Or perhaps they’ve done less good, thanks to the bureaucratic, informational and incentive disadvantages of state action.
Government programmes tend to crowd out charitable activity. Taxes tend to crowd out charitable giving, because discretionary income is lower than otherwise. We can’t conclude merely from that whether the social effect is positive or negative. That would require an actual comparison of the effectiveness of the measures.
That would require an actual comparison of the effectiveness of the measures.
Yes, but at least in terms of correlation, Germany is a rather healthier, happier society than America, by most measures. The non-impoverished subset of America tends to be better-off than Germany, but that’s an extreme selection effect: America might as well be considered several different countries divided by class and region at this point.
US GDP per capita is some $10,000 higher than Germany’s(on a PPP basis, though the nominal numbers are similar). There’s a lot of room for those who are poor by American standards to surprise you with how well-off they are by comparison to Germans. For example, Mississippi, the poorest state in the US, is better off than big chunks of Germany(and not just the East), and is still above the OECD median. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_regions_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita
Or perhaps they’ve done less good, thanks to the bureaucratic, informational and incentive disadvantages of state action.
Government programmes tend to crowd out charitable activity. Taxes tend to crowd out charitable giving, because discretionary income is lower than otherwise. We can’t conclude merely from that whether the social effect is positive or negative. That would require an actual comparison of the effectiveness of the measures.
Yes, but at least in terms of correlation, Germany is a rather healthier, happier society than America, by most measures. The non-impoverished subset of America tends to be better-off than Germany, but that’s an extreme selection effect: America might as well be considered several different countries divided by class and region at this point.
US GDP per capita is some $10,000 higher than Germany’s(on a PPP basis, though the nominal numbers are similar). There’s a lot of room for those who are poor by American standards to surprise you with how well-off they are by comparison to Germans. For example, Mississippi, the poorest state in the US, is better off than big chunks of Germany(and not just the East), and is still above the OECD median. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_regions_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita