6 Ways America Is # 1
Greatness no sane society would want
Do Donald Trump and Make America Great Again (MAGA) realize how many ways the USA is already great? Here are six categories in which America leads the world. Feel free to add your own.
1.Most billionaires. According to the Indian Express, the US in 2024 is home to more billionaires than any other country in the world, with 813 individuals possessing a total of 5.7 trillion dollars. (A trillion is a million million.) If those numbers are right, American billionaires have an average of $7 billion each. If they never made another penny, they could spend $10 million a year and not notice the difference for 500 years.
Doesn’t it feel good to have all those people riding around buying and selling whole cities, planning to take humanity to Mars and make more billions in the process? The increasing poverty and desperation among the working classes is an unfortunate but necessary side effect of enriching those beautiful, talented people.
2. Most prisoners — With all those rich people needing protection, it’s no wonder the US incarcerates more people than any other country.-According to World Population Review (WPR), in the US in 2021 1,767,200 people were in prison, slightly more than in China, despite China having five times more people to draw from.
When you lock people up, you have to hire people to control them; you have to build their prisons, clothe them, and buy their food. Incarceration creates jobs. Perhaps that’s why rates keep going up, no matter who is President. WPR says, ”The incarceration rate in the U.S. has skyrocketed — the prison population was a mere 200,000 in 1972, less than a ninth of today’s total.”
3. Highest medical costs. According to Health Systems Tracked (HST), the US spends over $12,000 per person on health care, far more than any other country. “On average,” reports HST, “other wealthy nations spend less than half as much on medical care.” According to a survey of rich countries by the Commonwealth Fund in 2021, the US ranked dead last in quality of care and life expectancy, and first in number of people without access to medical treatment.
I attribute this exalted ranking to profit-oriented care, like prescribing expensive new drugs instead of proven generics, paying for invasive procedures but not helping people live healthy lives, over-testing and over-treating some while denying care to others.
Looking at some of the graphs I linked to above, I was shocked at how much of a downside outlier the US is. Poor countries like Panama have better health than we do. I can’t think of a positive spin on this, except to note what nice cars some doctors seem able to afford.
4. Highest Military Spending — Despite our cities falling apart, being protected by two oceans, and having no real enemies, the US ranks #1 in military spending, in military bases around the world, in numbers of wars fought, and weapons sales and giveaways to other countries.
We’re not just #1 here; in most of these categories, we outdo the rest of the world combined. The US has been at war for 228 of its 245 years, according to an AI search.
Even with all those wars, you have to go back to World War II to find an example of a US victory over any country big enough to fight back. We no longer fight our own wars; we get proxies like Ukraine and Israel to fight for us. How great is that!
5. Mass shootings — When you rank #1 in violence around the world, some of that violence comes home. The US ranks first in both gun ownership and school shootings.
Again, the numbers are flat-out ridiculous. The US has more privately-owned guns than it has people. In school shootings, we outpaced the #2 country (Mexico) by 288 to 8 over a one-year study period. Maybe massacres are the price of freedom, as Fox TV host Bill O’Reilly said after one horror. But what kind of freedom is it when you can’t go to school or to a concert without getting shot?
6. Most debt — The US does not worry about paying for things. We may not rank #1 in overall debt, depending on how you calculate, but we’re very high in lists of consumer debt, business debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt, and the federal debt. Taken together, we’re definitely the biggest debtors in the world, which is how we manage to accumulate so much stuff.
Are you proud yet? There are more categories where we might not be #1, but rank very high, such as numbers of homeless people and drug addicts. I didn’t choose to live in such a society, did you? Is this the greatness MAGA will build on?
Some writers call America a “dystopia,” usually defined as “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.”
You could call us dystopian, I guess, but that word misses the whole clown show aspect of it. It’s a society that would make sense to drunken teenagers on a bender. I think this is what happens when a society is guided only by private profit. People keep doing what makes them money, even when they can see it’s killing them.
Perhaps we could make America great by undoing some of the ways we’re already great. People need to learn and teach each other ways to live that heal, not to strive for wealth at the cost of war, mass violence, and environmental destruction.
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