User blog comment:Jeremiah Garland/Discussion Blog: North Korea/@comment-7379056-20130330185939/@comment-3984166-20130402044427

Just pointing out, America doesn't have THE HIGEHST standard of living and saying that is kind of offensive.

LETS TAKE A LOOK AT MY HOMIES.

First lets take a look at HDI

1) Norway

2) Australia

3) United States

^ not highest quality of life.

Let's look more closely. Let's take the worlds most liveable cities ( real statistics )

City	        Country	Rating 1	Melbourne	 Australia	99.5 2	Vienna	        Austria	97.4 3	Vancouver	 Canada	97.3 4	Toronto	         Canada	97.2 5	Adelaide	 Australia	96.6 5	Calgary	         Canada	96.6 7	Sydney	       Australia	96.1 8	Helsinki	 Finland	96.0 9	Perth	      Australia	95.9 10	Auckland	 New Zealand

So quality of life, America is not #1. In general, my homies across the Atlantic have a higher quality of life GENERALLY. This includes; access to healthcare ( which America has frankly failed at ), income equality, ease of businesses ( how easy it is to start a business ), tax rate, education quality, infrastructure quality ( in Europe you can get on high speed rail across the continent, America struggles to build a highway on budget ), eco-friendlyness,

I'm not putting down America, but in quality of life terms you aren't #1. This is in GENERAL.

Now lets move onto economics The USA does go supreme in this, at 14 trillion dollars in GDP ( some sources say 18, 16, let's use 14 - all the other amounts I list will be from same chart ) China comes second at 8 trillion. If we were to include organizations or supranational regions the EU would come in first at 16 trillion At current expectations, China will overtake the US in growth, and GDP by 2018 if debt continues to rise, and America continues to have a low growth rate, and increasing inflation ( federal government is printing too much money )

Military power, well.. USA wins on that :P But my point is, America isn't the greatest. No country or group is. They may be best military, and economically, but it is far to say they are the most developed. There are very developed places all over. There are 48 million American's on foodstamps, also 15% of America is under the poverty line. Of course American poverty is a lot different then the global definition of poverty ( malnutrition, etc, ).

ALSO.. look at places like Hong Kong, Singapore, those areas are very developed. Europe is a highly developed place just as much as America. A growing problem I think for America is retirement pension, their retirement age is 60-62. That will be very expensive ( 10k people in the USA retire each day. At the current retirement pension, that will be a huge expense, Plus the number of people retiring a day will only increase )

I personally love America, and what it stands for. However, I dislike the whole attitude of 'we are #1, everyone else sucks". I admit, Europe has its own problems ( as you've seen with Greece, Cyprus, Portugal ) and we aren't perfect either, heck, nobody is. China has pollution so heavy that by 2050, 40 million people would have died from lung diseases, their pollution is so bad that just a few days ago 1 thousand dead pigs were floating in a river. Some rivers are red from pollutants. Bejjing is so polluted that somedays the rain kills rodents.

ANYWAYS, you know what I mean. :D