[null_investor]

The economist has said this for decades.

Meanwhile the US life expectancy has been decreasing.

And countries with huge governments like France have been doing just fine.

Also running a similar deficit than US.

Even being libertarian, I have common sense to acknowledge that those takes are plain stupid.

It's all about how the money is spent, not if it's public or private.

I bet most money spent by the government in the US is in entitlements, not infra or any kind of subsidies to key industries. So yeah, very inefficient!

[creer]

My impression of The Economist is more of "never enough taxes". The article shows some US graphs but is not US-centric. A quick search showed an equivalent article (w much more graphs) for the UK. And France "doing just fine"... is problematic - in particular ever more despairing to find places to control its government budgets.

[wumeow]

> Meanwhile the US life expectancy has been decreasing.

That was a blip due to covid and has been slowly recovering to pre-pandemic levels.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/19/health/us-life-expectancy-202...

[jschveibinz]

"COVID-19, drug overdoses (opioid crisis), and accidental injury accounted for about two-thirds of the decline in life expectancy" in the U.S.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...

[derbOac]

It was stagnant for years prior to the pandemic. So yes the pandemic had a huge impact but it wasn't exactly a great trend.

[MattGaiser]

The overall article actually agrees on many of these points. The title and intro blurb is poor.