This looks like a heavily opinionated article with a questionable use of data.
Others have mentioned the lacking focus on inequality already, so I want to add some other points:
While European countries have lower GDPs, their citizens work less hours than Americans[1] and spend less on health care[2] while having similar or longer life expectancies. Privatized education might similarly inflate GDP numbers without improving the actual quality of life.
The author - funnily enough a specialist for tax competition and board member of the Cayman Financial Review - is way too eager to draw political council from this apples to oranges comparison.
If inequality within a country matters, then inequality between countries also matter. For instance back in the 60s at least European countries produced cars and other things to compete with American cars. Today when a new technology comes out, like Facebook, it captures nearly all the value in America itself. American investors and their 401k, capture a bigger share of it (the more money you have to invest, more money you'll make, which makes it disproportionately go towards America, and yes, more towards some Americans). Even in America, HCOL (high cost of living) areas capture more value than LCOL areas.
This trend is just expected to accelerate. No to mention the strengthening of the dollar and flight towards the Dollar is another wealth transfer from ROW to the US.
Speaking in the very narrow view of tech, if you work in tech in the US you are likely to make anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much as in Europe, including taxes and healthcare costs.
There simply is no comparison. Switzerland comes second, with the UK or Canada next.
Europeans always mention free healthcare. But when your salary in the US is triple before taxes then the healthcare costs are irrelevant.
The absolute truth is that by choosing to work in Europe rather than the US, you're losing potentially millions of dollars by time you reach retirement (with compounding interest investments) -- as an average individual contributor. If you're a high performer, you might lose far more than that.
Entry level grads in the US can in some cases be paid more than senior developers in the EU.
I agree the US provide a very high materialistic living standard if you are well-educated or rich - but as you said, focusing on the tech sectors is a very narrow view on societies as a whole.
As an European working in tech I really don't care about those millions of dollars. My income - very low on the SV-scale - is more than enough to live a comfortable life.
Compared to the Anglosphere this also means that there is a lot less pressure in regard to getting priced-out with a median salary. Public transport & infastructure is great, university education is cheap and housing is affordable (not just for me, but also my friends in other industries).
Personally, this feels more egalitarian and I prefer it to a society with higher GDP that comes with more inequality.
Sadly true. How often do I see this bay area etc. "whining" that some house means a couple years of saving up cash.
Here most people I know first save up for 10 years and then pay back 1300-2000k€ a month for 30 years for their house. And that's with lots of construction work done by themselves.
Most devs I know make less than 3.5k€ a month before taxes, end up with about 2.5k€.
I work for a US startup and while they all got big houses in Boston, we struggle to find anything below 600k€ here in some small Mountain town ;) , and that's usually not more than 1000 square feet.
I do earn more than twice what I did before. Working only part time and fully remote. Devs usually earn less than the business people. We got lots of free education in that regards so you can easily get a cheap 19 year old coder with 5 years from a technical school.
But if you're not out for money you can have your relaxed 38.5h/week job with 5 weeks paid vacation, obviously unlimited sick pay, up to 3 years paid maternity/paternity leave and lots and lots of protection (for example my wife is protected from being dismissed from her job until our kid is 8 years old).
I've lived and worked in Canada, USA, UK, Japan, and Germany. I've also done a fair bit of traveling.
Yes, on a per-capita GDP basis, the USA is technically "ahead", but when it comes to daily living, it's FAR behind. During my 6 years in the USA, I saw roads falling apart, terrible infrastructure, litter everywhere, crime and poverty the likes I've never seen outside of third world countries. The only thing even close to the USA was urban UK, which (other than parts of Southern Europe and Paris) is probably the dirtiest of the Western European countries. But even they weren't as bad as the USA. (Bear in mind I lived in the UK in the late 90s. Things may have changed since then)
Put simply, the quality of life in America was FAR worse than any other country I've lived in.
The consumption index is also not the greatest measure, since it has a lot to do with consumer attitudes & materialism, which are different in most of the world compared to America and Japan (I've never seen materialistic attitudes as strong as there).
After moving to Germany, I have no desire to live elsewhere.
As someone in tech who chose to grow their career in Canada instead of the US (where I could easily make double), I very much appreciate your comment.
I still haven't discarded the possibility to move to Europe, as there are aspects of the lifestyle here that I have a hard time getting used to. Comes to mind: the high amount of drug users and mentally ill people screaming on the streets, completely ignored by the state.
Are there any metrics for quality of life that take into account happiness?
Generally, you want to live in a place with a low disparity between rich and poor. They'll usually have lower crime, lower social problems, better maintained infrastructure, lower corruption, better culture. Scandinavia is probably the best you can get, if you don't mind the cold ;-)
America is a really really big country. What parts were you talking about? The wealth diversity even within say, California or even Virginia, hell even a tiny state like New Jersey is enormous.
In no places I’ve ever lived has infrastructure been a problem. Crime has been a slight problem, but not much.
First of all, a lot of the "yellow" areas in the post-soviet block, that were catching up in the past 30 years. The standards of living are increasing there every year.
Secondly - GDP is the weirdest metric possible to measure the quality of life. Even purchasing power index is not as good, because it ignores the things that the government gives for semi-free.
Growing in one of the poorest Polish regions, me and my friends' families could buy fewer iPhones, and cars were a distant dream, but we had free public education, free healthcare, cheap but decent housing, and the public transit.
I wonder if the post's author has actually been to any of the poor European regions - even comparing them with rich US, they look seriously decent.
Yeah, looking at GDP per capita rather than median income totally disregards the inequality that makes $54k/person ludicrous to describe as typical in the US.
European countries ahead of the US: Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland, France, UK, Spain,Austria, Italy, Malta, Norway. Interesting how many countries (France for example) is ahead of Germany in both mean and median net wealth per adult.
In the US 34.5% of population has wealth between 100,000 USD and 1 million, In UK 44.8%, France: 46.3%. US has significantly more people with wealth over 1 million. German Gini index is 81.6, France 69.6. USA 85.2.
EDIT:
Table 3-3 is super interesting. Membership of top wealth groups for selected countries, 2019. (absolute number of people).
Over USD 100,000; Number of adults (thousands)
China 113,410
United States 103,198
Japan 55,370
Germany 26,012
United Kingdom 25,388
France 25,110
Italy 23,284
China already has more people with wealth over 100,000 USD. (20.8% of total) than any other country. No wonder why US companies want to stay in Chinese markets.
And yet more than half of Americans don’t have $400 to cover an emergency. I wonder how the US would stack up in 25th percentile wealth against European countries?
Also, there are measures like food insecurity that I suspect would be very telling.
Per the government, the median American household has >$1000 remaining every month after all ordinary expenses, far more than enough to cover a $400 emergency. The "can't cover $400" trope doesn't imply what you think it does, it is pulled out of context from a survey about how people would cover an emergency, not whether they could. Many popular financial stats used in the media are misleading in service of a narrative.
As another example, you'll see many articles stating some large percentage of Americans don't have any savings, which is only true because they define "savings" as having a savings account, which many Americans with plenty of money don't even have (myself included). And then there is the one about Americans having no retirement savings, where "retirement savings" excludes any real estate investments, taxable brokerage accounts, etc which is where many Americans have the majority of their retirement savings.
The "food insecurity" surveys are a similar story. Same with "food deserts". If you dig into the underlying studies none of them imply what the media tries to imply with them. It is a hazard to uncritically accept statistics from the media. They have an incentive to paint the most dire story possible.
The term of art for this is "discretionary income". I think it is a more informative than disposable income, but it is much harder to find for many countries. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) publishes surprisingly detailed statistics on consumer expenditure at decile resolution which allows it to be easily computed.
Discretionary income is defined as disposable income after you subtract housing, utilities, food, clothing, healthcare, and transportation costs based on actual survey data. Roughly speaking, discretionary income is the amount of money available for saving or spending on fun. If you want to know the mean and distribution of how much a person spends on eggs or fresh vegetables in each decile, the BLS can tell you that. It also tracks a lot of non-essential expenditures. It is a great resource.
I don't like wealth comparisons because they do a poor job of accounting for usable vs. locked up wealth. What I mean is that you could easily live in California and have $200k in counted wealth, but virtually all of it is in your home's equity and more or less inaccessible to you while someone living in a cheaper country with $200k in wealth likely has a lot more of it in liquid form.
Disposable Income is a better indicator of "money you get and can actually use" than total median income or wealth. The US is easily #1 in this category by PPP mean [1], and only drops to #3 by median.
If you have a sudden $1000 expense, you can't magically sell your house to pay it off next week. Also if you sell your house, what are you going to do then? Live on the street with all your belongings in shopping carts? Magically find another job paying the same amount somewhere cheaper?
Home equity is not liquid. It's locked up. There's a reason finance distinguishes between liquid and fixed assets - they are different classes with different dynamics.
The median household income in the US is ~$64k currently. Since disposable income is net various income and social taxes, it implies an effective tax rate of 30% at the median income.
This number is deceptive in that the US is geographically massive and the economies, State governments (taxes), and cultures vary widely across thousands of kilometers. The difference between the median income of the highest and lowest States is almost 2x, so your experience will be very different depending on which State you live. Also, in terms of discretionary income, cost of living varies a lot so disposable income isn't the entire story.
Note that the average discretionary income (money left over after all ordinary expenses) in the US is ~$2k/month whereas the median discretionary income is $1k/month. This implies that high income earners (think $100k, not FAANG) have a few thousand dollars left over each month after expenses.
I've worked in Europe for several years and the differences in discretionary income are stark, both due to income levels and taxation. Americans are kind of oblivious to just how freely they spend money due to having so much discretionary income; we tend to assume the rest of the developed world is similar when that really isn't the case.
How does this account for things like taxes and shifting of expenses?
It is common knowledge that in the USA, they will pay you extra in the corporate world, but that extra money goes to family health care, education, transport, and other things that are covered by European taxation schemes.
If you look at discretionary income, the median corporate employees are making similar incomes.
And of course, SWEs are outperforming in USA, and manual laborers are outperforming in EU
I have not researched that until now but it appears the US is #3 for median disposable income behind Switzerland and Norway. If there’s a better metric I’m interested. However, I think it’s safe to say the typical US resident is not relatively impoverished. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
Indeed. Don't be fooled by North Dakota as the top GDP per capita state in the US. There are a relatively small number of landowners in the western half of the state making crazy passive income from oil rights their great-grandfathers lucked into when they immigrated a hundred years ago. The state is very working-class. It maybe doesn't have the same amount of abject poverty that you see in other places, but people here work hard for a living.
Also, the numbers in the article are from 2014 when the oil boom was in still full swing. That's what provided a lot of the highest paying jobs in the state. Drilling levels today are less than 10% of what they were at the peak, and consequently many of those jobs have gone with it.
Doesn't focusing on consumption completely obscure to bulk of inequality, which takes the form of endless billions constantly accumulating among a minuscule portion of the population?
And even looking at median income would still leave other things out -- like the much higher fraction of that household income which goes to medical expenses in the US than in, well... the entire EU for starters.
That's an average again. Also not sure what you mean by "No."
That data neither proves nor disproves what your parent comment said.
Additionally disposable income doesn't account for "optional" spending on healthcare etc. by the individual.
When you look at median disposable household income, the US still comes in somewhere at the top, but the top 15 countries all have about the same ballpark figure (~30k USD), with US being the only country among them that doesn't have unemployment benefits, affordable healthcare, etc.
Is there any particular point you're trying to make?
You keep responding to people with at best tangentially related data that is not relevant to the discussion.
Now suddenly we're looking at median gross income.
And this time I don't know at all how to respond to that in a manner that will somehow make it relevant to the discussion again.
>Where did you get the idea that the US doesn't have unemployment benefits?
I do not know why I wrote it that way, really. I am aware the US has some social security and unemployment benefits, but not much compared to many other rich western countries. It's pretty much at the bottom right next to Germany, which has a comically low (cash) benefits imho.
I realize those numbers may be skewed by stuff like:
- Food stamp programs (US)
- The state directly paying for apartments etc. in some cases (Germany)
- Whatever else infrastructure etc. you get to use for free as an unemployed person.
In any case "social security" is hard to quantify, and depending on how and who does it you'll see countries jumping all over the place in rankings. So I'm pretty much just going by what the general perception of social security is in various countries.
Even per capita is misleading. Go to get stitches in the eu vs america. Buy a regular pizza in the eu, get quality, buy it in the usa get synthetic yuk.
I have my doubts about some of the statistics in this article (Groningen the number 6 wealthiest place in Europe? I'm not so sure about that) but I can't deny that wages and freely expendable income in the US are much higher than most of Europe.
However, with the work ethic and the hours many US workers pull to maintain those standards, I'm not so sure if I'd want Europe to move towards the rich American standard.
From a rich man's perspective, which many of HN's readers are very likely to know because this crowd is seemingly highly educated or intelligent through their own pursuit, the US does allow for a better standard of living than most of Europe. The wages are higher, the taxes are often loert and there's better access to luxury items.
However, in pursuit of happiness, I'd prefer less work and more free time to enjoy the fruits of my labour over amassing wealth. Having access to expensive laptops instead of needing to cheap out is nice, but what's the point if you barely have time to enjoy your purchase?
There's also the perspective of poor, uneducated people. In a lot of cases I'd much rather be jobless or stuck in uneducated labour in Europe than in the US with the Labour rights situation in a lot of states. The right to work system means you have a lot more power if your boss depends on your skill, but if you don't have any unique skills or can't sell them, the same power can be turned against you to limit your options. The employee-oriented labour protection a large part of Europe enjoys is worth more to me than he ability to get a raise or leave for another employee tomorrow.
I wonder what this article would look like if it weren't written by an economist, but rather by someone researching general happiness. I'll take poor and happy over being rich and unhappy any time, and wealth can only add so much to your hapiness.
The argument in this article is double stupid. The obvious reason why it's stupid (economic metrics vs quality of life metrics) is already pointed out by other comments. The not so obvious one is that the article compares current metrics but to really compare effect of the policies on the economics you need a long term measures of change because European countries and USA obviously had a very different starting places cos WW2 and USSR collapse.
I fully agree that we need to fix health care for the uninsured and underinsured in the United States.
However, do you ever wonder why so many Americans aren’t voting for socialized healthcare? In reality, most of us aren’t at risk of going bankrupt from a health care emergency. Again, I fully agree that too many people are at risk of going bankrupt from a healthcare emergency, but it’s not the norm for the average American like you might read online.
The United States does actually have government health care programs for low income and disable people (Medicaid, covers approximately 23% of the US population) and for elderly (Medicare, covers people 65 and over). We also have government subsidies for lower income people (up to 400% of the federal poverty level) who need to buy their own health care plans through the marketplace.
Again, it’s not perfect and I agree that improvements are necessary, but the reality of the situation is a bit different than many of the reductionist comments you read online.
When you’re earning 2x or even 3x as much as European counterparts (using my real-world experience managing international remote teams), paying the health insurance premiums doesn’t feel like as much of an inconvenience. In my case, my employer pays my premiums and my out of pocket maximum spending is capped at $1000 per year, worst case.
>The United States does actually have government health care programs for low income and disable people (Medicare, covers approximately 23% of the US population) and for elderly (Medicaid, covers people 65 and over). We also have government subsidies for lower income people (up to 400% of the federal poverty level) who need to buy their own health care plans through the marketplace.
Another way of putting your point is that 91% of Americans have medical insurance, whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers. The only such systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.
PS - Obamacare did not greatly expand coverage. 85% of Americans had medical insurance pre-Obamacare.
>Again, it’s not perfect and I agree that improvements are necessary, but the reality of the situation is a bit different than many of the reductionist comments you read online.
Indeed. There are things I'd certainly improve about the US system—decoupling primary healthcare coverage from employment, for one—but the way people online lie^H^H^Hexaggerate it's not surprising that so many non-Americans believe that every American is one hangnail away from bankruptcy.
Speaking of which, another common lie^H^H^Hmisrepresentation about Americans and health care: Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...). A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
>In reality, most of us aren’t at risk of going bankrupt from a health care emergency. Again, I fully agree that too many people are at risk of going bankrupt from a healthcare emergency, but it’s not the norm for the average American like you might read online.
In reality, every single person is at risk for a medical situation that will bankrupt you.
Ever drive? You're at risk for getting into a car accident that could lead to thousands or hundreds of thousands of medical costs.
One of the biggest lies of the american health care system is that your risks of medical costs is solely connected to your health.
You can be the healthiest person in the world, and a drunk driver can still lay your ass out. And that is being truly the healthiest person. Many people only seem like they're perfectly healthy, because diseases like heart disease and cancer can be lurking without symptoms for long periods of time.
The biggest cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical costs. STILL. The idea that most people are at risk of going bankrupt from a health care emergency is just false.
> The United States does actually have government health care programs for low income and disable people (Medicaid, covers approximately 23% of the US population) and for elderly (Medicare, covers people 65 and over).
That's wrong.
Medicaid covers the poor, Medicare covers the aged, blind, and disabled. (You can be both and be covered by both—and by either or both plus private insurance in some cases—which is a contribution to high healthcare administrative costs because of coordination of benefits.)
TL;dr 41% can cover a $1k emergency with savings. Others would get in debt. Sure, there are some ways for the very low end to get help. But that still leaves a massive number of people exposed.
> my out of pocket maximum spending is capped at $1000 per year, worst case.
Is that for any medical help from any source, or does that involve the in-network / out-of-network provider billing dance?
That was an informal poll performed by a personal finance website. It’s not a scientific study.
Furthermore, read the actual question they asked. They didn’t ask if people could pay the expense from savings. They asked how people would pay the expense.
The options include things like “reduce spending in other areas” aren’t mutually exclusive with being able to draw down on savings accounts. Many people prefer to reserve their savings for retirement unless necessary.
I'm not sure that really changes the overall picture. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe... gives 39% of people who would either go into debt, sell something, or couldn't cover an emergency $400. Even if the number is skewed a lot (say it's 20%), it's still a massive amount of people.
Your 20-30% claim is still way too high for even the median wages, ignoring typical SWE comp. it’s not clear where you got your numbers, but they’re not supported by the data.
The median US wages are covered by the subsidies above. Again, I want to emphasize that I support health care reform to improve coverage at the lower wages, but I’m trying to explain the discrepancy between the dire picture painted online and the seemingly irrational voting patterns of most Americans. The idea that you can move to a median European country and come out ahead financially due to government healthcare doesn’t really add up.
It is true but it proves nothing. US has ridiculously inflated health care prices. According to this article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47491964 monthly cost of diabetics treatment in 2016 was $19 in Italy and $360 in the US. So US is spending here over 20 times more for the same treatment.
They charged $2,835 a day for the ventilator. Seriously? You may buy brand new ventilator for 29,000 PLN in Poland which is around $7500, hospital usage certified ‘PHILIPS RESPIRONICS TRILOGY 100’. You may rent brand new top model of Lamborghini in Los Angeles for around $2500 a day. In Europe they won’t even charge for the ventilator. The room, which costs on that bill $9,736 a day should be already equipped in everything what’s necessary to support life. If the room price doesn’t cover the equipment, does it mean it’s just 9k for the bed a day?
While there are definitely some horror stories about this in the US, it is a lot less common than people think. It turns out only about 4% of bankruptcies for adults are due to a hospitalization[0]. So you're much more likely to go bankrupt for other reasons.
That's not what the study is saying. They're not disputing the fact that bankruptcies are largely caused by healthcare-related costs. What this study says is that being admitted to a hospital only has a 4% chance of causing a bankruptcy.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that their sample set is entirely from California which is materially different from many other states in the US, so it's possible the 4% rate varies state-to-state.
>A new study from academic researchers found that 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies were tied to medical issues —either because of high costs for care or time out of work.
(My emphasis.) In other words, people going bankrupt because health problems = lack of work = lack of income. That does not contradict the fact that only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0... that is, bills for health care treatment exceeding available income.
Your article goes on to quote a study author who carefully elides the difference between the two. Oh, by the way, he is a prominent proponent of Medicare for All! Imagine that.
Probably a lot? But it's honestly kind of hard to say and I have seen very conflicting data (such as the 4% vs 60% discrepancy in what percentage of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills). I do agree healthcare in the US is thoroughly terrible, even if for no other reason than exactly this uncertainty. If you go to the hospital or have some type of procedure done, you could be out a few hundred dollars or a few tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and there's really no way to know before you go in.
And my anecdotal experience only muddies my understanding even more. Things have always worked out pretty well for me. Even the time I got a $45,000 bill because the surgeon was covered by my insurance but the anesthesiologist was not, somehow in the end after a few phone calls to the billing department my portion was lowered to just an extra $400 on top of the expected copay. I have no clue how any of it works, but these insane numbers seem to often just go away as mysteriously as they appeared. I don't personally know anyone who has actually had to pay the absurd amounts of money that get quoted, it's like it's all some kind of fake money. (I do realize that I am probably in a very privileged bubble, most people I know are at least not uninsured for instance).
Having lived all over Europe and US for varying amounts of time, this is true. Yet, the subjective quality of life is higher in most of Europe than in most of the US.
Funnily, this is true within Europe as well. Most of Northern Europe is richer than most of Southern Europe. Yet, the subjective quality of life is by and large higher in the south. (This last part is my opinion, take it with a grain of salt.)
I think it really depends on what you appreciate in your life.
Europe is better for a stroll down to the pub to grab a pint with friends and then going to a museum .
America is better for using some snow-mobiles with friends and driving around in a fancy car.
As an American, there's some things that I just couldn't do in Europe: I'm making my own aluminum plane and learning to fly it. That's basically impossible in Europe.
If you said to me: you are gonna die and reborn, no guarantees about what your life will be in terms of health, education, personal wealth or personality traits, in which country do you want to be born? Most probably not the US for me.
Most people in my village are making around E500/month and they are pretty happy ; is that possible anywhere in the US? I think that would explain something; it's basically that people can afford to live happily because the things that really matter are from the gov. Public transport, healthcare and food if you really cannot pay for it (500 is enough actually to get to restaurants here a few time per month and a drink at the bar daily). But if something goes wrong (fridge breaks etc), you don't end up under a bridge.
It is no news that average income is higher in the US, compared to Europe. The point of social safety nets is not to improve your gross national product, but to reduce poverty.
This is a highly opinionated piece that selectively uses a tiny bit of data while ignoring a ton of inconvenient data to make a persuasive argument that does not stand up even to mild scrutiny. It is cleverly disguised as objective research.
In other words, this is political propaganda of the highest quality. I mean that as a compliment.
It might be flawed, wrong, stupid, etc. but that’s not a reason to flag it. Argue against, bring more light into the discussion. Censoring it brings no good.
It was NOT intended as "censorship." According to the HN guidelines, as I understand them, this kind of writing simply does not belong on HN. As I wrote above, that's why I flagged it. Please don't attack a straw-man. For reference, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Average is a difficult measure to use in isolation. Gini also has to be considered. While the average income (even figuring in PPP) in say, Czech Republic, is far lower than in the U.S., the poorest people in the U.S. are far poorer.
Many EU countries are with-in 80-90% of the US by this measure. Also, the US, nationally- / federally-speaking, has no mandatory annual leave; countries in the EU have many days, and people tend take them:
Further, using OECD data on labour productivity, the US is down the list, so it seems that when Europeans are working, they get more done:
> GDP per hour worked is a measure of labour productivity. It measures how efficiently labour input is combined with other factors of production and used in the production process.
> I’m simply making the modest — yet important — argument that Europeans would be more prosperous if the fiscal burden of government wasn’t so onerous.
That does not necessarily follow. Given that in capitalism the 'excess' value created goes to Capital and not Labour, it is debatable whether Joe the Plumber or Jacques the Baker would see more money in their pockets.
I searched the page for "health" and "med" and could not find any mention. Then I looked up "Foundation for Economic Education" on wikipedia, and understood why: it's a libertarian think tank. To factor in healthcare would weaken their message.
It’s almost as if you don’t need to be filthy rich, standing on the shoulders of the poor like in America to have an acceptable quality of life in Europe due to social programs that make sure everyone has what they need.
When i was living in italy, most of my local friends were “poor” (no money) but they had everything they need - they were not even trying to become richer. A different idea of “personal success”, i guessed.
Others have mentioned the lacking focus on inequality already, so I want to add some other points:
While European countries have lower GDPs, their citizens work less hours than Americans[1] and spend less on health care[2] while having similar or longer life expectancies. Privatized education might similarly inflate GDP numbers without improving the actual quality of life.
The author - funnily enough a specialist for tax competition and board member of the Cayman Financial Review - is way too eager to draw political council from this apples to oranges comparison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS