“Taxes”, the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed a century ago, “are what we pay for civilised society.” So can we tease out from government spending breakdowns what different countries reckon counts as civilisation? No. That would be silly.
Nah, not really. Kind of reasonable, given the initial premise. (= that initial premise is bonkers!)
Turns out -- and this will come as a shock to most of you -- quite a lot of countries have wacky ideas about what "civilization" means: most governments spend waste funds on all manner of stupidities.
IMF: “world’s leading economies need to take ‘urgent’ action to rebuild public finances” — which may possibly involve them having a look at the spending side of their budget ledger.
Here's a nice little IMF-based like-for-like comparison
Nobody is surprised that the Europoorean basket case France is at the top #1593319, #1593563
A lot of this looks like it’s driven by France’s choice to spend almost a quarter of total economic output on social protection, versus the US’s 12th. And much of this comes in the form of pension spending, which we split out using data we found at Eurostat and in another OECD report.
...yep, it was the boomers all along. FUCK EM.
Honest question: how much freer and richer would societies be if Boomers didn't exist/had better values?
Oh no, America just wanna keep those filthy, unhealthy boomers alive! #1527198.
Terrible. Not a civilized move.
Have you seen how fat and dumb Americans are? Of course we have to spend the most money on that stuff.
I unfortunately have; it's fucking unbelievable.
They should be ashamed of themselves
The high ratio of US expenditure on health is partly indicative of the woeful state of health in USA but also the hugely inefficient method of provision.
The amount of rentseeking corruption and inequity in the US healthcare is unequaled anywhere in the world.
The public health systems such as Australia and New Zealand provide a far better cost effective provision of healthcare.
Equally the amount a government taxes and spends is not a measure of how effectively that government is governing- it can be a measure of how ineffective it is.
China you will not has a very low tax burden on citizens but a highly productive economy that enjoyed ever larger fiscal and trade surpluses.
It is crucial that governments tax, but also how they spend those tax revenuies.
While USA squanders its exceptional privilege on seeking to preserve its petrodollar hegemony China trains millions of engineers and technicians and builds global productive infrastructure for the post industrial economy.
China won the trade war by how well it manages the available resources and economy not how much it taxes and spends.
Get it yet?