Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

American life expectancy compares extremely unfavourably with the UK. The English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline for much of the past decade. It has England’s lowest life expectancy, highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing. But as of 2019, that health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 (the number of years someone can be expected to live without a disability) was the same as the average for the entire US.

https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...

Also what you conveniently forget to mention, all European countries still spend less on Healthcare than the US, as a percentage of their GDP. In absolute numbers this comparison would look even worse

So this isn't Defense Spending redirected to Healthcare

> Of these contact offences, an estimated 17,100 are ‘flagged’ as child sexual exploitation in police recorded crime data.

> New police data, the Complex Organised Child Abuse Dataset (COCAD), while suffering a number of limitations, has identified around 700 recorded offences of group-based child sexual exploitation in 2023.

> Given the lack of a prevalence survey and how under-reported child sexual exploitation is, the flaws in the data and confusing and inconsistently applied definitions and data sets, it is highly unlikely that this accurately reflects the true scale of child sexual exploitation, or group-based exploitation.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on...

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Child H (2008) was 11 years old when she came to the attention of the Police. She disclosed that she and another child had been sexually assaulted by adult males. When she was 12, she was found drunk in the back of a car with a suspected CSE perpetrator, who had indecent photos of her on his phone. Risky Business became involved and the Locality Team did an initial assessment and closed the case. Her father provided Risky Business with all the information he had been able to obtain about the details of how and where his daughter had been exploited and abused, and who the perpetrators were. This information was passed on to the authorities. Around this time, there were further concerns about her being a victim of sexual exploitation. She was identified as one of a group of nine children associating with a suspected CSE perpetrator. Her case had not been allocated by children’s social care. The Chair of the Strategy meeting expressed concern about her and considered she needed a child protection case conference. This does not appear to have been held. Three months later, the social care manager recorded on the file that Child H had been assessed as at no risk of sexual exploitation, and the case was closed. Less than a month later, she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested. Child H was at this point identified as being at high risk of CSE. Risky Business, social care workers and the Police worked to support Child H and her father and she was looked after for a period. She suffered a miscarriage while with foster carers. Her family moved out of the area and Child H returned home. Some of the perpetrators were subsequently convicted.

In the US, unless you or your family own a holding with a lot of companies, the country taxes you between 50 and 40% (well, 30 and 50%, but food stamps are a bit weird so i will exclude them here). If you manage to get rich enough to be able to optimize your taxation, you are only taxed on company profits (so 21% to federal, 27-29% depending on your state) and sometime use taxe (sales taxe doesn't really apply anymore).

I have benefited from VAT-free school furniture most of my life because my uncle owned a company that bought office furniture regularly, and VAT-free sport clothing/tools because of a similar scheme by his wife and her companies.

I assure you you pay more taxes overall than people holding a few companies, and the more you own, the easier it get to avoid VAT and taxes in general (the owner of the Yacht my sister used to cook for was hired by the Yachting company as the captain or something for his vacations: avoided VAT on buying the Yacht, avoid VAT on a personal cook, avoid VAT on food. And if this specific company loose a small amount of money every year, tax write-off baby!).

Zucman wrote The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. It's an interesting read, and

This is neither here nor there. As I said, temptations can arise that make things more attractive to certain people given their conditioning and the habituation of their desires. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we can refuse to indulge even strong desires. To the degree that we are in possession of our wits, we are culpable.

> If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history

I have no idea how this is supposed to follow, or even what this means.