State of the Rich Union

Best comment so far on President Bush's State of the Union address:

"Once you live in a rich democracy like the U.S., it's pretty much all gravy. The fights over income inequality, national health insurance, immigration policy, and so forth, all take place within a remarkably narrow range of national well-being, compared to the variance that currently exists around the globe.

A big government health care system may cause your happiness to vary by a percent or so from this mean (which direction depends on your political persuasion), but it will not bring you within a few orders of magnitude of a peasant farmer living on the edge of starvation in Darfur. This brings me a certain equanimity when watching the successive presidents deliver their speeches."

From The Economist blog Free Exchange.