There are a lot more broken cost structures - housing, which has similar potential losses to incarceration with the stress of rent driving drug use and homelessness costing a ton and taking potentially productive people out of the economy.

Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies).

Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc.

Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.

Yes, Food. I spent a couple of years in California and I miss it very much. However, the one thing that I would not have been able to work around, if I were to make my home there, is the food. Not that it tastes bad, but that it is bad, and there is no escaping from that food chain, and its long term effects on health, compounded generation by generation. I now live in a supposedly poor EU country - of course there are problems, but everyone is smart and healthy. It is the food. Adopt EU food regulations now.

Hmm, California's obese plus overweight is 69%, significantly more but not quite the picture you're drawing in comparison to France's 60%.

For what it's worth, the parent comment didn't explicitly mention weight, and health has a lot to do with nutrition, and I would imagine they were commenting on that as well.

Right but 100% of overweight people are unhealthy. So clearly that can't be right that EU food regulations are ensuring good health.

I guess they could be saying that among the remaining third of the population, the Californians are still unhealthy even if not overweight while the French are healthy. Seems unlikely to be true, though.

Indeed. And the average American will spend more in mortgage interest + rent than any of those others: 5x to 10x more than a college education. Unfortunately, since housing has become a ponzi scheme, mortgage interest is confused with investment.

Housing is cheap in small towns. As I understand it, America has "Section 8" housing which pays most of the rent for unemployed people and they pay 30% out of their unemployment benefit. So are homeless people really just choosing to live in a city where they're not eligible for section 8 because they don't want to live in a small town? Or have they done something so badly wrong that they can't get it anywhere? If your income is too high for section 8 but too low for rent, then you need to move because your labor is worth less than your living costs.

To get section 8 you must meet a list of requirements. Just being unemployed is not enough.

Even if you qualify, there is limit to how total many section 8s are given out. So there is a waiting list of several years, during which time you must still qualify.

You can not just sign up on that waiting list. There are small windows open at random a few days a year when they will accept names.

No leasor is required to accept section 8 people and very few do. So even if you get a section 8 voucher, you still need a lot of luck to find a place.

Thus the streets are paved with homeless.

But in order for affordable housing to drive economic growth it needs to be in areas with lots of good jobs. Just imagine if you could rent a decent apartment in silicon valley for $600 a month, we'd see an explosion of new companies and jobs!