Progressives and math just don’t get along. Maybe this is what happens when you pursue liberal arts and social justice degrees at the exclusion of learning hard science, engineering and other practical skills. Nevertheless, these social justice warriors never seem to run out of steam, and they continue to make baseless demands in order to feel better. In a few short moments, I’ll show you the obvious and mathematically simple errors that completely discredit their most popular platforms.
Housing
Let’s start with a light topic. Progressives love telling everyone how the baby boomers destroyed the housing market. They often explain how minimum wage workers could easily afford a house in the 70s, but because of the 2007 crash, that will never be possible without aggressive minimum wage hikes. Let’s check the math. Minimum wage in the 70s ranged from $1.60 to $2.90 per hour. This led to an average monthly income of $375 for the entire decade. Median housing prices ranged from $23,600 to $62,600. The average APR for a mortgage was right at 10 percent. Put it all together and you get an average monthly mortgage payment of $378 for a median home across the decade. You might notice that this number is greater than the monthly income of $375.
How does today compare? At a minimum wage of $7.25, monthly income is right about $1,200. The median cost of a house across the country is $200,400 and APR is around 3.92 percent. This yields a monthly payment of $948 for a 30-year fixed mortgage. That is notably less than the $1,200 monthly income. It turns out that housing is the most affordable it has ever been.
Socialism
If progressives love anything more than bashing baby boomers, it’s proclaiming socialism as the only hope for the future. One would think that more than a hundred years of global experimentation and recorded history would squash this idea. The mistake in this assumption is that people promoting socialism can do basic math.
In the world today, there are exactly four countries that claim to be socialist to any extent: China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. All four of those countries have made dramatic moves away from Marxist economies since the 90s, and every single one has seen economic improvement as a result. The changes in China were so extreme that the global poverty and starvation levels dropped by roughly 30 percent from 1990 to 2007. This is solely based on China finally allowing capitalistic investment. It swiftly created a middle class and brought poverty and starvations to historic lows for the country.
The progressives would counter and point to Scandinavia as sources of successful socialism. While the countries do carry extensive taxes and some aggressive social assistance programs, none of them claim to be socialist. Each country enjoys capitalist enterprise, and the means of production are all privately owned. More importantly, Scandinavia is far from paradise. The region leads the developed world in suicide rates and has the lowest economic mobility of any developed nation.
Health Care
We’ll finish the discussion with the hottest topic of the day. Progressives love Obamacare while simultaneously pushing for a single-payer system. I’ve taken on this argument many times, so I’ll be a bit brief. Obamacare has indisputably increased medical mortality rates and lowered American life expectancy. It increased healthcare demand without adjusting supply. The result has caused more fatal errors and longer wait times. Despite that, the U.S. still leads the world in shortest wait times. In Canada and Sweden (two of the best single-payer systems in existence) wait time mortalities range from five to seven times higher than the U.S. This is because average specialist turnaround times run six months or longer. Back home, we can still see a doctor in two weeks or less.
These are just the most famous examples. As a rule of thumb, any time you hear a progressive argument, you can apply even a little basic math and you’ll see just how wrong they are. For the group that likes to demonize its opposition as anti-science, this consistent failure might seem embarrassing. It would be funny if there weren’t so many of them constantly spouting dangerous ideas. Still, the truth always wins in the end, so you can trust basic math to eventually break the progressives one way or another.
~ American Liberty Report
