America is not No. 1

This archived article was written by: Cassidy Scovill

America is lagging behind other countries and now is left sitting in the dust while the other first-world nations prosper.
In a country as rich and powerful as America, one would imagine we rank relatively high statistically when you compare us to others. Sadly, as a nation we are tailing behind all the other first-world nations in topics like education. We are not the worst country when it comes to education but, we are far from the number-one nation. According to the CIA, we are 46th when it comes to spending money on our schools. It comes as no surprise that we come in 14th in math because as a nation, we don’t put near enough money into education.
When it comes to crime, we rank a few number-one spots but they’re not the ones we wanted. More crimes are committed in America than any other country and we also have the most prisoners per population than any other country. To make matters even worse, more rapes occur in America than anywhere else.
Health wise, you already know going in it is going to be a pretty bad sight considering that deaths from weight surpassed deaths by smoking in our country. We are the most overweight nation on the planet with more than a fourth of our entire population overweight. In life expectancy, we are 49th and this is the one that scares me. For a country with some of the greatest medical minds, we still rank disappointingly low in life expectancy.
As a country we need to start looking into how we can get better, how we can actually make some meaningful changes and make America a country that deserves to be called No. 1.