It’s your back-to-work open thread time. For a lot of people, today is their first day back at work for 2010. Are you ready?
Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight posted this interesting graph: health care spending per capita vs. life expectancy. The U.S. is a big outlier on the graph. In general life expectancy increases with increasing spending, except for the U.S. because our spending is so much out-of-whack with the rest of the world.
Newsweek dives into some revisionist history with an essay called “What If Gore Had Won?” In their re-imagining of history 9/11 didn’t happen because Gore didn’t ignore the threat of bin Laden, Katrina was a big disaster.
What do you think a Gore presidency would have been like? I think there is a chance that 9/11 was avoided, but if not we would have gone into Afghanistan and not Iraq. We certainly wouldn’t have let bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. We wouldn’t be tortuting people or holding them in extra-legal limbo. We would have also been prepared for Katrina because we would have had competent people running FEMA. The Terri Schiavo debacle would have ended in the Florida courts and we wouldn’t have had the Great Recession.