Word: europeanally
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What misconceptions do we have about our differences? Crime rates are a good example. The U.S. murder rate is always held up as exemplifying the contrast across the Atlantic. There's no getting around the fact that the murder rate in America is much higher than in European countries. The implication is that every other crime is equally high, but I knew that was simply not the case. For example, [the U.S. has] comparatively low rates of sexual assault...
What about the U.S. tax system? How does it compare to Europe's? The U.S. tax rate is at the low end of the European scale. The big difference is we have no national VAT, or value-added tax. We rely on income and property tax for revenue, and our corporate tax is higher than that of most European nations. And yet our system is very progressive. Rich Americans pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the richest Europeans do. We have a low absolute level of taxation, but it's progressive by European standards...
...Europeans have VAT and it's very, very high - in Nordic countries, it's somewhere between 20% and 25%. The average European pays a much higher percentage in overall budget every time they buy something, but European governments give it back in the form of social benefits. American social benefits tend to be limited to the poor, so there's a much clearer [wealth] redistribution through the tax system than there is in Europe...
...have more people who live under the poverty line. In terms of relative poverty, that's true. But if you look at absolute poverty, you get a different impression. Because our GDP per capita tends to be higher than GDP per capita in European countries, the people who fall below the poverty line [in the U.S.] are not necessarily considered poor elsewhere...
...really that much worse than Europe's? There are basically three numbers that always come up when people talk about the American health care system: average life expectancy, infant mortality and the mount of money we spend per head. Average life expectancy is at the low end of the European scale. We don't do well in terms of infant mortality, either. [And] we spend almost twice as much per person in health care expenditure. Fifteen percent of Americans don't have any insurance coverage. That's undeniable...