-By Warner Todd Huston
Fraser Nelson of The Spectator did some number crunching recently and found a shocking fact: Britain is poorer than every State in the USA but one.
As Nelson wrote on August 22, “if Britain were to somehow leave the EU and join the US … we’d be the 2nd-poorest state in the union, poorer than Missouri. Poorer than the much-maligned Kansas and Alabama. Poorer than any state other than Mississippi, and if you take out the south east we’d be poorer than that too.”
This is both shocking and disheartening, especially to American liberals. The liberals all assume that Great Britain is still the jewel of Europe pointing to its nearly 100 percent socialist-styled government as a model of perfection. But it turns out that decades of socialism has laid Britain low making it worse off than every state in the USA but Mississippi…. and with Britain’s jihadi problem, one would think it would be better to be a bit poorer in Mississippi than be forced to live in Britain!
Nelson calculated his statistic by the following method: “You take the US figures for GDP per state, divide it by population to come up with a GDP per capita figure. Then get the equivalent figure for Britain: I used the latest Treasury figures which also chime with the OECD’s.”
It’s not surprising that America’s best-paid 10 per cent are wealthier than top 10 per cent. That fits our general idea of America: a country where the richest do best while the poorest are left to hang. The figures just don’t support this. As the below chart shows, middle-earning Americans are better-off than Brits. Even lower-income Americans, those at the bottom 20 per cent, are better-off than their British counterparts. The only group actually worse-off are the bottom 5 per cent.
So, for all of Britain’s communist-styled government polices, its free homes for people, its supposedly wonderful free healthcare, its old age pensions that kick in earlier than ours (though the retirement age is going up soon), for all these social welfare programs and “nets,” well, the truth is they are all poorer than any of us.
So, they’ve exchanged freedom and liberty for a lower quality of life than even our poorest areas.
What morons.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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