Britain 49th Poorest "US State", Per Capita GDP

Why Britain is poorer than any US state, other than Mississippi - Spectator Blogs:

I've always liked to look at simple data with proper relative scaling. Just listing the GDP of the US is misleading, we have 320 million people, Germany has 81 million, England 65 mil, Sweden 10 mil and Norway only 5 million. If one divides the wealth of nations ... and states, how is everyone doing relative to others?

Turns out England is just ahead of Mississippi and just behind Alabama. Next to the bottom of poorest US states by GDP. Norway comes in between #7 Massachusetts and #8 New Jersey, Switzerland is next between #20 Virginia, and #21 Iowa.

The article promises to tell you "why", but it doesn't really -- it is written by a Brit last summer during the Ferguson debacle, it is really just admonishing Brits to not be so smug, since for all but the very poorest, every income group in America is doing better than their counterparts in England.

Readers of this Blog know why ... European countries have different cultures and have been playing with socialism for a lot longer. We know that socialism reduces GDP -- we have over a century of evidence. The THEORY is that the "more equitable distribution" of money under socialism is worth the cost. In countries like Norway and Sweden, there is some level of truth to that -- they have cultures of reasonably strong work ethic, they have cold winters that tend to encourage people to do something productive rather than sit in "the sun" (being "the dark" up there), and they are small enough where the temptations of the elite bureaucracy doing the robbing from the productive to give to the unproductive is limited by both proximity to those being robbed, and the "take" being smaller.

Even the Scandinavian nations however have been forced to make adjustments to be more business and work friendly over the past few decades, same with Canada. "The Ant and the Grasshopper" is a fairy tale, but it is a fairy tale grounded in real principles, unlike the tales told by socialists!

Due to the power of "The Party (TP - Democrat)" and it's control over the media and education, the vast majority of Americans have no idea of simple and widely available facts like this. They are told that everyone in Europe has it BETTER than they do, and that the policies of Europe relative to government, economics, etc pretty much put the US to shame.

We are indeed marching toward shame -- but our downward trend is still behind Europe. The US is large, and it had built up a powerful momentum over 200 years. It even got a super shot in the arm in the '80s with Reagan that delayed the demise by a good 30 years.

Most of the US population has no awareness of where we are actually at economically, no idea of how we got here, and absolutely no concept of where we might want to go. Our ability to govern ourselves relative to economics has been destroyed -- we know we need an economy, but generally have no idea of how an economy works! This is exactly what TP wants -- they are happy to continue to take total control.

So we have a real danger of going from BO to BS (Bernie Sanders).

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