File this, by Thomas Kostigen, under either "Onion Wannabe," "Fellated someone for my journalism job," or "Causation/Correlation Confusions of 2009 #5,211" Here's a sliver:
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says people in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are the most content with their lives. The three ranked first, second and third, respectively, in the OECD's rankings of "life satisfaction," or happiness.
There are myriad reasons, of course, for happiness: health, welfare, prosperity, leisure time, strong family, social connections and so on. But there is another common denominator among this group of happy people: taxes.
Usually I'd launch into some sort of critical analysis. But this warrants none of that. Between the question begging and the correlation/causation problems, the high tax countries with unhappy people (oh, and Nordic suicide rates), I'm going to let the Logic 101 students pick this one apart.
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