I am going to share a little analysis I’ve done by combining Pennsylvania’s PSSA test scores, Census ACS data, and Department of Education statistics to refute a few popular progressive notions about education, namely, that:
1: The SAT/ACT only “measures family income”:
2: This is somehow being caused by more and better test prep efforts amongst the more affluent.
3: Higher income school districts are actually better because they spend more money.
Numerous people have asserted that the United States spends dramatically more on healthcare than other countries, presumably even more than countries of our level of wealth and affluence, and that this can only be explained by the fact that we do not have single-payer or some such.
Here are some examples graphs used to make this point
These appear to be very convincing at first blush, but i never found these arguments particularly convincing due primarily to:
I knew the proponents of single-payer were, at best, making an incomplete argument and that it invited an exaggerated impression of what we should likely expect from a country like ours, but, up until now, I lacked the data and the time to present these argument comprehensively. I recently got in an argument with someone over this subject and found a treasure trove of data all in one place (mostly) to thoroughly debunk this overly simplistic argument.
To make my points, vis-a-vis fundamental issues with naive treatment of GDP per capita and sensitivity to comparison countries, here is a quick chart showing National Healthcare Expenditure (NHE) as a percent of GDP by GDP per capita
