What is this? The "let's quote blatantly false stats" day?
Kelvyquayo wrote:
The infant mortality rate in the US is now the same as in Malaysia.
False. According to the
CIA factbook the US is ranked 183rd out of 225 nations for infant mortality at 6.43 per thousand births. Malaysia is ranked 124th at 17.16.
I guess "three times the infant morality rate" is "the same" in your book? Or did you just not bother to spend the 20 seconds it took for me to debunk this?
Quote:
Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala.
Considering that India is ranked 55th at 54.63 deaths per 1000 live births, I find that incredibly hard to believe. Either the state of Kerala has an astronomically low relative rate compared to the rest of India, or somehow you expect us to believe that black children and *only* black children born in DC die at a rate on average nearly 10 times higher then that of the US average.
Norms for things related to medical care simply don't vary that greatly from the national average. How about you find some evidence for this?
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Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover.
Possibly true. Are we including the fact that at least 6 million of those Hispanics are here illegally from Mexico alone? Cause that might seem to have an impact on those figures.
Quote:
The US is the only wealthy country with no universal health insurance system. Its mix of employer-based private insurance and public coverage does not reach all Americans. More than one in six people of working age lack insurance. One in three families living below the poverty line are uninsured. Just 13 per cent of white Americans are uninsured, compared with 21 per cent of blacks and 34 per cent of Hispanic Americans. Being born into an uninsured household increases the probability of death before the age of one by about 50 per cent.
You're reading from the social liberalist playsheet here. It's an ideological difference of opinion. In the US, we tend to believe that people earn their way in the world. The government only provides an environment in which to do that and otherwise stays the heck out of the way.
And guess what? It works.
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Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent.
Lol. Define "child poverty" and we can maybe start to talk about this. You are aware that poverty is traditionally defined in such a way as to eliminate the measurement of the benefits of a non-socialist system while exagerrating those of the socialist, right? After all, when you define "poverty" as a percentage income off the median, you're automatically in trouble. Yet that's where many of those calculations come from. The other common method is calculating income in relation to staple goods. Which works great in a traditional agrarian society, or one in which "the people" are provided for with those very staples (food, clothing, housing, education), but falls appart when you start to ask what the value of "standard of living improvements" brought about via new technology is. The fact that a family's income in relation to the cost of a loaf of bread may have gone down is mitigated enormously if that same family has access to things like TVs, computers, the internet, and cell phones, all at a price that even the most poor can afford.
Luxuries are vastly cheaper today as a direct result of nations like the US *not* adopting socialist methodologies. Luxuries that anyone can afford. Yup. Even those children growing up in poverty live in better and safer homes, with much greater comfort then they did in the past. You can't measure that easily though, so it's generally ignored.
It's a matter of whether you'd rather live in a society where you are provided with everything except opportunity and potential for a better life in the future, or one in which the people's potential is limited only by their own dreams. I personally would rather live in the second state. Those who rave about the benefits of socialism tend to forget the ridiculous tax rates involved. They ignore the stagnation of their economies, the lack of technological growth, and the lack of improvement in people's lives over time. And in the case of European Socialisms, they've been able to benefit from the fact that the US is *not* socialist to a great degree, buying or licensing US designed "stuff" for their own consumers. They're able to provide these things for their people without having to spend the money to make them in the first place. Imagine if no-one in the world actually did this though? Imagine if everyone adopted socialist economies? Who would build computers? Who would design new TVs? Cell phones? How many things that might exist wont simply because we chose to take the easy way out?
Sorry. The rest of the world can bask in their second-fiddleness. I'd rather be part of actually *doing* something with my life, instead of just existing. "The people" just become a collection of eating and breeding masses if they don't collectively accomplish anything along the way. Socialism is great for keeping large numbers of people alive and in comfort. It's horrible for encouraging growth and human endeavor. I'll take a different option, thank you very much...