So Michele Bachmann thinks that China is such a better nation for not being a welfare state. Well, maybe she should realize what her America would look like as this article in the NY Times "
" by Michael Wines and Ian Johnson reports:
Days after a nine-seat van crammed with 62 kindergartners slammed into a coal truck in northwest China this week, killing 21 children and two adults, the 21st Century Business Herald — a state-run, reliably nationalistic newspaper — did something extraordinary.
It published a chart.
In one column, the paper recounted recent school-bus accidents in which about 60 children had died. In an adjacent column, it listed the sums that selected Chinese government departments had lavished on new cars in 2010.
And in fact, many episodes in the litany of scandal and misfortune that has consumed Chinese Web surfers in recent years had little to do with money.
After a young man fled last year from a hit-and-run accident by invoking his father’s rank as a deputy police chief, the phrase “My father is Li Gang” became a national catchphrase for using connections to escape responsibility.
After a much-publicized high-speed rail crash in the eastern city of Wenzhou killed 40 people in July, online critics and journalists contended that corruption had enriched powerful officials at the expense of safety or had encouraged cover-ups of officials’ misbehavior.
If you've ever heard of the "Asian-American driver" stereotype, then maybe it's because Asian countries have poor drivers:
For years, China’s roads have been among the world’s most dangerous. Statistics for 2009, the most recent available, show that 67,759 people died on the road in China, a 7.8 percent decline over the previous year. That capped a decade of steadily declining road fatalities.
But another study, by the World Health Organization, cast serious doubt on the official Chinese figures. Comparing policy data with hospital records, the study concluded that the real death rate from traffic accidents was roughly twice the official figure. That would make China’s roads the most dangerous among middle-income countries.
Oh, let's see how Bachmann's model of "limited government" works over there in China, where the school bus standards are softly enforced:
The dangers facing students in substandard school buses were known to government officials. In July 2010, the national government ordered that buses carrying primary school students meet strict safety standards that included emergency exits, seat belts and data recorders to track drivers’ behavior. Unregistered minibuses were outlawed.
Some were skeptical that the new standards would have much effect. “The biggest problem of China’s school bus industry is not the lack of a standard, but the rampant use of illegal vehicles,” a prescient vehicle-rental businessman from Beijing, Zhang Jie, told China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper, at the time.
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