Jesse Love 

Celestopea Times Editorial Columnist

Quality of Life

In this season of bare-knuckled politics, issues that affect the quality of peoples’ everyday lives seem to get lost in the barrage of character assassination by the candidates and their surrogates.  That’s too bad, because unverifiable questions about their military service actions during the Viet Nam war and other irrelevant innuendos about the distant past have little bearing on the men they are today, or the choices either will make that will affect all of us if they are elected to office.  What I’d rather know Mr. Candidate, is what you are going to do to improve the quality of my life?

That our quality of life as Americans may not be all it could be was brought home to me this summer when my son, (who has dual citizenship) visited from France.  I was somewhat dumbfounded when he explained why he had chosen to go to school in France rather than the USA.

“Well Pop”, he said, “In France, tuition and books for the years you are in school pursuing your bachelor degree, are free for all students. Plus the government pays 90% of your rent so my $500.00 apartment only costs me $50.00.” 

Wow!  How many financially struggling American students, or would-be-students who will never go to college because they can’t afford it, would love a deal like that!  I couldn’t argue with that reasoning as attending school in the USA would mean a financial sacrifice for all of us and would require my son to take a part-time job to help pay his expenses, giving him less time to study and do well at the University.

“Another thing”, he added, “What happens to me if I need medical or dental work?”  He went on to explain, “In the USA, I’d have to buy insurance and even for students it is very expensive.  In France, medical and dental costs are partially paid by Social Security.” 

I thought I had him now.  “Hold on, you’re not 65 years old, what does Social Security have to do with anything?”

He patiently explained, “In the USA, a worker pays a little over 7% of his gross income to Social Security.  However, except in very unusual circumstances he cannot draw any benefits until he retires.  The age for that has just been raised in the USA to 68.  In France, I have to pay 10% of my gross income to Social Security, but I can draw on it all of my life to help pay for medical and dental expenses and other things like greatly extended unemployment compensation if I ever need it.”

“See these teeth”, he said flashing a big smile, “It cost $8,000.00 to get my teeth fixed.  I paid $4,000.00 and Social Security paid the other 50%.”

“And when’s the last time you took a long paid vacation Pop?” he queried. 

“Truth be known son, I have never had a paid vacation,” I replied.

“I know”, he consoled, patting me on the shoulder, “But I came to visit you this summer with 5 weeks of paid vacation from my very first job.  That’s the minimum an employer can give to new employees.  If I went to a University in the USA, I’d be working somewhere like McDonalds to help pay for school, I’d have to beg for a day off and I certainly wouldn’t be getting 5 weeks paid vacation.”

Then he lightly elbowed me in the ribs, “And did I forget to mention that after I graduate and am in the workforce, the standard work week in France is 35 hours and any additional hours are overtime?”  “And frankly Pop”, he continued, “people and governments in the European Union, especially the countries of Western Europe, just have a higher consciousness about maintaining a good quality of life for all their people.  For example, we have much stricter environmental, food quality and energy efficiency requirements than the USA.”

After this conversation, I seriously had to do a more through investigation.  There were obvious quality of life differences between the USA and France, but I was sure that France must be in debt up to their ears to pay for those generous social services, low working hours and long paid vacations.

I needed an authoritative, indisputable information source to sort all this out so I went to the CIA World Factbook, to compare populations and 8 quality of life areas.  Here’s the comparison in key categories between the USA and France.  If you look at the rest of the countries of Western Europe you will find statistics similar to or often better than Frances.  Sweden for example, has a life expectancy of 80.3 years, an infant mortality of only 2.77 / 1000, Public Debt of 51.8% and zero people living below poverty.

Here’s the comparison in key categories between the USA and France.  If you look at the rest of the countries of Western Europe you will find statistics similar to or often better than France's.  Sweden for example, has a life expectancy of 80.3 years, an infant mortality of only 2.77 / 1000, Public Debt of 51.8% and zero people living below poverty.

Some quick conclusions from this data and the facts I learned from my son:

1.  The USA is a far richer country.  If you divide the GDP by the population, we see that each American worker produces substantially more wealth than each French worker but that would be obvious as they work longer hours and take fewer vacations.   However, for all of its’ wealth, the USA shamefully has over 12% of its population subsisting below the poverty level compared to Frances 6.5% and Sweden’s 0%.

2.  France has a more extensive social network that produces greater life benefits for their citizens.  As evidence we see they have a higher literacy rate, nearly half the percentage of people living below the poverty level, a longer life expectancy and a significantly lower infant mortality rate.

3.  France is a bit more in debt than the USA, but not much more.  France carries a debt that is 68.8% of the GDP while the USA’s is 62.4%.

4.  Americans spend 27% more on their military than the French do on theirs as a percentage of the GDP.  Before I did the research, I was sure I would be able to jump on military expenditures as one of the problems, but as a percentage of the total GDP and in relationship to other countries, military spending is not that significant.

So now I had to admit that I just didn’t get it.  How can the American workers produce more money, making the USA GDP the highest in the world by far, but have so much less to show for it?  Where is all the money going?  Then I read this little footnote by the CIA concerning the United States that stated that since 1975 nearly all gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households!  In other words, the rich have gotten richer but everyone else has treaded water at best, for the last 30 years. 

Forbes Magazine just came out with their current list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.  Like previous recent years, Bill Gates of Microsoft was number one with $48 Billion dollars.  The top three Microsoft moguls Gates, Allen and Ballmer are worth a combined $81 Billion.  It was also interesting that Sam Walton’s five Wal-Mart heirs occupy five positions in the top ten, with a combined net worth of almost $100 Billion dollars.  Almost everyone on the list is a billionaire and the combined wealth of the 400 individuals is over $1 Trillion dollars.  The entire GDP of the United States is a little less than $11 Trillion dollars, so the personal wealth of these 400 individuals is about equivalent to 10% of the entire annually generated wealth of the other 293,000,000 citizens of the USA.  From another perspective the richest 400 Americans are worth more than the annual GDP of the entire country of Canada.

A quick search of Forbes list of the wealthiest French citizens shows the richest is Liliane Bettencourt of L’Oreal with a $19 Billion dollar net worth.  After Ms. Bettencourt, France boasts only ten other billionaires and the combined net worth of all eleven is far less than the combined wealth of just the top two US billionaires, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

How much money can one person or even one family spend?  If you take an average 50 year old, American Billionaire, with just $3 Billion dollars, who lives to age 80, without making another nickel, he/she could spend $1,000,000.00 every week and still have well over $1 Billion dollars remaining when they died.  If you had 30 years and needed to spend $1,000,000.00 each week could you find a way to do it?  I don’t know.  Even if you shopped till you dropped every single day of your life and added three or four new mansions every year, it would be a challenge for one person or even extended family to spend that much. 

The more poignant question is, why is so much of the money generated in the USA concentrated in the hands of so few people to the point of such lavish extravagance that they can never even make a dent in trying to spend it?  Western European countries are able to offer all of their citizens a higher quality of life than their counterparts in America simply because their greater requirements for employers to provide employees a higher standard of living means the top stockholders get a little less while the rank and file employees that make everything work get a little more.   And Europe’s greater social security and corporate taxes mean the rich aren’t quite as rich but also insure a strong social safety net for all citizens built upon a firm foundation of top education, subsidized health care and stringent, comprehensive environmental regulations. 

As my son later elaborated, “living in Europe with all of its safeguards for citizens and help for students, simply gives you a tranquility and peace of mind that allows you to be more productive at work, more intent at school and more relaxed at home.”

Can America take a lesson from Europe?  Sam Walton was famous for his unimposing ways, including still driving around in an old pickup truck but are his five $100 Billion heirs proportionately so much greater contributors to Wal-Mart operations than the 1,500,000 employees?   The savvy and vision of Bill Gates certainly was important to Microsoft’s phenomenal growth and many of their employees have been well compensated, but without the people who buy Microsoft products, the founder’s pockets would be empty.  Perhaps sharing a little more of the wealth would help millions of people have a better life instead of just a handful.

The argument that American companies cannot give their employees better wages or benefits because it would make them non-competitive with other companies and multinational corporations simply doesn’t hold water.  For many years European corporations and countries have been giving their citizens better health care, higher quality and better access to education, enforcing more stringent environmental standards and offering shorter work weeks and longer paid vacations.  Even with all the perks many Western European countries carry less debt than the USA and it hasn’t diminished their ability to compete with the United States in the world economic arena.  For example, Airbus of France recently surpassed Boeing as the number one airplane manufacturer in the world.  Nor have slightly higher taxes stifled innovation and entrepreneurial efforts as is evidenced by French inventor Guy Negre’s recent unveiling of the revolutionary new car that uses no fuel and runs on compressed air. (See September 2004 issue of Celestopea Times).

America has always had the resources, moral fiber, innovation, compassion and worker productivity to be the greatest country in the world, a land of wonder for all of its citizens.  Isn’t it time to fulfill the potential?