HoneyWagon wrote:European pitters...thoughts?
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Leaving aside the blatant anti-European bias of that Twitter user (who might be a troll or at least writing those thing in a tongue in cheek fashion), I think that most Americans don't realize that there's no such thing and there's never been such a thing as a purely libertarian or a purely government-driven economy.
All economies are a mix of market and state economies, it's just that in liberal democracies economic efforts aren't centralized and directed as they were/are in left totalitarian states.
It's also pretty odd to see German National Socialism called "pagan" with respects to religion: there was no such thing as a state religion in Nazi Germany, and while some Nazis, like Himmler, were followers of weird supernatural cults, many Nazis were Protestants or Catholics or at least paid lip service to Christianity, like Hitler himself, and even tried to launch a version of Christianity without its "Jewish content". Nazi Germany is included in a lost of socialist states when they actually were corporatists and followers of the "third way" between a government-driven or a market-driven economy.
[It's also weird that a Trump supporter rails against socialism when Trump is actually in favor of more governmental control of the economy than the average Republican candidate. Trump is a protectionist and an isolationist, pretty far from a libertarian. Trump is likely to increase, not decrease government spending if he wants to build the wall and give incentives to American business to stay local.]
But anyway. The US have plenty of government spending, it's just spent on different things than in Europe: they spend more on defense in percentage of their spending than most European countries and far less on healthcare, for example.
OR DO THEY? (Dun dun dun...)
According to this website the US government (at all levels: federal, state and local) is estimated to spend in 2017: $1.3 trillions on pensions (20% of their spending), $1.5 trillion on healthcare (22%), $ 1.0 trillion on education (15%), $0.9 trillion on defense (12%) and $0.5 trillion on welfare (7%), all out of a total $6.9 trillion.
In comparison the
the UK government (again, both at central and at local levels) is estimated to spend £156.9 billions on pensions (20%, more or less like the Yanks), £142.7 billions on healthcare (18%, actually four percentage points less than the US!), £85.2 billions on education (11%, seven percentage points less than the US...) and yes, only £45.6 billions on defense (only 6%, roughly the half, in terms of percentage points, of what Uncle Sam pays for his troops, so yeah, the defense spending thing is probably accurate), out of a total of £784 billion.
A UN estimate of the
US population is of 325,147,405 people. The same UN estimate of the
UK population is 65,284,874 people.
So a
very rough and superficial analysis tells us that the US government spends roughly $21.100 for every citizen it has, while the UK government spends £12,000 for every one of its subjects. This result looks surprising, because it tells us that not only the UK spends half for citizen than what the US spend, but that the US spend
more, in percentage, on healthcare and education than the UK!
And yet it's the UK who is popularly known for public healthcare and education while the US are known, at least in the media and the popular perception, as places with little to no government spending, especially on healthcare and education!
What's going on? Well, it's easy, I cheated a bit, since total government spending is pretty much meaningless, because it includes local, state and federal spending. Local and state, spending on healthcare means, for example, building, maintaining and repairing hospitals, of which the US has more than UK (simply because they're a more populous country), or local/state subsidies to local/state healthcare businesses. Likewise the local/state spending on education includes building, maintaining and repairing schools, and school vouchers. Again the US has more people so it's kind of obvious they spend more on that.
A better indication of how the US manage their budget in a way that is different from European nations is the
US federal budget spending. Leaving aside interests on federal debt (which are less than 10% of the federal spending), there is
mandatory and
discretionary spending.
Mandatory spending makes up two thirds of the US federal budget spending. It isn't decided year by year through appropriations, but periodically, through eligibility rules for Social Security, Medicare and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which compromise most of it, along with minor benefits like Veteran's Benefits or some transportation and food subsidies.
Basically the system works like this: the Congress sets the criteria on who gets benefits in terms of healthcare, social security and food aid and then sees how many people apply and are eligible. So the US already spend
plenty of money on healthcare and social security, but unlike many other liberal democracies those expenses are in form of aid to single people and families who apply and are found eligible, not to a centralized and organized safety net (like the NHS in the UK).
Whether the current US system is better than the current UK system is left to the opinion of the reader, but it's pretty stupid to think that the US are a "capitalist" country that spends nothing on healthcare and safety nets while the UK is a "socialist" country with a "socialized" healthcare and safety nets. It's just a difference of how expenses for healthcare and safety nets are managed.
Anyway, in terms of pure spending, the US in 2015 spent
$986 billion specifically on Medicare and Health, while
the UK spent £116.4 billion on the NHS.
We assume that the population in the US and the UK were, in 2015, of respectively,
320,090,857 and of
65,110,000
So the numbers tell that the UK spent around
£1788 per subject on the NHS while the US spent
$3080 per person only on Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs, give or take.
But wait. We have to take into account the exchange rate. We assume an average
roughly 1,5 dollars for every British pound in 2015 the UK
still spent less (roughly $2700) per their subjects on the NHS than the US (roughly $3000) on Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal mandatory spending on healthcare per their citizens.
From these numbers it almost looks like the US are the slightly more "socialist" state in terms of healthcare, and that UK has a slightly less expensive healthcare system, even taking into account exchange rates and the respective size of each population. This looks, again, pretty surprising.
TL;DR: Are the US really spending much less on the UK on healthcare? Probably not, maybe even a bit more! Are the US as "socialist" as the UK, or even more?
