West Austrians make the best bacon and bacon fat on the plant, it is known. And because she's so rich she can afford to get her week's supply flown in by chartered 747 every Monday.

Hence West Austrians should be greateful for her continued patronage.

Super rich, ignorant, lucky woman preaching nonsense to hard working non-rich average people. Nothing she says can be taken seriously. Only a select lucky few are born into extreme wealth such as multi-millionaire/billionaire trust fund kids or a member of the royal family.

That cannot be explained because:

The USA spends more per capita* on healthcare than any other "western" country in the world that has a public health system, and

far more as a % of GDP* than any other "western" country in the world that has a public health system, and

has a higher infant / young child mortality rate* than any other "western" country in the world that has a public health system, and

has a higher adult mortality rate (under 55 years)* than any other "western" country in the world that has a public health system, and

has a lower life expectancy* than any other "western" country in the world that has a public health system.

*based on 2009 data (i.e. pre-Obama's non-socialised "socialised" health care act)

So US non-single payer health care system has worse bang for buck than all countries with mixed single payer public health + private insurance systems.

- I thought the excess (surchage i think its label on the tax form) is 1% extra on top of the original 1.5% medicare levy i f you earnt over $70,000.  If you get private heath over the age of 31, then you pay the $2 for every year when you actually get the cover. I knwo my mum got it late so she pays about $20 more than me for samecover, but in the years previous to havng health, she had to pay apporx 1% surchase on taxes to medicare levy. Back in her day the threshold was $50,000, so $500 extra.

- The flood stuf I was refering to was QLD, these areas are designated flood plains (meaning they flood on a regular basis, not a once every 100 year thing). The severity obviously varies. aOne example, the rail tracks in the flood plains that got washed away, they rebuilt them exactly the same way (i.e created an elevated train track which creates a dam wall. They should include tunnels thruogh the wall, so water can continue its natural flow to the main river.

- Not sure if interest is part of the capital gains section, but it is in the income section of tax on its own i think.  I think on interest earned they charge a flat 30% or so.  Many things are means tested in our tax system, so I don't see why this cannot be the same at a minimum. Negative gearingis great if you got enough money to get into the realestate investment market. I was more refering to the low to middle class, who save some extra cash rather than blow it all.

Uh.   The US had a third party payer system before Obama put in Obama care.

And unlike other countries.  It didn't ration healthcare like other countries do.

Also, don't use life expectancy, it's such a gigantic sham figure to try and use for it has tons of other factors.  See what happens to US Life expectancy when you remove car accidents and violent crime.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-americans-poor-life-expectancy/

This isn't a perfect graph or number either since it doesn't account for the severity of the accident, so it's possible the US could be not saving some people it could have who face violent injurites...(Also it's adjusted mathmatically based on these numbers rather then a full reading hence why some countries life expectancy go down.)  but I hope you'll realize it's informative value here.

Afteralll if you are worried about is an illness or disease?   Looks like there isn't a better country in the world... no?

That's 13 year old data. And it seems to have some oddities, how come Aussie LE goes down? Does that mean it's ll the oldies having car accidents and criminal violence? I can see LE going up for many countries when being controlled for fatal injuries but how does Japan drop by over 2 years? "standardised" means there's been a bit of statistical data manipulation and you'd have to understand the manner and reason for manipulation to know whether those manipulations have created artifacts. I'm no statistician so I can drill down into the maths to know what's going on there. But seeing Japan drop by 2 years when taking our fatal injuries looks counter intuitive. It's also a progression since 1980, so there's no indication of whether countries have started lower than the USA then overtaken, but averaged out to the same / less. The data I'm referring to is the LE in 2009

But note I also mention infant / young child mortality and adult mortality (under 55) also being higher in the US compared to other countries. Adult mortality for each country is also split male/female (male always higher mortality) so this controls for the generally more violent and more accident prone men. The adult female mortality is higher in the USA.

So across all 4 measures of mortality: LE, IM, AM (FM / MM) the USA comes out worse than all the countries with some level of UHC. If nothing else it means the huge expense that's happening in the USA on healthcare doesn't seem to be leading to the US keeping pace with comparable countries.

Material wealth on this planet is finite. Obvious truth based on finite resources. Not everyone can have a car, for example. We will run out of plastic, oil, gold and so on. So, yes, wealth is finite.

I am a bit of a statitician having run a few expierments in my time.   So i can explain it eaisly... (I actually did with the parenthesis but i guess i wasn't clear enough.)   Japan drops so much because Japan has very few car accidents and violent crimes.

They are standardizing the amount of accidents and violent crimes among nations so that they are "even" taken it out of the equation.  Countries who's life expectancy drops, are countrys that are way below the average accident/violent crime incident rates.

Japan's life expectency drops 2 years because their accidents and violence rate are increased to match that of an average country via statitical regression.  No one really drives, and no one really is trying to kill other people.  Compare that to the US where almost everybody HAS to drive, and has a violent crime problem higher then regular, espiecally among young gangs and well.... the results are obvious.

And no... female mortality rate doesn't control for violence and accidents.  I can't imagine why you think it would... espiecally since violent crimes and accidents among women are increasing as time goes on... and there are gaps between violent crimes and accidents between different countries women... but like you said... you aren't a statician. 

I mean even before, whenit was more diverse... it's worth pointing out, Men may be more likely to commit violent crimes, but that doesn't mean a woman isn't going to be on the other end of it.

There really isn't much difference from that data and the data your refrencing though.,

Outside the data I refrenced actually controlling for some nonhealthcare factors.

No offense, but your data is just horribly misused due to general ignorance of the issues and factors related behind such numbers.

Lets take Infant mortality.  There are several factors uncontrolled for in Infant mortality numbers.  Lets start with 2 basic ones.

A) What the country considers infant mortality.  Many countries don't count an infant death as infant mortality unless they were born within specific parameters.

B) Teen Pregnancy.  One of the biggest causes of premature birth and low infant weight, the largest cause of IM happens to be teen pregnancy.  Using IM rate as an indicator is ridiculious unless you standardize for teen pregnancy rates... much like how the above standardized for violent crime and car accident rates.

To give you an idea about just how big a gap in teen pregnancy there is...

Teen Pregnancies in the US are > 10% of births in this country. 

I mean, how could you remotely consider infant mortality worth comparing without controlling for those factors... or premature births in general, smoking/drinking during pregnancy,  STDS and a huge host of other factors related to infant mortality?

Not to pile on with the statistial facts.... but..

"Teenage mothers are more likely to have preterm, low-birth-weight babies. The mortality rate for infants born to US teenage mothers is 1.5 to 3.5 times as high as the rate for infants born to mothers ages twenty-five to twenty-nine.[12] The US rate of births for teenage mothers is very high—2.8 times that of Canada and 7.0 times that of Sweden and Japan. If the United States had the same birth weights as Canada, its infant mortality rate—adjusting for this variable alone—would be slightly lower than Canada’s (5.4 versus 5.5 per one thousand births).[13]

Turning to gestational age, MacDorman and  Mathews calculate that if the United States had the same distribution of gestational ages as Sweden, its recorded infant mortality rate would drop by 33 percent,  tying it with France as the fifth lowest rate out of twenty-one developed countries."

.http://www.aei.org/outlook/health/global-health/us-health-care-a-reality-check-on-cross-country-comparisons/

(Note Gestational age means how old the fetus is when born, so in otherwords, when controlling for premature birth.)

More and more i get why some people are argueing that Algebra and geometry should be replaced in highschool with statistics and critical thinking statistics courses.  Even if people didn't get it completely and be unable to do their own analysis with confidence intervals in the like... like is often the case with Algebra and Geometry it would be a LOT harder to fool people with stats... since people would be trained to initally look for confounding variables like people who take statistics classes are. 

Not even getting into the problems with that theory. Not all wealth is matieral... I mean, your on a computer right now... on a website, about videogames.   Videogames are a form of wealth... and they're digital.

Furthermore, there are tons of mateirals that were worthless hundreds of years ago, that are worth tons now.  As new products get made, "finite" products get more valuable.  Not everybody can be flying around in airplanes made out of pure gold, however people can continue to live better and better lives through investment, hardwork and increasing the value of things.

Working for "inner joy" however, that actually IS something that is finite and largely impossible.

Everyone wants to be a poet, writer, teacher or something like that.

No one wants to be a garbage man.  Even people who enjoy it, do so because it's easy and they get paid.  There isn't anyone who's going to be a garbage man on their free time as a hobby.