Want more proof America's health care needs drastic improvement? Or that politics needs cleaning up? How about cutting spending?
Here it is: thanks to those and other short-comings, the U.S. is now just ninth in the world according to a new study of international prosperity.
See who beat America here>
The U.S. rates relatively poorly in the 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index, a ranking of 104 countries in terms of a broad definition of prosperity that includes economic growth and quality of life measures.
America leads big countries, with strong scores for democracy, entrepreneurship and innovation, but it still has a long way to go, easily losing to the Scandinavians, Canadians, Aussies and others in many important categories like health, governance and economic fundamentals.
The index is the third annual report published by the London-based Legatum Institute. Here are highlights about the USA:
Legatum spokesman Hamish Banks tells us the U.S. story isn't terrible in context.
"On the face of it the U.S. is getting beaten out by a raft of countries more known for their welfare policies -- the Scandinavians, Swiss and Dutch, for example -- and scores relatively low on health and safety and security. We need to compare like-with-like, however, and the U.S. maintains its pre-eminence amongst the large nations and is still leading the pack in Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Democratic Institutions. There’s no doubt, however, that the economic fundamentals score is below where it should be, but the general underlying indication is certainly not bad, at least form a long-term perspective."
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