RE: The work-around President
Like I said those numbers are skewed by the number of very wealthy people here.
Another misconception.
The North European countries have more rich people than the USA.
On paper if you count the government surplus every Norwegian is a millionaire. And yet they often live packed into shitty apartments. The cost of living and taxes are much higher.
But even if not: We are comparing 1/5 of population parts here. You won't tell me that 1/5 of the US people are "very wealthy", do you? ;)
61 out of 100 U.S. households will break into the top 20% of incomes (roughly $111,000*) for at least 2 consecutive years.
Cheese burgers are from real life,
But nobody is going to give you 10$ for a cheeseburger. Same goes for housing, helath care etc. Nobody is going to give 5 times the sticker price as subsidy.
LOL, you don't have 5 Guys burgers in your country. At a hospital in America how much do you think 2 Tylenol cost?
They cost $50, so in fact we don't pay 5 times more, we pay 50 times more. If section 8 housing pays $1200 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment would any landlord ever rent it out for less?
Since I don't know what that is, I can't say.
But I know that you can sometimes have the same stuff in the next hospital for 5 times less (or more).
And sometimes you pay 10 times more co-pay then the thing costs.
But that is not the result of subsidy, as you can easily see on the fact that in that case it would always be the same price.
That is just a greedy free market charging what it can from "customers" who have no idea of the top secret real price.
Acetaminophen costs $50 at a hospital. Indeed there are massive differences in prices, I was directed to get an MRI at a hospital not too long ago and it turned out that it cost like $500 more than at an office of the same company about a quarter mile from the hospital. Why do you think these differences exist and persist?
Because no one ever asks how much they cost because they are not paying out of pocket because we have subsidized care. They were all confused when I started asking how much it costs.
It's anything but a free market when the government creates price floors.
We can tell you are wrong because we have an example of health care market in the US without government subsidies, veterinary care. And veterinary care costs a fraction of what human care costs even though the procedures are either identical or actually much more difficult because dogs need to be restrained and can't talk and such for some procedures and of course human doctors only have the equipment and training for human medical procedures and vets can treat many species and yet veterinary procedures cost only a fraction of what we pay for the same thing with subsidized and managed care. Vets operate under a "greedy free market" and provide the same thing for much less than your government subsidies.
We have that too. A state and a private. The costs are roughly the same, but there is a huge but.
The private does not need to take you - so they don't take the "bad deals".
The state system has to take over all the really sick (those whose costs are a lot more higher than a "normal" person), the unemployed and so on.
So this is a huge sum that makes the state more expensive compared to private, and still the costs are nearly the same!
In the future - due to the low interest rates - the private may well become more expensive than state.
The costs are the same because of the price floor created by the state system, yet another example of how subsidies raise costs. Without the public system providers would have to compete with each other on price.
In this case, without a private system, the public would be even cheaper!
And they do compete, so that argument is invalid. They just don't compete for all Germans, but "only" for the number of people of a smaller country.
And what has that to do with the numbers of millionaires being a lot higher there then in the US?
btw. AS far as I know housing prices in the US are worse.
Households is not people.
Income is not wealth.
And that headline looks awfully like some statistic massaging. I can't say because the website does not let me in (EU).
I guess to say that 61% of households are stuck at the lower 20% for at least 2 years would also be right. There are not that many university students that make much money while studying.