Australia is a better place to live than the USA.

Thank you for taking the debate. Let me first clarify that, yes we are talking about the quality of life and the standard of living. I'll start by rebutting points. "Being that the USA is about 15 times as populous as Australia, makes the fact that the USA is #1 in the world for GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (the value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year,) even more incredible." Actually no, having a population 15 times ours makes it much easier to have a larger GDP. You have much better production capacity due to your population, hence more ease to produce...so on and so forth. "GDP (PPP) Australia= $35,000 (ranked 17th in the world) GDP (PPP) USA= $46,000 (ranked 4th in the world)" This does not take into account at all the distribution of wealth amongst the populace. For instance, the USA has over 400 billionaires while Australia has just 12. This makes the GDP per capita argument rather weak. Let me move onto some cold hard facts that you might find sobering. - The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004). - The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). - Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005). - The International Adult Literacy Survey...found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'. - Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.) - U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower (The European Dream, p.81). - Twelve million American families--more than 10 percent of all U.S. households--"continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves." Families that "had members who actually went hungry at some point last year" numbered 3.9 million (NYT, Nov. 22, 2004). - The leading cause of death of pregnant women in the USA is murder (CNN, Dec. 14, 2004). - American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). - Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" (The European Dream, p.70) - The United States has lost 1.3 million jobs to China in the last decade (CNN, Jan. 12, 2005). - U.S. employers eliminated 1 million jobs in 2004 (The Week, Jan. 14, 2005). - Sometime in the next 10 years Brazil will probably pass the U.S. as the world's largest agricultural producer. (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004) - Bush: 62,027,582 votes. Kerry: 59,026,003 votes. Number of eligible voters who didn't show up: 79,279,000 (Wikipedia) - One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004). - Americans spend more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined" (The European Dream, p.28) - Nearly 900,000 children were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available" (USA Today, Dec. 21, 2004) From these facts it should be clear that the USA is no where near the leader in 'science, technology, music, movies, sports, agriculture, charity, economics, finance, health, etc etc etc' they don't seem to be even close. Your economy is being run into the ground. The American national debt is nearing 10 trillion dollars, currently at $ 9,418,965,804,131.95 That's $30,965.42 per citizen. Many countries are declaring the United States as "bankrupt" or at the very least, nearing bankruptcy. Next round I'll show why life in Australia is superior to life in the USA.