American Leisure

It's official - according to a new study reported by the Onion (America's Finest News Source), Americans lost 180 trillion leisure hours to work in 2004. That number is just staggering to me. Yet another area where we lag far behind developed countries in Europe and Asia.

I'm a positive person though, so I refused to let this news of lost leisure, especially news from a fake news source, get me down. Instead, I scoured all of the Internets (thanks, Google!) for data that validate our hard-working free market society. There are plenty of great things about living in one of the few developed countries with a private insurance system, and having fewer vacation days than anyone else isn't so bad when you consider the US:

• has more televisions per capita than any other country (excluding the super-tiny nations at the top of this list, Christmas Island, Bermuda, and Monaco)
• imprisons up more people per capita than anyone else
  
• uses the most energy per person
• drinks more juice than any country save Canada

So there you have it. We make work harder and have less free time to show for it, but with all of our extra cash, we're buying more TVs, locking up more bad guys, and drinking lots of juice, all with the lights on, the water running and the engine idling. We're obviously having a lot of fun, so who's to say that we need any more free time?