I just wanted to take a minute to say hello and to see how things have been for you lately, and to maybe bring you up to date on a bit of news from here.
Well, right off the bat, we hear you have a new Conservative Prime Minister and that his Party and Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems are in partnership, which I'm sure will be interesting; you probably heard that us Colonials are again having Tea Parties, which has also been very interesting.
I have a Godson who's getting married this September, so we're all talking about that, and I hear Graham Norton was even better than last year at hosting Eurovision, despite the fact that it's...frankly, it's Eurovision.
Oh, yeah...we also had a bit of an oil spill recently that you may have heard about-and hoo, boy; you should see how the Company that spilled the oil has been acting.
See the dirty secret here is that Canada has historically been notably less wealthy than the US (Nationmaster lists the US at $6K higher in GDP per capita for 2006) and there was always an element of apples to oranges in comparing our systems. We have fewer MRIs? Well, duh. Of course America should have had the better system, and at the upper end of the income spectrum, they probably do. The fact that we're ahead at all is itself an indication of how broken the US model is.
So let's transmogrify those oranges into apples, and get some idea what it would mean to implement US level health spending within other systems. US health care reform opponents have recently moved from bashing Canada to the UK's NHS, but the same sort of disparity applies. In 2006, the UK spent about US$192B (8.2% of GDP) on health care, based on an economy that generated $39K per capita. America spent $2 trillion (15.3%) based on an economy that generated $44K per capita. The Brits too, spent less of their national income on health care, but that income is proportionally smaller too. Let's adjust both dials and see what we get.
On the occasion of the Convention on Modern Liberty currently taking place in the UK, Times Online published a column by novelist Phillip Pullman (The Golden Compass) on the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties in Britain.
Or rather, it briefly published this column and then, apparently, withdrew it. At the time of writing, the original link led to an error page -- though the column was still listed in search results for the Times Online site. The Google cache of the page was scrubbed.
For the past two weeks we have paid more attention to the rest of the world than usual, what with the Olympics drawing our attention to Asia, and the conflict in the Balkans forcing us to learn that Atlanta is not in danger...that indeed, there is another Georgia-and how events in that Georgia could affect life in our Georgia.
As it happens, I belong to an international blogging collective (the Blogpower community) with voices that happen to be especially well-placed and often powerful to boot...a combination that will be most helpful for today's exercise.
We are going to take a journey, Gentle Reader, all the way from India to Australia. We'll visit Canadian friends, then we have much to discuss in the UK...and we get to meet a friend in the Sudan-and just for fun, we'll toss in a few discussion questions based on Russian history.
Finally, through the miracle of Facebook, we'll meet an actual volunteer soldier from South Ossetia who will describe the Georgian attack on his city.
There's a lot to cover, so put on your travel hat, grab your virtual passport, and let's hit the road.
Note to would-be Farm Bill reformers everywhere: There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies include West African cotton farmers. There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies include clothing manufacturers (actually, you could almost put a period right there, they've mostly gone to China by now), garment distributors, or clothing retailers who've got even a passing desire for the price of cotton to go up. There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies could be characterized as having a broad, favorable public consensus towards furthering the goals of the World Trade Organization. This doesn't mean you can't argue against subsidies, it just means that the foregoing are always going to be weak arguments when your audience is the U.S. Congress.
Take the debate about international food aid and the Farm Bill, for example.
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