10 ms·

Doesn't comparing income after tax make it a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to begin with? Those taxes don't disappear. Those taxes buy services (natio

by remon 12y ago

Doesn't comparing income after tax make it a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to begin with? Those taxes don't disappear. Those taxes buy services (national healthcare and free education comes to mind) that US middle class citizens would have to pay for with their net income. Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison (if such a thing can be reliably quantified)

jnbiche 12y ago
Agreed. So the actual situation in the U.S. is actually worse than it is portrayed here -- which is already not a pretty picture.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  It's really not that bad. The U.S. / French per capita difference in 2010 looks to have been about $5000, if I squint at the graph. That's $20,000 after taxes for a family of four. U.S. out-of-pocket costs for health care[1] and education[2] aren't nearly that high, especially if, as the article claims, they're only counting real cash income and not employee-paid health premiums and other benefits. [1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm [2] https://www.salliemae.com/assets/Core/how-America-pays/howamericapays2013.pdf https://www.salliemae.com/assets/Core/how-America-pays/howam...
mcv 12y ago
Excellent point. So while the US middle class seems to be one of the richest in the world according to the graphs, they're actually doing a lot worse than that, due to the lack of government services.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  I think when you factor in purchasing power parity it goes the other way. Food and non-coastal housing in the US is pretty cheap. Also, it's much cheaper to live well in a certain style in the US away from the coasts than in Europe. Bubba has a large house, two trucks, a few acres of land, ATVs, a hunting cabin, and hunting licenses. Francois has a small house, pretty much no land, and a single small sedan. Francois might make more money in absolute terms but Bubba would never agree to swap.
  - david927 12y ago
    Unless you have any health issues or have kids that want to go to college. Then it goes the other way. Trust me, as an American who lives in France, Francois wouldn't swap either.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - digitalengineer 12y ago
      And so both get what they want. Both are used to 'their' way of living. More freedom would scare Francois because it also means less governement in health care, child-support, rent-support, 3 years of unemployment checks, etc etc.
      - epi8 12y ago
        Can we stop saying things like "more freedom"? Freedom is really poorly defined even to an individual, and tends to lead to sentences like "they hate our freedom". You could very well argue that freedom means absolutely no laws, absolutely no government, no public sector, period. You could also very well argue that freedom means being able to be confident that you have access to medical care, education, and child-support regardless of who you are, or your income level. Freedom doesn't actually _mean_ anything anymore, it's just a political catch-phrase. Can I rephrase your post and say "less government support would scare Francois..."?
        digitalengineer 12y ago
        Of course. I should have said freedom of choice. Francois has less choice. About a third of his wages (and 20% of everything he buys) is used for the different types of government support. In return, he has the welfare-state benefits.
        vidarh 12y ago
        Still bad. I grew up in Norway. I moved to the UK at 25. Employment rights and social welfare in the UK is a joke compared to in Norway - the UK is "US light" in those respects. Yet I felt I had much more freedom of choice in Norway: Becoming truly destitute in Norway is pretty much only possible if you refuse to apply for government support. This, to me, meant I was free to make a lot of decisions without considering consequences that would put me at substantial risk in the UK, and much more so in the US. It is hard to describe the feeling. I've mentioned before, how I started my first company (an ISP) pretty much on a whim because we were dissatisfied with the available ISPs; we threw together a business plan, found an angel investor, found offices and moved into them (literally; three of us lived there for a while) in the span of a few months. During this time, not once did the potential consequences of failing enter my mind, for the simple reason that there'd pretty much not be any consequences: I'd be able to get government support if I needed it, and I'd "just" go back to my studies or find another job. Not really needing to worry about healthcare, or housing, or whether or not you might starve, are important forms of freedom to me. I'd take that over a few percent lower taxes any day, and I'd argue that I get more freedom of choice from those benefits than what few percent more disposable income could buy me in other ways. > About a third of his wages (and 20% of everything he buys) is used for the different types of government support. If Francois makes enough to pay 1/3 of his wages in income taxes, he's earning enough that he'd pay roughly 1/3 of his wages in taxes in many pats of the US too. Sure, if Francois went to live in Utah, he'd be better off, tax wise. If he were to go to California, on the other hand, the difference would be minimal. VAT makes up very little of the typical tax burden. I'm in the UK, and 20% VAT translates to about 4% of my gross wage, because most of my income does not go to products that are taxed at the 20% bracket (for starters, I pay tax with some of them; then I pay my mortgage, and so on; and food is zero-rated). Tax differences are not as great as people tend to think. My tax burden in Norway was about 1-2 percentage points higher than in the UK. A salary giving me the same purchasing power in Silicon Valley, would cut my tax bill by about the same as my added costs for healthcare insurance, and certainly wouldn't cover my increased transport costs... I did the maths for this to excruciating detail because we were considering moving to the US at one point. There may be specific income levels where the differences are more pronounced due to differences in tax policies, and certainly some countries / states are more or less expensive (as I learned the other day: stay clear of Belgium... )
bertil 12y ago
There is no “before tax” values for any other similarly wealthy country: tax data collection elsewhere is done after most taxes, actually significantly more tax, that pay for free and better public education, free and better healthcare, etc. In anything, an after tax over-estimates US middle class wealth compared to Europe and Canada.
vaadu 12y ago
Free education? That only comes by learning from other people's mistakes. If a classroom and professional teachers are involved it's anything but free. They cost big bucks.
- danbruc 12y ago
  School and university are free, i.e. already paid with taxes, in Germany. The same goes for health care, although it is technically not a tax.
- viraptor 12y ago
  Free, as in everyone paid for it collectively (via taxes) and you don't need to pay directly to the college/university anymore. Not free as in noone pays.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    The phrase often used in the UK is "free at the point of delivery" - it was one of the founding principles of the NHS: http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/about/Pages/nhscoreprinciples.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/about/Pages/nhscoreprinc... Pretty much everyone knows that the NHS is paid by taxpayers (NB I have met people working the UK public sector who had never given a moments thought to where the money they spent actually comes from, but they are pretty rare).
    - VLM 12y ago
      Its a local mythological belief that if you remove universal services which basically everyone requires from our universal tax collection system and insert vast teams of middlemen competing with each other to build a dilbertian confuseopoly, that those highly paid middlemen none the less somehow magically reduce aggregate net total cost to the society. Which would be hilarious as a parody if it wasn't being presented as factual policy.
      - arethuza 12y ago
        I wouldn't hold up the NHS as the best possible health system but it does kind of work given the relatively small amount of money we pay into it - it is telling that the book by the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, called his book about its creation "In Place of Fear": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
saalweachter 12y ago
National healthcare and free education? What country are you talking about again?
flexie 12y ago
Exactly. The income includes retirement and unemployment benefits but doesn't include other public benefits such as public healthcare, public education, public transportation. Being "after tax" it discounts for taxes that are usually higher in Europe but it doesn't discount for expenses that Americans generally have to pay with their income after tax but which many or most Europeans pay via tax (or don't have to pay at all) such as health care, college, third or fourth family car, higher cost for religious activities, higher cost for litigation, higher cost for private security etc.). It is difficult to make good comparisons without taking the public spending into account or deducting for the part of the private income that Americans must allocate to expenses that are paid over the taxes Western European countries. For most Europeans the value of free or almost free public benefits such as public healthcare, public education (from kindergarten to university), public transportation, low crime rate etc. is substantial. Having lived in three European countries (Scandinavian, Iberian and now in the Balkans) and in the US (New York) I have maintained for years that American median wealth seems smaller than Western European wealth and that there is a huge public investment backlog in the US: Roads, airports, subways, railroads, hospitals, schools etc. is very outdated in many places (probably because much of it was built decades before similar infrastructure in Europe). In America I felt like we would have to struggle just to make it into what felt like "middle class life". In Western Europe middle class life is a base from where people build their lives.
- the_watcher 12y ago
  So is the correct way to look at "middle class wealth" to take top line incomes and then determine a list of "middle class services" and then subtract the average cost paid for those services in each country? This has long been a pet peeve of mine in country v. country comparisons.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - buyx 12y ago
    This sort of comparison would also be useful for South Africa, where the cost of maintaining a middle class lifestyle (security, education and healthcare) is relatively high. I usually regard my taxes as charitable donations to the millions who subsist on welfare payments- I've long since learned to view any services I receive from the state as a bonus.
ry0ohki 12y ago
But then I suppose you'd also need to compare the quality? Is the free healthcare paid for taxes as good as the paid healthcare after taxes? I'm not saying it is or it isn't, just makes it hard to compare. If someone doesn't take advantage of the free education what then? Also so much of US taxes goes to military, which countries like Canada benefit from, in a sense our military spending subsidizes Canadian healthcare.
- phillmv 12y ago
  That argument might've held sway prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I don't think that's been true for the past 25 years :).
  - jerf 12y ago
    No, it's certainly been true. Many world economics have avoided military buildups by piggy-backing on the back of the US buildup. In fact I've seen credible arguments that it has actually contributed to world peace significantly to have the US building up the way it has, yes, even despite the wars the US sometimes engaged in, by making it not worth it for anybody else of significant size. The rule about "democracies not going to war" may in fact have been false... it may merely have been Pax Americana happening to coincide with a lot of democracies. As America becomes "enlightened" (heavy scare quotes) and withdraws its military umbrella, a strange world is left behind... how does Europe feel about having effectively no military with which to counter Russia's growing imperial ambitions? It's officially all smiles (or forced grins) while they're stuck depending on Russia now, but I'm sure wheels are spinning behind closed doors even now. If the US elects another President with ambitions to back off the foreign involvement even more, or if the situation deteriorates enough more on this one's watch, what are the odds that Europe has to start building up? And how many other places will have to follow? And how will a social-benefit-addicted continent react to having to fund a military again? They certainly won't be able to maintain the current level of social commitments everywhere. Maybe the US shouldn't be enforcing Pax Americana depending on your own personal values, but don't think for one second it hasn't had its benefits even outside of the US, and don't think that the end of Pax Americana is somehow going to occur with a burst of rainbows and puppies, where we go from one dominantly-powerful military to zero. The number can only go up.
mildtrepidation 12y ago
Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison (if such a thing can be reliably quantified) The fact that it can't be reliably (more specifically, objectively) quantified is why we see so many nearly-worthless income comparisons instead: The content mill has to run, and less responsible journalists are often happy to print arbitrary crap masquerading as information rather than tackling hard topics with hard work (or just accepting that some things can't be accurately compared and moving on to things they can actually address in a meaningful way).
- netcan 12y ago
  The absolute comparisons of "inflation adjusted, PPP adjusted, after tax" income is hairy. But the directions of change should be still useful. The US is still flatter.
VLM 12y ago
The trend over time is still a story. WRT services provided, the USA has not advanced (very much) and the rest of the world has not backslid (very much), so its a fair comparison over time. Also even if the perfect median Canadian vs the perfect median USA is open for debate, for absolutely everyone below median, the graphs indicate its a virtual certainty they'd be better off emigrating out of the USA.
Spooky23 12y ago
They do from my perspective. I live in New York. I have a $200k house with over $6k in taxes, most of which for schools and public safety. Educational programs are flat or being cut, but employee expenses have ballooned over the last 10-15 years. The fully loaded cost of a $80-100k teacher includes about $25k in pension contribution, $15-20k in healthcare, etc. For the police/fire department, it's even crazier (they have 20 year retirement) My personal experience is better than most. We have a good household income, and I've been promoted a few times in the last 10 years. On average our household compensation increases by 7%. But... my net spending power is flat or down a little. Why? Property taxes up 30% since 2006. Health insurance up 150%. Food up ~30%. Utility bills up 50% (NY fail).
Iv 12y ago
When I started looking for a job hey told us, at my French university, that I should aim for 50% to 100% more salary in US for the same "life standard". Having to pay for your kids education and for every medical act quickly adds up.
- refurb 12y ago
  That's a bit of hyperbole. Yes, if you want your kids to go to a top private university, be prepared to pony up $200K. However, if you want them to go a state school, it's MUCH less. And in terms of medical costs, for most people, private insurance covers a vast majority of medical expenses.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    College is still very expensive, and student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy (although the rules on this have been changed for the better). Insurance is pretty expensive and/or comes with caps, plus if you ever have to make a claim on it a bunch of your valuable time goes into an administrative black hole. One thing I really miss about most European countries is that if you are sick enough that you have to go to hospital, not only are you not likely to suffer a severe financial hit, you don't have to deal with any paperwork besides your clinical care instructions. Medical staff tend to be paid fixed salaries rather than on a per-procedure basis and rates for care are standardized. The complexity of the US healthcare market leads to all sorts of weird economic distortions, like this: http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/florida-trauma-centers-charge-outrageous-fees-the-moment-you-come-through/2169148 http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/florida-trauma-centers-c...
    - refurb 12y ago
      I won't argue that the US healthcare system isn't horribly inefficient. My point simply is that the US not some horrible crap hole where everyone goes bankrupt when they get sick and kids can't go to college because it's too expensive.
unclebucknasty 12y ago
>Doesn't comparing income after tax make it a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to begin with? True. OTOH, as long as they are using the same measure as before, then the report has meaning on a relative scale. >Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison This would be interesting. I would like to see one world-wide (for instance, Americans may have been wealthier than Europeans for decades, but we also work harder). It is hard to quantify, but even the comparison of a subjective measure of overall contentment could be revealing.
edj 12y ago
Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison (if such a thing can be reliably quantified) The Economist attempted to quantify quality-of-life and rank nations using the metrics they developed [1]. Their quality-of-life index is a bit out of date - almost 10 years old now - but interesting nonetheless. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index
- remon 12y ago
  That seems a questionable measurement. In their reasoning quality of life goes up if a "variable taking value 1 if country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership" goes up. There is not a developed country in the world where church attendance or trade-union membership is going up. That said, interesting read.

by remon 12y ago

jnbiche 12y ago

Agreed. So the actual situation in the U.S. is actually worse than it is portrayed here -- which is already not a pretty picture.

twoodfin 12y ago
It's really not that bad. The U.S. / French per capita difference in 2010 looks to have been about $5000, if I squint at the graph. That's $20,000 after taxes for a family of four. U.S. out-of-pocket costs for health care[1] and education[2] aren't nearly that high, especially if, as the article claims, they're only counting real cash income and not employee-paid health premiums and other benefits. [1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm [2] https://www.salliemae.com/assets/Core/how-America-pays/howamericapays2013.pdf https://www.salliemae.com/assets/Core/how-America-pays/howam...

mcv 12y ago

Excellent point. So while the US middle class seems to be one of the richest in the world according to the graphs, they're actually doing a lot worse than that, due to the lack of government services.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
I think when you factor in purchasing power parity it goes the other way. Food and non-coastal housing in the US is pretty cheap. Also, it's much cheaper to live well in a certain style in the US away from the coasts than in Europe. Bubba has a large house, two trucks, a few acres of land, ATVs, a hunting cabin, and hunting licenses. Francois has a small house, pretty much no land, and a single small sedan. Francois might make more money in absolute terms but Bubba would never agree to swap.
- david927 12y ago
  Unless you have any health issues or have kids that want to go to college. Then it goes the other way. Trust me, as an American who lives in France, Francois wouldn't swap either.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - digitalengineer 12y ago
    And so both get what they want. Both are used to 'their' way of living. More freedom would scare Francois because it also means less governement in health care, child-support, rent-support, 3 years of unemployment checks, etc etc.
    - epi8 12y ago
      Can we stop saying things like "more freedom"? Freedom is really poorly defined even to an individual, and tends to lead to sentences like "they hate our freedom". You could very well argue that freedom means absolutely no laws, absolutely no government, no public sector, period. You could also very well argue that freedom means being able to be confident that you have access to medical care, education, and child-support regardless of who you are, or your income level. Freedom doesn't actually _mean_ anything anymore, it's just a political catch-phrase. Can I rephrase your post and say "less government support would scare Francois..."?
      - digitalengineer 12y ago
        Of course. I should have said freedom of choice. Francois has less choice. About a third of his wages (and 20% of everything he buys) is used for the different types of government support. In return, he has the welfare-state benefits.
        vidarh 12y ago
        Still bad. I grew up in Norway. I moved to the UK at 25. Employment rights and social welfare in the UK is a joke compared to in Norway - the UK is "US light" in those respects. Yet I felt I had much more freedom of choice in Norway: Becoming truly destitute in Norway is pretty much only possible if you refuse to apply for government support. This, to me, meant I was free to make a lot of decisions without considering consequences that would put me at substantial risk in the UK, and much more so in the US. It is hard to describe the feeling. I've mentioned before, how I started my first company (an ISP) pretty much on a whim because we were dissatisfied with the available ISPs; we threw together a business plan, found an angel investor, found offices and moved into them (literally; three of us lived there for a while) in the span of a few months. During this time, not once did the potential consequences of failing enter my mind, for the simple reason that there'd pretty much not be any consequences: I'd be able to get government support if I needed it, and I'd "just" go back to my studies or find another job. Not really needing to worry about healthcare, or housing, or whether or not you might starve, are important forms of freedom to me. I'd take that over a few percent lower taxes any day, and I'd argue that I get more freedom of choice from those benefits than what few percent more disposable income could buy me in other ways. > About a third of his wages (and 20% of everything he buys) is used for the different types of government support. If Francois makes enough to pay 1/3 of his wages in income taxes, he's earning enough that he'd pay roughly 1/3 of his wages in taxes in many pats of the US too. Sure, if Francois went to live in Utah, he'd be better off, tax wise. If he were to go to California, on the other hand, the difference would be minimal. VAT makes up very little of the typical tax burden. I'm in the UK, and 20% VAT translates to about 4% of my gross wage, because most of my income does not go to products that are taxed at the 20% bracket (for starters, I pay tax with some of them; then I pay my mortgage, and so on; and food is zero-rated). Tax differences are not as great as people tend to think. My tax burden in Norway was about 1-2 percentage points higher than in the UK. A salary giving me the same purchasing power in Silicon Valley, would cut my tax bill by about the same as my added costs for healthcare insurance, and certainly wouldn't cover my increased transport costs... I did the maths for this to excruciating detail because we were considering moving to the US at one point. There may be specific income levels where the differences are more pronounced due to differences in tax policies, and certainly some countries / states are more or less expensive (as I learned the other day: stay clear of Belgium... )

bertil 12y ago

There is no “before tax” values for any other similarly wealthy country: tax data collection elsewhere is done after most taxes, actually significantly more tax, that pay for free and better public education, free and better healthcare, etc. In anything, an after tax over-estimates US middle class wealth compared to Europe and Canada.

vaadu 12y ago

Free education? That only comes by learning from other people's mistakes. If a classroom and professional teachers are involved it's anything but free. They cost big bucks.

danbruc 12y ago
School and university are free, i.e. already paid with taxes, in Germany. The same goes for health care, although it is technically not a tax.
viraptor 12y ago
Free, as in everyone paid for it collectively (via taxes) and you don't need to pay directly to the college/university anymore. Not free as in noone pays.
- arethuza 12y ago
  The phrase often used in the UK is "free at the point of delivery" - it was one of the founding principles of the NHS: http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/about/Pages/nhscoreprinciples.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/about/Pages/nhscoreprinc... Pretty much everyone knows that the NHS is paid by taxpayers (NB I have met people working the UK public sector who had never given a moments thought to where the money they spent actually comes from, but they are pretty rare).
  - VLM 12y ago
    Its a local mythological belief that if you remove universal services which basically everyone requires from our universal tax collection system and insert vast teams of middlemen competing with each other to build a dilbertian confuseopoly, that those highly paid middlemen none the less somehow magically reduce aggregate net total cost to the society. Which would be hilarious as a parody if it wasn't being presented as factual policy.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      I wouldn't hold up the NHS as the best possible health system but it does kind of work given the relatively small amount of money we pay into it - it is telling that the book by the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, called his book about its creation "In Place of Fear": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

saalweachter 12y ago

National healthcare and free education? What country are you talking about again?

flexie 12y ago

Exactly. The income includes retirement and unemployment benefits but doesn't include other public benefits such as public healthcare, public education, public transportation. Being "after tax" it discounts for taxes that are usually higher in Europe but it doesn't discount for expenses that Americans generally have to pay with their income after tax but which many or most Europeans pay via tax (or don't have to pay at all) such as health care, college, third or fourth family car, higher cost for religious activities, higher cost for litigation, higher cost for private security etc.). It is difficult to make good comparisons without taking the public spending into account or deducting for the part of the private income that Americans must allocate to expenses that are paid over the taxes Western European countries. For most Europeans the value of free or almost free public benefits such as public healthcare, public education (from kindergarten to university), public transportation, low crime rate etc. is substantial. Having lived in three European countries (Scandinavian, Iberian and now in the Balkans) and in the US (New York) I have maintained for years that American median wealth seems smaller than Western European wealth and that there is a huge public investment backlog in the US: Roads, airports, subways, railroads, hospitals, schools etc. is very outdated in many places (probably because much of it was built decades before similar infrastructure in Europe). In America I felt like we would have to struggle just to make it into what felt like "middle class life". In Western Europe middle class life is a base from where people build their lives.

the_watcher 12y ago
So is the correct way to look at "middle class wealth" to take top line incomes and then determine a list of "middle class services" and then subtract the average cost paid for those services in each country? This has long been a pet peeve of mine in country v. country comparisons.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- buyx 12y ago
  This sort of comparison would also be useful for South Africa, where the cost of maintaining a middle class lifestyle (security, education and healthcare) is relatively high. I usually regard my taxes as charitable donations to the millions who subsist on welfare payments- I've long since learned to view any services I receive from the state as a bonus.

ry0ohki 12y ago

But then I suppose you'd also need to compare the quality? Is the free healthcare paid for taxes as good as the paid healthcare after taxes? I'm not saying it is or it isn't, just makes it hard to compare. If someone doesn't take advantage of the free education what then? Also so much of US taxes goes to military, which countries like Canada benefit from, in a sense our military spending subsidizes Canadian healthcare.

phillmv 12y ago
That argument might've held sway prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I don't think that's been true for the past 25 years :).
- jerf 12y ago
  No, it's certainly been true. Many world economics have avoided military buildups by piggy-backing on the back of the US buildup. In fact I've seen credible arguments that it has actually contributed to world peace significantly to have the US building up the way it has, yes, even despite the wars the US sometimes engaged in, by making it not worth it for anybody else of significant size. The rule about "democracies not going to war" may in fact have been false... it may merely have been Pax Americana happening to coincide with a lot of democracies. As America becomes "enlightened" (heavy scare quotes) and withdraws its military umbrella, a strange world is left behind... how does Europe feel about having effectively no military with which to counter Russia's growing imperial ambitions? It's officially all smiles (or forced grins) while they're stuck depending on Russia now, but I'm sure wheels are spinning behind closed doors even now. If the US elects another President with ambitions to back off the foreign involvement even more, or if the situation deteriorates enough more on this one's watch, what are the odds that Europe has to start building up? And how many other places will have to follow? And how will a social-benefit-addicted continent react to having to fund a military again? They certainly won't be able to maintain the current level of social commitments everywhere. Maybe the US shouldn't be enforcing Pax Americana depending on your own personal values, but don't think for one second it hasn't had its benefits even outside of the US, and don't think that the end of Pax Americana is somehow going to occur with a burst of rainbows and puppies, where we go from one dominantly-powerful military to zero. The number can only go up.

mildtrepidation 12y ago

Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison (if such a thing can be reliably quantified) The fact that it can't be reliably (more specifically, objectively) quantified is why we see so many nearly-worthless income comparisons instead: The content mill has to run, and less responsible journalists are often happy to print arbitrary crap masquerading as information rather than tackling hard topics with hard work (or just accepting that some things can't be accurately compared and moving on to things they can actually address in a meaningful way).

netcan 12y ago
The absolute comparisons of "inflation adjusted, PPP adjusted, after tax" income is hairy. But the directions of change should be still useful. The US is still flatter.

VLM 12y ago

The trend over time is still a story. WRT services provided, the USA has not advanced (very much) and the rest of the world has not backslid (very much), so its a fair comparison over time. Also even if the perfect median Canadian vs the perfect median USA is open for debate, for absolutely everyone below median, the graphs indicate its a virtual certainty they'd be better off emigrating out of the USA.

Spooky23 12y ago

They do from my perspective. I live in New York. I have a $200k house with over $6k in taxes, most of which for schools and public safety. Educational programs are flat or being cut, but employee expenses have ballooned over the last 10-15 years. The fully loaded cost of a $80-100k teacher includes about $25k in pension contribution, $15-20k in healthcare, etc. For the police/fire department, it's even crazier (they have 20 year retirement) My personal experience is better than most. We have a good household income, and I've been promoted a few times in the last 10 years. On average our household compensation increases by 7%. But... my net spending power is flat or down a little. Why? Property taxes up 30% since 2006. Health insurance up 150%. Food up ~30%. Utility bills up 50% (NY fail).

Iv 12y ago

When I started looking for a job hey told us, at my French university, that I should aim for 50% to 100% more salary in US for the same "life standard". Having to pay for your kids education and for every medical act quickly adds up.

refurb 12y ago
That's a bit of hyperbole. Yes, if you want your kids to go to a top private university, be prepared to pony up $200K. However, if you want them to go a state school, it's MUCH less. And in terms of medical costs, for most people, private insurance covers a vast majority of medical expenses.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  College is still very expensive, and student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy (although the rules on this have been changed for the better). Insurance is pretty expensive and/or comes with caps, plus if you ever have to make a claim on it a bunch of your valuable time goes into an administrative black hole. One thing I really miss about most European countries is that if you are sick enough that you have to go to hospital, not only are you not likely to suffer a severe financial hit, you don't have to deal with any paperwork besides your clinical care instructions. Medical staff tend to be paid fixed salaries rather than on a per-procedure basis and rates for care are standardized. The complexity of the US healthcare market leads to all sorts of weird economic distortions, like this: http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/florida-trauma-centers-charge-outrageous-fees-the-moment-you-come-through/2169148 http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/florida-trauma-centers-c...
  - refurb 12y ago
    I won't argue that the US healthcare system isn't horribly inefficient. My point simply is that the US not some horrible crap hole where everyone goes bankrupt when they get sick and kids can't go to college because it's too expensive.

unclebucknasty 12y ago

>Doesn't comparing income after tax make it a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to begin with? True. OTOH, as long as they are using the same measure as before, then the report has meaning on a relative scale. >Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison This would be interesting. I would like to see one world-wide (for instance, Americans may have been wealthier than Europeans for decades, but we also work harder). It is hard to quantify, but even the comparison of a subjective measure of overall contentment could be revealing.

edj 12y ago

Would be interesting to see a quality of life comparison (if such a thing can be reliably quantified) The Economist attempted to quantify quality-of-life and rank nations using the metrics they developed [1]. Their quality-of-life index is a bit out of date - almost 10 years old now - but interesting nonetheless. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index

remon 12y ago
That seems a questionable measurement. In their reasoning quality of life goes up if a "variable taking value 1 if country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership" goes up. There is not a developed country in the world where church attendance or trade-union membership is going up. That said, interesting read.