WHERE TO BE BORN?

This chart came from The Economist, one of my favorite periodicals for calm, thorough and objective reasoning.  A sister company of this periodical, Economist Intelligence Unit (E.I.U.), did a study recently, weighing in many factors as to the best places to live in our world now. The U.S.A. used to dominate this study. Look where we are now---number 16, behind a host of nations, even our neighbor, Canada.

Factors to determine these ratings include. geography, income, crime rate, trust in public institutions, health, safety, family life and resources. One of the contributing factors in America's decline from numero uno to sixteen is the fiscal debt crushing future generations and the economic load it will impose on those generations.

One amusing note: in the article, they quote one of my favorite movie lines from that classic, The Third Man, a masterpiece directed by Sir Carroll Reed and featuring Joseph Cotten and one of my favorites, Orson Welles. Welles plays an ammoral con man, an American operating in the shady drug (in this case, penicillin) blackmarket after World War II in Vienna. His old friend, Cotten, is trying to dissuade him from his crooked endeavors by appealing to his humanitarian instincts. Welles replies in a great speech to the effect that medieval Italy, a country torn by strife and the evil Borgias, created Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. And in 500 years of peace and harmony, what did Switzerland create? The cuckoo clock! The writers of the article were referring to what they called the "yawn factor" of living in boring Switzerland.
I still love that line.

Just in case you are planning to live another hundred years or more, I thought you might find this information of value. As for me, I'm too old to emigrate.  I'll stay here in the good old U.S.A., warts and all.