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"... in 2003, the average Republican man paid about 48 percent ($5,100) more than his Democratic counterpart in total Federal taxes, including FICA contributions. The average Republican woman paid about 34 percent ($3,400) more than her counterpart."

http://wallstreetpit.com/89671... [wallstreetpit.com]. From the article:

"Hardly surprising, we see that in a two-party split, 60-80% of welfare recipients are Democrats, while full time Workers are evenly divided between parties.

"You have similar results in this recent NPR-Poll. Among the Long Term Unemployed, 72% of the two-party support goes to Democrats.

"Hardly surprising, we see that in a two-party split, 60-80% of welfare recipients are Democrats, while full time Workers are evenly divided between parties.

"You have similar results in this recent NPR-Poll. Among the Long Term Unemployed, 72% of the two-party support goes to Democrats.

"It appears that once more common sense is right and the impression left by the New York Times wrong. Indeed, people who live off the government disproportionally support Democrats.

"Given that Krugman is aware of the Gellman-Paradox, he should have reported the individual level data first instead of wasting everyone’s time with state-level aggregation that we already know is wrong. Instead he acknowledged that state level data is probably wrong (to get cover), then goes ahead and relies on the wrong method anyway, since it produces the results he wants. The false impression that Republicans use more welfare is already spread around the internet by liberals who still trust Krugman."

"With their exclusive rights protected by the Public Carriage Office, and their rivals held back, London black cabs behave like any cartel — they squeeze their advantages for all their worth." http://www.spectator.co.uk/fea...

Uber is cheaper and quicker than black cabs: http://www.independent.co.uk/v...

In the age of GPS "The Knowledge" is a needlessly hard test which keeps most people out. https://www.washingtonpost.com...

London drivers say "The Knowledge" is better than a GPS http://www.theguardian.com/wor... but even before the age of GPS, most cities on the planet regulated taxi without such a test. Doctors do something similar with entrance boards which decide how many new doctors can enter a field. http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-... Rudimentary economics: any profession which restricts their numbers can charge more. Imagine if nurses, paramedics, firemen and cops set up their own mandatory boards what it could do for them.

Most cities restrict taxi numbers usually by restricting the number of licenses issued.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/6... FRANCE $270,000
http://globalnews.ca/news/1780... CANADA Was $360,000
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/cost... AUSTRALIA Was $425,000
http://www.scmp.com/business/m... HONG KONG $1M
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... USA $1.2M

High speed trains are awesome, and they're great for prestige and getting customers to buy that technology. Yet they're out of price range for the majority of customers.

Maybe not? This from a recent World Bank report:
"As of October 1, 2014, over 2.9 billion passengers are estimated to have taken a trip in a China Rail - High Speed train (called CRH services), with traffic growing from 128 million in 2008 to 672 million in 2013, or about 39 percent growth per annum since 2008. In 2013, 530 million of those CRH trips took place on passenger dedicated HSR lines. In 2013, China HSR lines carried slightly more HSR passenger-km (214 billion) than the rest of the world combined. This represented about 2.5 times the HSR passenger-km of Japan, the second largest country in terms of HSR traffic. These are substantial numbers for a system that is still in its early days."

Also, a personal informed opinion here

Ok, we need some links with more concrete figures:

1. Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk

Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable. The United States' GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

I'm not saying that's a reasonable way to draw a budget, just to provide an estimate on what Musk is targeting. Since this article came out (Nov 2012), I think his cost estimations went up, and his funding plans shifted more to preparing a realistic IPO (not covering the whole thing, but some of the early stages). Cannot readily find a quote for that.

There are many more (somewhat obfuscated) details in that article, like this one:

Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by SPACE.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."

Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, "Maybe."

2. Elon Musk Says Ticket to Mars Will Cost $500,000

“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket — half a million dollars. It can be done,” he told the BBC.

Musk did hint that one of the keys to low-cost trips to the red planet would be the ability to not only refuel there, but also to reuse the entire spacecraft on the return trip. In the BBC interview Musk said by reusing the spacecraft, you end up with the same sorts of costs airlines face. Musk compared it to flying today where a 747 isn’t simply thrown away after a flight to London. Like the airplane, the cost of the spacecraft could be spread out over numerous flights rather than just a single trip making fuel one of the main expenses rather than the entire ship.

3. Tesla’s (TSLA) Musk On Colonizing the Red Planet

Asked about the possibility of a SpaceX IPO, Musk said the company’s plans are too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, making an IPO unlikely any time soon.

“Maybe [when] we’re close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we’ve flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense,” he said.

So, I can't comment on how realistic is each of his cost and time estimations, but he is trying hard to make them internally consistent, and most and first of all, to bring down the launch costs and to improve the reusability. We can already see several successful steps in that direction, and we will see the gradual progress, or lack thereof, very soon. It's not some Kickstarter scheme for Gates & Buffet.

I'd happily pay another 10% or so to gain what people in many (most?) other OECD nations have--I'd be a fool not to, since it's a bargain.

I'm willing to bet that if you actually had that option, you wouldn't take it.

Let's presume that "I do alright but I'm far from rich" means you pull in about $85k/year. An additional 10% means you would pay just over $700/month more in taxes. That's before you take into account that the average gross salary in Denmark is almost $10,000/year lower than in the U.S., so another ~$500/month hit after taxes. That $1,200/month bump in take-home pay that you enjoy over the average Dane could buy you and your family a righteous medical insurance policy, and if you're a smart shopper you'll still have quite a bit left over to save for your kids' education.

That's just the financials. As far as transportation, the idea that the U.S. has an inferior transportation infrastructure is at best an apples-to-oranges fallacy, and at worst an outright myth. The only country in the world of comparable size that has a better-developed system of transportation (or one that even comes close) is China, and you'll note they have the tax revenue from 4 times as many people to pay for it. Western European countries are substantially more compact, in both absolute and per-capita terms (Denmark specifically has 4x the population density of the U.S.), and thus don't have nearly as much ground to cover or face comparable last-mile challenges. Moreover, the price they pay for what you perceive as a transportation utopia is arguably reduced mobility, a more limited choice of destinations due to highly restricted personal last-mile reach, and -- more importantly -- a paradigm where apartment living is the norm rather than the exception. (How many Danes do you think live in single-family homes?)

Back to the balance sheet: note that we haven't even gotten to sales tax yet. So...you're already paying about $1,200/month for the privilege of sharing walls with your neighbors and piling your family onto a crowded train to go away for the weekend instead of hopping in your minivan. Now - on top of that, you would pay >15% more in VAT than you do in the States. Not only that, but you would also pay breathtaking import tariffs to boot: nearly 50% on things like bicycles, and a mind-boggling 200% on cars, should you decide you want one. Oh, and once you've paid 3x for your car, you'd pay about $10 per gallon of gas to drive it.

I really don't think that 10% is as much of a "bargain" as your first impressions might lead you to believe.

Actually if you look at the statistics it looks like the cost of producing an iphone in China is dwarfed by all other costs -- so moving production elsewhere just be subtracting from an already lucrative profit and naught else.

I drew my numbers from memory, but they're backed up here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12930930 [nih.gov], and slightly worse: 31% to 16%. If I read this correctly, it does NOT include salaries for doctors, only for employees engaged in administrative roles:

That's an interesting report but I have a few problems with it.

1. It does not measure administrative costs for all health care dollars. It excludes major portions of the health care industry such as pharmaceuticals and medical equipment.

2. It does include doctor salaries as administrative overhead based on the proportion of time (self-reported) that doctors spend on billing and other administrative costs.

We determined the proportion of physicians' work hours devoted to billing and administration from a national survey and multiplied this proportion by physicians' net income before taxes.

The problem is doctors in America earn almost twice as much as doctors in Canada.

3. It counts ALL expenses on private insurance as overhead.

In 1999 U.S. private insurers retained $46.9 billion of the $401.2 billion they collected in premiums. Their average overhead (11.7 percent) exceeded that of Medicare (3.6 percent) and Medicaid (6.8 percent).

That implies that insurance serves absolutely no purpose when it does things like combat fraud (which is more severe in Medicare/Medicaid and does not get counted as overhead). Obviously this gives an advantage to Canada since much more money is spent on private insurers in the US. Of course "Our analysis also omits the costs of collecting taxes to fund health care."

I think you're somewhat overstating the report's finding. It definitely shows that the US spends too much on administrative overhead, and that the US spends more than Canada in certain segments of health care. So there's a lot of room for improvement. But I don't think it can be applied to ALL health care costs.

There are many areas of financial inefficiency in American health care.

I definitely agree with that. And to me it's the more important problems. If you want to address financial inefficiency in the US health care system, you have to start at doctor salaries. They're too high. It's massively inefficient. Doctor salaries are the largest component of health care costs (even in your efficiency report the first component they studied was the "value" of doctors' time spent on administrative duties) and controlling them is the key to controlling health care costs. Our doctors make 2 - 5 times the money doctors make in other countries with health care systems that are pretty much as good as our own (not getting into life expectancy vs life style again, I think it's close enough to call them all about the same).

http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-the-medical-cartel-why-are-md-salaries-so-high

Canada: $100,781
US: $199,000

There's the bulk of your 45% cost difference.

Of course the economists will say this is good for the entire economy. Really? Then why have real wages been stagnant for over a decade - for everyone?

Everyone? Even sports stars? Taking a salary survey, starting in the year 2000, is going to produce biased results, because this was the height of the dot com boom. You are looking at a number that was at its peak for a large number of people, particularly those of us in the technology sector.

The winners in globalisation are those countries who have the best educated people combined with an economy that can use those workers. That's why we saw Germany and other European countries being some of the first nations in the world to come out of the recent recession, even though many Americans will decry them for their "Socialist" policies, ensuring free high level graduate and post-graduate education for everyone results in a more educated workforce. But this isn't something that can be done instantly - it takes years for the benefits of education to appear, with an increased number of college graduates slowly leading to more competitive business overall. The United States has traditionally focussed on having a small percentage of very well educated citizens, and the majority were lower educated, but could be successfully trained for less creative posts in industry. This model is becoming less competitive due to globalisation, as the industrial jobs move to where they can be done cheapest, and other countries begin to ramp up high-level education programs that a greater number of their citizens have access to.

There is an artificial shortage of doctors maintained by restricting admissions to medical schools and even more so by restricting the total number of medical schools as well as increasing tuition for medical school much faster than costs.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/29/business/curbing-the-supply-of-physicians-who-said-we-have-too-many-doctors.html?&pagewanted=all
While [the AMA] is devoted to improving the quality of medical care, education and the profession, it also operates as a cartel to protect the economic interests of its members.

http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-the-medical-cartel-why-are-md-salaries-so-high
The Medical Cartel: Why are MD Salaries So High?

By Mark J. Perry|Jun 24, 2009, 2:47 PM|Author's Website

Greg Mankiw features the chart below on physicians' salaries in the U.S. vs. various European countries and Canada, showing that MDs in the U.S. make about $200,000, which is between 2 and 5 times as much as doctors make in other countries. How do we explain the significantly higher physician salaries in the U.S.?

The Medical Cartel: Why are MD Salaries So High?

One explanation is the restriction on the number of medical schools, and the subsequent restriction on the number of medical students, and ultimately the number of physicians. Consider the difference between law schools and medical schools.

In 1963, there were only 135 law schools in the U.S. (data here), and now there are 200, which is almost a 50% increase over the last 45 years in the number of U.S. law schools. Unfortunately, we've witnessed exactly the opposite trend in the number of medical schools. There are 130 medical schools in the U.S. (data here), which is 22% fewer than the number of medical schools 100 years ago (166 medical schools, source), even though the U.S. population has increased by 300%.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/archives/fm/08-90.html
"During the great depression, as Milton Friedman notes, the AMA ordered the remaining medical schools to admit fewer students, and every school followed instructions. If they didn't, they risked losing their AMA accreditation."

During world war II, they needed doctors quickly and they created so many (about 16,000) that there was a glut until the 1970's.

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The nursing shortage takes care of itself because pay sucks and hours are terrible. You work long enough to get experience to go work somewhere besides a hospital. A friend of mine's wife is an RN and basically works when she wants to now that she has left the hospital system.

P.S.

Just imagine if Roman-Latin has been stabilized in 500 A.D. with fixed spelling and mandatory education. Rather than have a bunch of devolved Latinate dialects, Western Europe would now be united under one universal tongue which would make communication between the peoples of the EU much easier.

Wait, is this supposed to be a good ting?

Sure they'd all speak the same language, but European culture would be much more homogenized and much less interesting (kind of like what the EU is doing now). There are a lot of libertarian leaning slashdotters. Not to say you're one of them, but it you favour small government and decentralization then you should also favour language fragmentation.

See this interesting article which argues European supremacy is largely due to the fragmentation of language.

Our National Religion isn't even the Almighty Dollar. If it were, then you could say the phrase

"A rising tide lifts all ships."

and it wouldn't cause Free Market Conservatives to go into apoplexy.

If I'm an executive in "Corporate America" and I can layoff 5000 workers, save a little bit for the company over the next few quarters, and get the board to give me a few million in reward money, then I'm just doing the job I'm supposed to be doing. But now we have 5000 people who can't afford to buy anything. That's no good in a consumer driven economy.

The top 1 percent of earners now take home 23 percent of total national income. The rest of us are their serfs. We don't mind much during the good times. We have great entertainments. But during the bad times we get mighty riled up and sometimes win elections. We start tossing about ideas with socialistic leanings. What happens then? The Holders of Capital convince enough people that the government is no good. That capitalism is our way of life. So e.g. instead of getting public high speed rail for everyone (similar to how the Interstate system works) we get handouts to Amtrak wanna-be's so they can free-enterprise slow trains and upgrade them as they gain in popularity. Ridiculous. We had that 100 years ago and they're gone for a reason. But I digress.

Unenlightened GREED is our National Religion. Finders Keepers.