According to stats, "equality" for the whole world means you will be living on about 7000 USD per year. By that argument, even the poorest 2% of Americans are above average.
Or do you mean just "equality of the people you see out your window"? Doesn't seem very equal to me.
ArghMonkey - Thanks for that link to the stats - very interesting! I wonder if the people criticizing you have any reply to those stats?
Have you considered Australia? I don't know if it's more left-leaning than Canada, but according to the current issue of "The Economist", an OECD survey just rated it the best rich country to live in. The economy is strong, unemployment is low, food is excellent, people are happy and very friendly... I've only ever heard great things about Australia.
Also, everyone on this thread (but especially those brainwashed by FOX) could probably learn a lot from a couple of recent books - you might at least check them out on Amazon and read some customer reviews:
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
Edited by: peasbeuponyou
@peasbeuponyou - I have considered Australia and thats a good suggestion actually.
@maenad/warmbasil - The smallest bit of research would give you the real answer.
Your middle class is disappearing, there is massive inequality in the u.s., not sure why some of u are so ignorant to reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class#Middle_class_squeeze
I think we're all pretty aware that there is some form of middle class squeeze in many places in the developed world, even without the wikipedia reference. My point, and I think maenad's too, is that it's the people who have far less that deserve our concern and engagement, people who can't adequately feed themselves and don't have safe housing, not those who are having to cancel the cable TV or switch to supermarket own-brands. There's really no need to be so rude to people who've tried to help you.
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>Btw, if any of you are interested in how bad things are for your middle class in the U.S., here are a bunch of stats - http://i.min.us/iiWpK.png
Class is a set of socio-economic factors, of which income is one part. See Caddyshack. The only people who use income as the measure of class membership are leftists.
The Gini index was developed by the man who wrote The Scientific Basis of Fascism. Yes, he was a Fascist. The only people who use the Gini index as a measure of income equality are leftists.
Rotate the number 7 ninety degrees clockwise and you have something like this: _| That's also an approximation of Global Annual Income (vertical axis) by Percentile of population (horizontal azis). The US is at the far right of the graph. The reason we have income inequality is by world standards 70% our population is wealthy or rich. The rest merely live an economic life that most of the world will never attain.
According to the book "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger", you don't need especially high taxes (as in Scandinavia, for example) in order to achieve a fair, equitable, prosperous, civilized, "socialistic" society... as Switzerland and Japan prove...
So there's two more very decent places you might want to consider, and I'll add Taiwan and South Korea to those. These are all largely middle class, increasingly prosperous societies with good universal health care systems, low unemployment, good public safety and relatively good governments that don't rape their own people (metaphorically speaking, and in contrast to what is happening in the US, UK, Ireland, etc.)