We are Losing America

Right before our eyes..

We rank last, or close to last in nearly every single category..

The decline of America

You're a communist!

Pinko homo commie, thank you very much..

Uhm, may I just comment to boxerdc..

Have you heard of the financial crisis? It started in USA. It therefore hit USA the worst. Besides, that list puts USA as among the worst of the best (the 20 "best" nations in the world, in terms of Development). On a lighter note, Sweden is better than you. Yay for us

You think USA is poor? Try Zimbabwe

Is that a suggestion of what to strive for?

Less than 2% of the American population is living under the so-called Poverty Threshold

What I mean is, USA isn't doing as badly as those numbers seem to say

Interesting. I get the impression there's a lot of cherry picking going on there, and not so much of a complete picture, but they are interesting statistics nonetheless.

umm.. no.
"Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature with roughly 13 to 17% living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

I may be wrong in this, but looking at the other 19 countries used which the US is compared to, only three use a conflict based system (similar to the USA) and none of them have a written constitution.

I haven't bothered looking up each political system to be sure, but I'm fairly sure I'm right in that.

The indicators used are ones which are naturally skewed to favour countries that power-share or have consensus democracies.

It is one of those odd anomalies that countries which are conflict-oriented fair better without a constitution, whilst those which are consensus democracies fair better with one.

Also you use a federal system without using a consensus democracy.

For some odd reason, and I don't know why, there are anomalies in performance and 'societal standards' with regards to democracies that don't fit into the set ideals. That is one which is power sharing will use a federal system and have a written democracy, whilst those that are conflict-oriented use a parties system without a constitution. As soon as you change that (like in the USA) the indicators suddenly change.

Look at Lijphart's work (but don't accept a single one of his conclusions, he is quite frankly, wrong in his conclusions, but sound in his research). It's weird.

I see that information is from 2010 so my thought is that the stats seem to more reflect the bad economy and not really America prior to the economy.

It was quite shocking though.

The article is from 2010. Many of the stats are older. The poverty data is from 2000

Thank you, Tino. I broke my eyeglasses and it hurts my eyes to really focus so I mostly skim through things.

The two things that bother me the most is the disparity in incomes, and infant mortality..

We have the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world.. That says something horrific about how we treat our people.

And if you remove the top 1% of incomes from the graphs, we drop to fourth from the bottom in income levels.

Can someone please educate me. I heard on the news a couple of years ago that there was a case of a baby being kept on life support and the parents had no money or insurance.

I heard that because of this George W passed a law/bill that said doctors can terminate life support on someone if there is no money or insurance to pay the bill. Is this true?