Excellent point, Gavin, that the size of one's income does not always equate to quality of life. I would add happiness. In fact, among those who I know personally the correlation is inverse. There is corruption in some form pretty much everywhere, but in the US you're somehow an ungrateful bigot deserving of punishment for exercising the freedoms some of us thought were the founding principles of our nation. And the people are largely self-policing in this regard, which is very disturbing.

The average person's robotic response to any suggestion of travel to mexico is that "you' d better not go outside the tourist areas, because there's GANGS out there!" Yet I know someone who's been caught in the midst of a gang-related gunbattle TWICE (on seperate occasions) in east PDX on his way from lightrail to the gd community college! A liberal, 'progressive' city, go figure. Oh and there is literally a villiage of homeless people that stretches for MILES down springwater corridor, and the price of living continues to explode.