Why Does Canada Feel more Developed Than The USA

Why Does Canada Feel more Developed Than The USA . If The USA is wealthier than Canada, why does Canada feel more developed (far cleaner cities, a lot less crime, fewer homeless people, significantly higher life expectancy). Welcome to The Atlantis Report. The US, having about 9 times more people than Canada, of course has more wealth combined, but if you characterize wealth as how much each person (or household) has. Canadians are wealthier, most due to the fact that while they make about the same wages, their universal healthcare system cost about 40% less .so with healthcare costs in the US at $10,000 per person, that means Canadians have about $4000 more per person due to a simpler, cheaper, more efficient, and superior healthcare system. “The US is the third richest country in the world according to Credit Suisse's 2018 Global Wealth Report. But when you take into account how much wealth the average American household has on hand, the US doesn't even make the top 10.” The world's richest country revealed in new report . For wealth per adult, the US ranks third in the world, ahead of Canada, but inequality skews the average. For instance, if LeBron’s high school class of 100 is measured, and LeBron makes 50 million a year and his other 99 classmates average $50,000, the average is $500,000, but 99% of them make only 10% of that. Averages are misleading to the extent they are skewed by inequality. Since the US is the most unequal of all 35 high-income nations, the gap between average wealth and median wealth is huge. And when it comes to median wealth, Canada ranks higher. Canada has 45 billionaires with a net worth (about 145 billion) less than America’s wealthiest billionaire, Jeff Bezos. The US has over 500 billionaires with a net worth of about 2.5 trillion, and America’s billionaires, on average, have twice as many billions as the Canadian group. This American group is the LeBron James of the financial elites, which results in the US having more wealth per capita (on average) but trailing Canada when it comes to the actual wealth of the ordinary American or Canadian. So which country is wealthier? If you look at it on paper, the US is wealthier both in total wealth and per capita wealth. But if look at actual Canadians, the vast majority have more wealth than the vast majority of Americans. This is due not to a more developed economy or higher wages, but huge savings on healthcare. nationalistpost reports: “The Canadian Institute for Health Information believes Canada spent approximately $228 billion on health care in 2016. That's 11.1 percent of Canada's entire GDP and $6,299 for every Canadian resident.” And while Canada is on the high end for cost of healthcare among the high-income nations, the US spends 18% on healthcare (with inferior results) or about $11,000 per person. This adds up to a staggering total in excess of $15,000 per household that Canadians with their national healthcare program save each year, and this is why they are, for the typical family, wealthier than typical American families. Part of the savings goes into the household wallet, and part into the national or regional treaury (as savings). This is a good thing to keep in mind (bearing in mind that most high-income nations achieve superior results for less than Canada) when someone tells you we can’t afford a universal healthcare plan. And keep this in mind when you are told we have “the greatest economy in history” which may well be true for the 504 billionaires with their 2.5 trillion in wealth, but the typical struggling American household is going deeper into debt each year and working longer hours and days than any other of the 35 advanced nations, and so it is an affront. Both the nation and most American families are, to pay the bills, going into unprecedented levels of debt … hardly a sign of a healthy economy or a great economy but more likely pointing to a coming collapse, engineered by the same policies that caused the greatest recession in 80 years just a decade ago: big tax cuts for the rich, profligate spending, and deregulation. And the Canadians (and Swedes, and New Zealanders, and Germans, and French, and British) will all shake their heads and say: Anyone can throw a great party on the credit card, but in the morning, you will wake up with both a headache and a staggering bill. And as always it is the typical family that will pay, as each economic crisis in this country, has led to more inequality and more wealth for the top tiers of multi-millionaires and billionaires. I will try to explain Canada. There is an entirely different sense of right and wrong in Canada. Canadians are democratic. (Not just a democracy; there’s a difference.) That means they are happy to pay taxes - big taxes - so that they have the resources they need in their neighborhoods. They don’t need to earn big money to be able to afford a house in a good school district or private school tuition in order to ensure an excellent k-12 foundation for their kids. Their children do not need to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for an undergraduate or professional degree at a good school. Some Americans think that the Canadian education system is of poor quality because it’s not privatized, and it costs so little out of pocket for everyday citizens. That’s simply not true. It costs less because the entire population of the province funds it. And if the province comes up short one year, the Feds send money to make up the difference. I earned a graduate degree ten years ago under one of the top scholars in my field, and my tuition was $800 CDN, three times a year. I could stand on a conference podium with anyone from Columbia, or Brown, or NYU and hold my own. There is much less wage disparity in Canada. Unions are still strong in Canada. And therefore, the gap between rich and poor is narrower. No one will go bankrupt in Canada if they get cancer. There is no such thing as paying for medical treatment. So there’s no worry about money for treatment, only about the illness. People aren’t penalized for having pre-existing conditions. Canadians know that being a human being is a pre-existing condition, so they generally don’t fault folks for that. Canadians see health care, gender, and sexual orientation parity as human rights - not privileges. Once abortion and same-sex marriage were brought in (what, 20 years ago?), it was no longer of national concern. Canadians do not care who sleeps with whom. They care about the Stanley Cup. Canada just legalized cannabis because they felt it was the right thing to do. There was no big outcry. They’ve moved on since. It’s much more difficult to sue your neighbor over nonsense or an employer for discrimination. So they are a less litigious populace. Rightly or wrongly. Canadians do not feel the need to keep weapons in their homes to defend against the government. They do not see government or taxes as a burden or a threat to their wellbeing or safety. They see them as an integral part of citizenship. That’s what I mean by saying that Canada is a democratic country and not just a democracy. There’s less need to feel like they have to chase after everything all the time, or they will fall into ruin. People can become unemployed and not have to worry about losing health coverage. They can still see the doctor if needed. The same doctor they saw when they were employed. They get unemployment insurance payments. They get housing if they need it (not the Ritz, it’s not an easy process, but it’s still shelter - and it doesn’t have to do with the weather. It has to do with the social safety net that all Canadians feel OK about - including paying taxes to keep it in place for people they do not know and will never meet.) America is wealthier, no doubt. There’s much more innovation here. More of an entrepreneurial spirit. So much more comfortable to animate new ideas and break into careers. Wonderful, booming economy. The health care system is much easier for some here. But much more difficult for many others. There’s not as much willingness to pay to help people if it doesn’t involve a personal benefit that’s immediately obvious. More individualistic. But who is actually benefitting from this individualism? Are the majority of regular individuals benefitting? I’m not so sure. Canada measures its “wealth” differently. I think Canada counts financial security for all as a sort of background noise type of wealth - public wealth for individual needs in rough cases. I think that brings people a sense of calm and safety. Feeling calm, safe, cared for via their own hard-earned tax dollars, and part of a grand community on a local and global scale - perhaps that could help explain longer life expectancies. I genuinely love both countries for who and what they are, but I think they could each be a little more like the other. It should be mentioned that police response times, healthcare, and homes are much better the wealthy US communities than in Canada, as well as, some communities in Canada are near third-world levels. If you think Flint is bad just speak to the over 200 Indigenous communities in Canada without access to running water. However, for this answer I will only be focusing on cities and suburbias because I think that is what the question was implying. It’s impossible to have a conversation in the United States about poverty, clean cities, and development without talking about race and taxes. Until recently America’s corporate welfare system has been a great detriment to the country’s inhabitants while at the same time greatly enriching businesses at the expense of their citizens. Canada and US are close neighbors which is great for both nations. Americans get to trade with Canada, and Canadian businesses get to sell goods and services to the single largest consumer market in the world. No other nation or even collection of nations , for example The European Union, has the consumer population that the US has. Period. There is a reason why many countries want to sell their product to Americans, because they represent a massive disposable income. OPEC countries tend to have very wealthy individuals but the entire nation is not made up of such people. The late Canadian nationalist and political philosopher George Parkin Grant, once offered a very adroit explanation for why Canada and the United States differ rather markedly. While both nations are the outgrowth of settler societies, the cultural and political traditions of Canada simply were carried across the Atlantic by the British. In that respect, Canada, much like the other former dominions, Australia and New Zealand, are settler societies that nevertheless derive many of the advantages of organic societies, such as Britain, France and Germany.









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