Walk into any room in this country and ask people where the United States ranks in the world, and you’ll hear the same reflex: number one. Best schools. Best hospitals. Longest lives. Smartest kids. Strongest military. Richest economy. Most God-fearing nation on the planet. It is a comforting story. A few pieces of it are true. The rest, by the most current international data, is wrong on every single count that matters to a family raising children, paying for medicine, or hoping to grow old.
Start with what we are first in.
Gross Domestic Product
In 2025, the United States produced roughly $30.6 trillion in goods and services — the largest economy on earth, more than a quarter of total global output. China is second at about $19.4 trillion. Germany, Japan, and India round out the top five, but none of them comes close to half our size. We are not just the biggest economy; we are the biggest by a wider margin than at any point in the last fifteen years.
Defense Spending
In 2024, the United States spent about $997 billion on its military — close to forty percent of all military spending on the planet, and more than the next nine countries combined. As a share of GDP, that comes to roughly 3.4 percent. That share is not the world’s highest — Ukraine, fighting for its survival, leads the planet, followed by Israel at 8.8 percent, with Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Russia close behind. But in raw dollars, no nation in human history has ever spent what we spend on arms, ships, planes, salaries, and bases.
Number one in wealth. Number one in firepower. Hold that thought.
We have a $30 trillion economy and a trillion-dollar military, and we cannot crack the top ten in the survival of our own newborns.
Joe Broadmeadow
Public Education.
When fifteen-year-olds across the developed world sit down for the same standardized test in math, reading, and science—the OECD’s PISA exam—Singapore finishes first. It has for years. Other East Asian systems, along with Estonia and Finland, fill out the top tier. The United States lands somewhere around the OECD average in reading and well below it in math. We have great universities. We do not, by any honest measure, have the best K-12 system. We have a system that produces brilliance at the top and abandons too many at the bottom.
Health Care
The 2025 CEOWORLD Health Care Index, which weighs infrastructure, professional readiness, cost, and access across 110 nations, puts Taiwan at number one with a composite score of 78.72 out of 100. South Korea is second. Australia, Canada, and a string of European democracies follow. The United States ranks fifteenth, despite spending roughly twice as much per person on health care as any of the countries beating us. We are paying premium prices for a midfield finish.
Infant Mortality
This is the one that should stop the conversation cold. In Singapore, Iceland, Japan, and the Nordic countries, fewer than two babies out of every thousand born alive will die before their first birthday. In the United States, the most recent figure is 5.1 per 1,000 — roughly three times the rate of the best-performing nations. Among the 38 wealthy countries of the OECD, the U.S. ranks near the bottom. Even our best-performing state, Vermont, would only crack the middle of the European pack. For Black infants in this country, the rate is more than double the national average.
No spin makes this acceptable.
Literacy
Nine countries report adult literacy at or near 100 percent: Andorra, Finland, Norway, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and others. The United States reports 99 percent—but that headline number papers over a hard truth. When you measure functional literacy, the ability to actually read and use everyday documents, roughly one in five American adults struggles. We rank somewhere around 37th globally. We are not illiterate. We are underliterate, and the gap shows up in everything from job applications to jury instructions to, and this is most troubling, civics and elections.
Life Expectancy
A baby born in Monaco in 2025 can expect to live to 86. In San Marino, nearly 86. In Hong Kong, Japan, and Switzerland, well past 84. A baby born in the United States today is projected to live about 78.4 years. We rank in the low 60s in the world, behind Cuba, Slovenia, and Lebanon. American life expectancy actually fell during the pandemic and has not fully recovered. We are the only wealthy country where that is true.
Religiosity
Pew Research has spent the last decade asking adults in more than a hundred countries a simple question: how important is religion in your life? Indonesia tops the global list, with 98 percent of adults saying religion is very important. Bangladesh follows at 97. Senegal, Mali, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Kenya, and a long row of African and South Asian nations all sit above 90 percent. The least religious places are in East Asia and northern Europe. Japan is at 7 percent; France and South Korea are at 18, with the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, and Estonia all in single digits or low teens. The United States sits near 40 percent, close to the global average, but vastly more religious than any other wealthy democracy on earth. We pray more, attend more services, and tell pollsters our faith matters more, by an enormous margin, than the citizens of any peer nation we like to compare ourselves to.
That last fact matters because it troubles the explanation many Americans reach for when these other numbers come up.
We have a $30 trillion economy and a trillion-dollar military, and we cannot crack the top ten in the survival of our own newborns. We outspend the rest of the planet on defense by a margin no empire in history ever managed, and our children read worse than children in countries with a tenth of our resources. We have more billionaires, more aircraft carriers, and more Nobel Prize–winning hospitals than anyone, and a baby born in Singapore, a city-state with no army to speak of, will live longer than a baby born in Boston.
We are also, on paper, the most faithful nation in the developed world. Among the countries beating us on infant survival, life expectancy, education, and health care, almost every single one is dramatically less religious than we are. Singapore, Japan, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada—none of them come close to American levels of professed belief. Whatever those societies are doing right, they are not doing it because they pray more than we do.
This is not an argument about whether religion is good or bad. The data does not say that, and neither will I. What the data does say is this: in the comparison most Americans love—us against the rest of the developed world—we are the wealthiest country, the most heavily armed country, and the most religious country on the field, and we are losing on almost every measure that determines whether our children live, learn, and grow old.
This is not a question of whether we can afford to do better. The numbers above prove that we can. It is not a question of whether we are a moral or faithful people. We are, by every measure available. It is a question of what we have decided is actually worth paying for and whether we are willing to be honest with ourselves about the difference between what we say we value and what our budgets reveal we value.
The countries that beat us in education, health, longevity, and infant survival share a few things in common. They invest publicly and consistently in primary care, prenatal care, and early-childhood education. They treat health insurance and basic schooling as infrastructure, not optional consumer products. They measure outcomes and adjust. They do not assume that a private market will produce a public good, and they do not assume that prayer alone will close a budget gap.
None of those nations is utopia. Taiwan has its strains. The Nordics have wait times. Israel and Ukraine are spending themselves into hard corners that will take a generation to climb out of. But on the metrics that determine whether your child learns to read, whether your mother survives her surgery, and whether your grandchild sees her first birthday, smaller, poorer, and more secular countries are running circles around us.
I spent much of my life in public service. I know what American excellence looks like up close—the federal task forces, the trauma surgeons, the teachers who stay late, the cops who run toward the gunfire. We are not a second-rate country. We are a country that has decided, year after year, to spend like a champion on bombs and stadiums, pray like a champion on Sundays, and govern like an amateur on the things that keep ordinary people alive and educated.
This is not a problem exclusive to Republicans or Democrats. Each has had its moments when it sought the common good. We’ve lost that in this era of allowing those with great resources to pay for the election results they want and achieve their purposes.
I am not suggesting we limit the wealth any one person can accumulate. But we do need to examine a system that can allow someone to control so much wealth while the average American faces living conditions that are not only less than the highest standard in the world, but aren’t even close.
When we have a government that proposes a $1.5 trillion defense budget (bumping our share of total worldwide defense spending from 40%, as I’ve pointed out, to 60%) and pays for it by reducing health care, public education, and environmental protections, its time for some deep introspection.
The numbers above are not an attack on America. It is our lab results. The chart is in front of us. We are first in the world in money, might, and faith. We are middle of the pack, or worse, in nearly everything that money, might, and faith are supposed to produce. The question is whether we are still the kind of country that reads its own results honestly, or the kind that tears them up because we don’t like what they say.
We used to be the first kind. We can be again. But pretending we already are is how we got here.
*Sources: IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2025); SIPRI Military Expenditure Database (April 2025 and April 2026); OECD/PISA 2022 results; CEOWORLD Health Care Index 2025; UN World Population Prospects 2024; UN IGME / World Bank infant mortality data; UNESCO and World Bank literacy estimates; Pew Research Center surveys on religion (2008–2023); Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker; CDC National Vital Statistics System.*
Leave a Reply