PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. (MarketWatch) — Maybe Reagan was wrong. Maybe wealth doesn’t trickle down after all. Maybe it trickles up — to Canada.

The Canadians-are-now-richer-than Americans story was all over the U.S. media last week. One New York daily’s headline (and MSNBC’s) was typical: ”Canadians Are Richer Than Americans!”

The shame!

And, who knew?

The NBC Nightly News featured a story about the average Canadian household’s net worth now being greater than the average American one with a large graphic reading “Oh! Canada!”

Congratulations are in order, eh?

Meanwhile, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who consistently shows he follows Canadian news closer than almost any major U.S. news organization, derided Canada’s “pelt-based economy” in his usual tongue-in-cheek style using a photo of drying animal skins.

The report showing the net worth of Canadian households pulling ahead of the average American household by C$43,000 ($42,000) after lagging C$60,000 behind five years ago came from an outfit called Environics Analytic Wealthscapes and its new data showed a Canadian household average net worth of C$363,000 compared with C$320,000 in the U.S. The story was picked up by a major Canadian daily, which was then picked up by Bloomberg, then Drudge, followed by NBC, other TV outlets, and many American newspapers.

Aside from major train wrecks and mudslides, it was the rare Canada story that was given any notice by the U.S. media.

The reasons for this latest accounting are pretty obvious: No Canadian housing collapse, wiping out household wealth; a more stable Canadian banking system that resembles a casino far less than the American version; a rising, commodity-fueled loonie that still remains close to the U.S. dollar after years of languishing well below. Also, Canada’s lower unemployment rate — 7.2% compared with America’s 8.2 — and higher consumer confidence. And finally, lower government deficits.

And it doesn’t hurt that Canadians’ higher-than-America’s household debt, fueled by credit-card spending, has finally started dropping after repeated warnings from the Bank of Canada’s charismatic governor Mark Carney.

All that is well and good, but it misses what, to me, is a more important story. The big picture, if you will:

The Canadian quality of life was already far better than Americans’ — in many ways that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. But money is the way we Americans normally judge the big picture. To Americans, whoever has more money has a better life.

This is nonsense, and is pervasive in the money-fixated U.S.

Let’s talk briefly about quality of life on a daily level, judging from personal experience.

My son and his family have recently moved from Oregon to Vancouver, B.C., which means, among other things, they have escaped the poisonous political atmosphere which currently smothers the U.S. Sorry, but you can’t measure that kind of quality-of-life improvement in dollars and cents.

My wife and I moved to Montreal from Pennsylvania in 1970 (this Army brat was one of the few Americans up there who did NOT go to Canada to beat the draft), partly to escape the also-caustic political climate of the Nixon years. It was the same as now — suddenly, the public rancor disappeared once we were out of the U.S.

How about the fact also that there are only a fraction of horror stories like Aurora, Colo., and handgun deaths in Canada than in the U.S.? Doesn’t that also contribute to the quality of life in non-economic terms? You bet it does.

Or how about the fact that parks and police stations are still fully staffed and funded in Canada?. That DOES have something to do with economics, of course, and opens the question of the commons’ relative importance in our two countries — of socialist operations like police, fire departments, school, roads, parks, etc., etc.

And, mirabile dictu, then there’s Canada’s socialized medicine, which recently turned 50 and actually works.

My granddaughter, alas, broke her arm two weeks ago shortly after arriving in Canada. She was brought to the emergency room — a place that would typically be much more crowded in the U.S. (by people who have no health insurance) — and she was treated and released post haste, and it was paid for by government health insurance. That’s the way things are supposed to work in a decent society.

This is what I mean by quality of life not being measured by net worth.

But wait, the naysayers are thinking, aren’t taxes much higher in Canada?

Yes, they are. But Canadians, though they grumble a lot about paying them, know they’re worth it.

I remember interviewing widely respected ABC anchor Peter Jennings, a transplanted Canadian, not long before he died when he was in San Francisco.

We discussed the differences in the two countries — Jennings became a U.S. citizen not long before his death in 2005. The issue of higher Canadian taxes came up. Jennings said:

“Americans want government services, but they don’t want to pay for them.”

“Canadians are a lot more mature in this department.”

Yes, they are. Even if it negatively affects their net worth.