“Welcome to America, the Land of Freedom”, read the signs at Washington, DC’s international airport as you line up to have your fingerprints taken and your body cavities searched for mini nuclear devices.
I could have titled this article “Setting the Cat among the Pigeons”. In an attempt to forestall the expected avalanche of disagreement, I confirm my awareness of statistics produced by a wide range of individuals and institutions of widely-varying intent and ideology, and which can “prove” almost anything one cares to prove, GINI coefficients being one easy example. The statistics on which this article is based were not selected carelessly and are not invalidated by a reader’s disaffection.
The United States Is the Best Only at Being the Worst
The US today has the greatest income inequality of all Western nations[1][2], surpassing China and more than a few undeveloped nations as well. From this, it has the lowest social mobility of most nations[3], meaning that improving one’s station in life is becoming increasingly impossible. If your parents are not educated and wealthy, you will never be either, and the American Dream is dead. The US today has the smallest middle class and the largest lower class of all major nations, the middle class having been mostly eviscerated in 2008, that process completing itself today, and will probably never now recover. Americans carry the largest amount of personal debt among all nations[4], including credit card debt and increasingly unrepayable student loans, and the US now leads the world in personal bankruptcies[5]. Since 2008, according to the US government’s own statistics, the US has the lowest percentage of home ownership at 57%[6], ranked 43rd in the world, far below China at 90%[7], and America now has a virtual epidemic of homelessness compared to most other nations, with untabulated millions of homeless families with children...........read more.........
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