Poor in the U.S. are richer than the typical European

When Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, pro-capitalist commentators rushed to compare him to Stalin or Mao and the horrors their versions of socialism caused. But Mamdani doesn't want Soviet or Chinese style socialism. He, and most socialists in the U.S., want European style socialism, with Sweden as their idol. 

But do they know anything about European socialism? I say European rather than Swedish because Sweden is a tiny nation, 10.5 million people, smaller than most large U.S. cities. It's statistical malpractice to compare a tiny nation to a huge one like the U.S. with 340 million. Sound statistics require that sample sizes be similar so that sample size doesn't affect the analysis. 

Still, the median income in Sweden is $33,472 according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compared to $46,625 for the U.S. If poverty is defined as household incomes below 60% of the median, then the poor in Sweden live on less than $20,083 whereas in the U.S. poor households enjoy $27,975. All OECD figures are adjusted for the cost of living. 

To be honest, we should compare the U.S. with the E.U. which has a population of 450 million. The rest of Europe doesn't look so much like Sweden. The weighted median income of the E.U. is just $23,802, that of the Czech Republic, and half that of the U.S. That means the typical European in poverty lives on less than $14,281 per year. Imagine a family in the U.S. living on that. The poverty line in the U.S. is higher by almost $4,000 per year than the median income of the typical E.U. household. 

I use the median income because it more closely reflects the middle class. Averages can be skewed by the high incomes of a few people. And poverty is usually calculated as a percentage of the median. I weight the medians by the population of each country in the E.U. so that small, rich countries like Sweden don't give us a false picture of how typical Europeans live. To learn how to calculate a weighted median, go here. These statistics are easy to find and calculate, but democratic socialists don't want to know them. Socialism is powered by envy, which is impervious to facts and reason. 

Why are Europeans so much poorer than Americans? They succumbed to socialist nonsense much earlier than the U.S. and the U.S. is slightly less socialist. But we can look forward to greater poverty in the future as we imitate European socialism. Is that really what American democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani want? 

Europeans and other socialists respond to the poverty of Europe by insisting they are morally superior to the U.S. by providing free healthcare and college. I'll look into that false picture next.