I agree with Nathaniel Lewis that the U. S. has a host of problems. I disagree with his claim that increased spending would solve many of them. From his piece at Jacobin:
The US government has a spending problem. Given the country’s level of wealth, the government spends far too little — at least $1.6 trillion a year too little — on social welfare.
This exacerbates problems like poverty and inequality, and makes life a lot harder for a lot of people — from families with young children, to would-be college graduates, to the sick and elderly — than it should be. By leaving a large proportion of health care spending to the private sector, the United States has ended up with a health care system which does not even pass the basic test of universal coverage but is far more expensive than if one that was publicly funded were at stake.
The best way to show this is to compare US social welfare with similar countries around the world. As a starting point, I use the OECD’s social expenditure database, which defines social spending as “cash benefits, direct in-kind provision of goods and services, and tax breaks with social purposes. Benefits may be targeted at low-income households, the elderly, disabled, sick, unemployed, or young persons.â€
Oddly, his own statistics might provide a clue to why we do what we do. Consider this graph:
Are we to believe that it is a coincidence that the U. S. is clustered with the rest of the English-speaking common law countries? Is it not more reasonable to conclude that there’s something about Canadian, British, American, and U. S. civil culture that leads to our having lower social spending related to total consumption than, say, France? Clearly, it has nothing to do with how our health care systems are organized: organizational and funding mechanisms for health care could hardly be more divergent than Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States and yet there we are, all tightly clustered together.
I agree with this statement of his:
The best way to show this is to compare US social welfare with similar countries around the world.
Are we more like Canada or Luxembourg?
Let me provide another set of inconvenient truths. The United States doesn’t just spend more for its health care than any other country. It spends more for its military, more on education, and more per foot of public roads or bridges than any other OECD country. All of these are overwhelmingly dominated by government spending.
For most of the last two centuries France has promoted the notion of “Frenchness” as the core of civil society: common language, common mores, common culture. That has led to the active suppression of minorities there. But they do have a lot of public spending.
