The statistics came from a European government website where they listed US and European nation government debt. Since the US number was right I had no reason to doubt the veracity of the other numbers.
The greater point here isn't the accuracy of numbers I quickly pulled out of a few websites. I simply wanted to point out that saying "I lived in for and is lousy" is nonsense without engaging a serious study of the numbers.
I wasn't about to spend a whole day writing a research paper because, well, I am not the one making the claim that Switzerland's shit don't stink.
Is the US perfect? Nope. We are as fucked as can be. And, at the same time, we still remain the land of opportunity and the place from where vast amounts of innovation continue to come from. A simply comparison of the tech startup ecosystem alone shows there are huge differences that need to be evaluated and accounted for.
In other words, if the utopia of Switzerland is so remarkably better than the crap we have here in the US, why is it that Silicon Valley hasn't migrated to Switzerland or that most of the major science and tech companies aren't founded and based out of Switzerland?
To me Switzerland is an aberration. Either it is a house of cards or it is the luckiest 8 million people on the planet. Time will tell.