Is the United States a bad country?

Answer 1

It depends on what you rate it against, if you compared to the world as a whole it would rank above midway but when compared to the top 20 democracies in the world (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)) it ranks lowest in almost all of the categories;

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;

• the greatest inequality of incomes;

• the lowest social mobility;

• the lowest score on the UN's index of "material well-being of children";

• the worst score on the UN's Gender Inequality Index;

• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;

• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;

• the highest homicide rate;

• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;

• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;

• the lowest score on Yale's Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);

• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);

• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP (in fact more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of which are allies

• the largest international arms sales.

These statistics don't lie, America is one of the worst "most developed democracies" and the argument that "everyone is so free and we have so many choices" is invalid since every other one of the twenty democracies have the same rights, maybe even more since there governments aren't controlled by massive companies who just lobby to get their own way (e.g cigarette companies, gun companies e.t.c.) which all lobby to get more sales at the expense of the people of America. So, in conclusion, America is a not a bad country relative to all countries in the world but is bad when compared to other countries with modern democracies.