So, how are the children?

Nordic, U.S. kids rank opposite in poverty:

Nordic countries have the lowest levels of child poverty in the developed world, in large part because of their generous public spending on social benefits for families, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.N. Children's Fund.

On the other end of the spectrum, the United States and Mexico had the worst rates among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group of the world's richest countries.

At least one-fifth of U.S. and Mexican children live under the national poverty line, according to the study undertaken by UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center in Italy.

...The report based its findings on the number of children growing up in households with an income less than half the national median.

Rated the best were Denmark, at 2.4 percent; Finland, at 2.8 percent; Norway, at 3.4 percent; and Sweden, at 4.2 percent. At the bottom end of the table were Mexico, at 27.7 percent, and the United States, at 21.9 percent. Both countries spend less than 5 percent of their GDP on government support for families.

Child poverty is just one area where the U.S. looks like a Third World country compared to the Scandinavian countries. I studied abroad for a semester in Stockholm (well, a pretty boring suburb of Stockholm, actually...) and we lived near a "bad part of town." I only heard this a few months into the semester and I just didn't believe it when I heard it. I thought it was a joke - it looked like an ordinary part of town. Imagine a "bad part of town" in the United States. That doesn't really exist there - even after a decade-plus decline in the Swedish welfare state. The basic infrastructure of these four countries is way beyond what we have here. Of course, there are problems and it's no utopia by any means, but the idea that we're actually far behind other parts of the world in terms of standard of living seems like non-sense to most Americans. They just assume that we're the best in every respect. This ignorance has consequences - just one of which is the fact that we simply don't realize how pitiful a job our society is doing at providing a healthy environment for our children.