US … we’d be the 2nd-poorest state in the union, poorer than
Missouri. Poorer than the much-maligned Kansas and Alabama. Poorer than any
state other than Mississippi, and if you take out the south east we’d be
poorer than that too.”
This is both shocking and disheartening, especially to American liberals.
The liberals all assume that Great Britain is still the jewel of Europe
pointing to its nearly 100 percent socialist-styled government as a model of
perfection. But it turns out that decades of socialism has laid Britain low
making it worse off than every state in the USA but Mississippi…. and with
Britain’s jihadi problem, one would think it would be better to be a bit
poorer in Mississippi than be forced to live in Britain!
Nelson calculated his statistic by the following method: “You take the US
figures for GDP per state, divide it by population to come up with a GDP per
capita figure. Then get the equivalent figure for Britain: I used the
latest Treasury figures which also chime with the OECD’s.”
It’s not surprising that America’s best-paid 10 per cent are wealthier
than top 10 per cent. That fits our general idea of America: a country
where the richest do best while the poorest are left to hang. The figures
just don’t support this. As the below chart shows, middle-earning Americans
are better-off than Brits. Even lower-income Americans, those at the bottom
20 per cent, are better-off than their British counterparts. The only group
actually worse-off are the bottom 5 per cent.
So, for all of Britain’s communist-styled government polices, its free
homes for people, its supposedly wonderful free healthcare, its old age
pensions that kick in earlier than ours (though the retirement age is going
up soon), for all these social welfare programs and “nets,” well, the
truth is they are all poorer than any of us.
So, they’ve exchanged freedom and liberty for a lower quality of life than
even our poorest areas. |
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