What is Canada doing right?

There’s a chart at Steve Sailer’s blog which shows that Canadian GDP/per capita has shot up during the last fifteen years and Canada is now richer, on a per-capita basis, than the United States.

So it’s worth pondering what Canada is doing right.

It should be noted that Canada has nationalized healthcare, and that taxes at all levels of government are 38.4% of GDP compared to 28.2% in the United States, with Canada having much higher levels of tax on the rich (according to Wikipedia).

Thus we see that the Republican prescription to boost the economy, which is to repeal Obamacare and lower taxes on the rich, is not the right prescription if we want to reverse the trends and pull ahead of Canada. Now, I’m not saying that Canada is successful because of higher taxes and nationalized healthcare, but rather these factors are unimportant compared to more important factors.

Canada, however, does not have a budget deficit. Maybe this demonstrates that it’s better for the economy to raise taxes in order to balance the budget?

Canada has had massive immigration during the last two decades, much like the United States, and now 20% of Canadians are foreign born. But the demographics of Canadian immigration is a lot different. The majority of Canadian immigrants are Asian. And the second biggest category of Canadian immigrants are white people from the United States and Europe. It should also be noted that Canada is only 3% black, and two-thirds of Canadian blacks are from the Caribbean, and in the United States Caribbean blacks tend to be harder working and more pleasant than blacks descended from American slaves. And Canada never had slavery, so they don’t have the same white guilt about slavery that we do here in the United States.

Canada has the same amount of land as the United States, slightly more actually, but a lot of it is barren tundra so useable land is less. But nevertheless, with a population of only 35 million, Canada is a lot less densely populated than the United States and has far more natural resources per capita.

Thus, I think that the secret to Canada’s economic success is that the population of Canada is composed to a greater extent of demographic groups that are more successful in the United States (non-Hispanic whites and Asians), Canada isn’t overpopulated like the United States, and Canada has responsible government that doesn’t spend more money than it raises in taxes.

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I was away all day, so sorry it took so long to approve the comments.

A lot of the trends talked about how Canada makes money by exporting natural resources to the United States. But that was the point of writing about Canada’s small population. I don’t know for sure, but I assume that Canada has about the same resources per square mile as the United States. Canada gets to distribute those natural resources to one-tenth the number of people, so natural resources per capita are ten times higher.

Both Republicans and Democrats seem to think the economy needs MORE people, but maybe the economy would prosper better with FEWER people. Less immigration plus lower birthrate is what the country needs.