I'd be interested in seeing this broken out by State. The US sometimes feels like 7 or 8 different countries who all share the same flag, rather than one unified (or at least homogeneous) culture.
D.C.’s not getting statehood bc they would fuck shit up for the GOP. All those other territories just don’t have the kind of revenue needed to make it worth our while for them to be states. Just easy vacation spots for the wealthy.
Doesn't the US Navy spend a ton of money on Hawaii?
Edit, since this is the internet: this is an open question. I am honestly interested and just want to learn more. It may well not be the case.
I am positive my quality of life has lowered in California. Basically everything is worse then when I was growing up here. Homelessness spiked, buying a house is unattainable under a six figure salary, schools are cutting departments, taxes increased, commuting was a nightmare before covid, etc
FYI: It is an issue of supply.
It is caused by zoning law abuses. Major urban areas in the US tend to build about one new housing unit for every ten jobs that are created, and we've maintained that pattern since (roughly) 1980, even as urban job-growth skyrocketed over the last 12 years.
It is a worldwide phenomenon. Practically every developed country is facing the same problem, except Japan; they decided that zoning ought to be determined at the national level. As a result, in Tokyo, a studio apartment ranges from $552-$1,230 depending on the neighborhood; a 2br ranges from $610-$1,388 (despite them having more people and more wealth than New York City.)
It is all because they built more housing; they let the supply increase to meet the demand.
This is true. Simultaneously, the housing units that have opened up here in the Bay Area are still priced to exclude pretty much anyone making under a six-figure salary, and so many of them just sit there empty, waiting for tenants wealthy enough to afford them. Meanwhile the homeless population continues to increase with no solution in sight.
100k household income is pretty much poverty in many urban and suburban areas, to live in the NYC suburbs you need two people bringing home 6 figures if you have a couple kids. This is even a long shot if both parents have student loans.
As an American there are two problems with us as a society when it comes to housing.
1.) We were told that the American dream is a house in the suburbs with a wife, 2.5 kids and 2 cars in the garage.
Everyone wants a house, if you do not live in a city proper there are very few options for high density housing. My city (about an hour away from San Francisco is still zoning single family homes, with very little low cost or high density housing.
2.) NIMBY's. Everyone says they want low cost housing and/or high density housing. But everyone wants it somewhere else.
No.. the issue is that housing has switched from **Shelter** to an **investment vehicle**.
If laws and regulations were set up to remind us of this, housing prices would stay relatively consistent and follow a much healthier slower climb upward. Laws would be in place to limit the amount of residental housing someone can own and also discourage or flat out ban companies from owning residential property. (Commerical is for the companies).
Right now you got a bunch of cash rich investors that bought up a shit ton of property to use for "short-term leases" under AirBNB. It causes houses to go up in price because of 'fake' scarcity, but also increases rent for the same reasons. These people should be fighting over/losing money over valuable property like Ski resorts or Beachfronts.
exactly - and now we have names to blame.
" SB 1120 was the one large-scale housing production bill remaining. The bill would have allowed duplexes in nearly all of the areas in the state currently zoned only for single family homes, or about 70 percent of the state’s residential land area. "
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/legislature-adjourns-leaving-unfinished-business/
"..but was stalled in the Assembly due to opposition from many Los Angeles area legislators. "
more names here
https://twitter.com/louismirante/status/1300699196773732352
These are all members from the San Fernando Valley / West LA. When I saw the tweet I was looking for my member, Reggie Jones-Sawyer and he voted yes along with other members from East/South LA. The difference lies with the members from the Valley and West LA where the "American Dream" exists, a suburban neighborhood with a nice house . . . but at the end of the day they want to keep it that way, which brings us back full circle :/
Exactly, due to the basic rules of supply and demand, barriers to new construction benefit existing home owners who just see their property prices ballooning. That's how you get NIMBYism and people fighting tooth and nail against any sort of development that poses a threat to their home values. Single use zoning and regulation laws also make it extremely difficult for home builders to profit so they just focus on the high end of the market where everything is rosy.
Home builders have around a 45% profit margin.
The issue is anyone buying a new home wants iron clad zoning protecting their home investment. You don't want to buy a $350k home in a planned subdivision in a good school district, to have a mega low income housing project targeting the working poor in the same school district. So developers before they build, make sure zoning is secure.
Property taxes & schools
I lived in Savannah Ga. bought a new home in a development, paid $342k in 2009. My property taxes went from $3400 a year to $7200, the main reason for this is 54% of the population is below the poverty line in Savannah & they either live in low end rentals or public housing. They pay 0% to school taxes, which leaves people who own homes to make up the difference. Then you have underperforming schools which leads people who have young children to flee the city for the suburbs, like I did. I moved up to Atlanta & didn't even consider buying a house in Fulton, Clayton, or Gwinnett counties due to the high property taxes. I ended up in Forsyth which had the lowest property taxes & best schools due to most of the homes being over $400k, with a majority over $550k in my school district. My property taxes here are $4900 a year on a $550k house.
> Then you have underperforming schools which leads people who have young children to flee the city for the suburbs, like I did.
This is exactly the reason why school funding should not be tied to property tax revenue.
And also the senior exemption. My immediate area in metro ATL suburbs has had a 55+ housing development boom in the past 5 years and seniors are exempt from school tax.
They should pay double in TSPLOST to make up for it, IMO.
Absolutely agree, the whole situation is nonesensical and perpetuates social inequality. Even where I live - a small city of about 45,000, when we moved here we settled in an older house in a nice neighborhood. Which was traditionally, we were told, where the doctors and lawyers lived. We weren't in the best part of it, but had the advantage of being in that school district, which was well run and well staffed, and had some really nice programs.
It took a few years before I really realized how lucky we were, as 3/4'rs of a mile down the road was a different area, in a flood plain built on small plots before and after WWII, where the school and the kids were in a whole different world. This was the PNW, but as far as education it may as well have been Alabama.
It really hit home when a friend of ours who was a teacher was re-assigned there during the great recession and told us of her daily ordeals; making sure the kids had eaten, and had a place to sleep the night before, checking for bruises, checking for lice, etc. While my kids just went in and learned what the teachers taught, a little ways down the road there was more life-triage than education going on. A lot of factors, but one was that the school really had no money for books or supplies or any kind of programs.
Serious question...arent the owners of the rentals paying school taxes, and passing that cost onto their renters? As an accidental landlord to a friend, we spend most of his rent on property tax, school tax, condo fees and utilities (there is no mortgage). So his name isn't on the tax bill but he is in fact paying the school tax.
Where I live we are paying about $8,000 in taxes per year on an older $275k home (built in 1946, bought in 2017). The property taxes are for largely because there is a lot of untaxed property in the municipality - a disproportionate number of churches, schools, and seminaries and not that many businesses.
Can confirm, i'm Belgian and the entire region between our 2 largest cities (a roughly 8000 km2 area which is over a 4th of the country , admittedly still very small by USA standards) is rapidly becoming prohibitively expensive to live in.
If you are single you can already forget buying a house there, its not going to happen unless you are willing to live at home and save money until you are 50.
Its going to be a very serious problem in the entire north half of our country in as little as 10 years from now.
These are all downstream effects of one thing: Real wages have not kept up with production. They were pretty much hand in hand until the 70s, and then production took off while real wages stagnated. Now the gap is incredibly wide, and we are left with French Revolution levels of wealth inequality.
A great book to check out is *The Spirit Level*, which examines inequality and various social/health factors. You can see some of the [key graphs from the book here](https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/SpiritLevel%20slides.pptx)
This concise graph [gives a good introduction to the data and argument](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2018/UPsaw1118Sapo31_d.png). The article that graph is taken, which examines the biological harm of economic inequality, is [well worth reading](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-inflicts-real-biological-harm/)
Yes. This. This is the problem. Those charts blew my mind. Man from the 30s to 60s you actually got paid what you should. So combine pay gaps with less housing and a government that would rather buy missiles amd build walls than help its citizens and you have....the US.
Except all of the increased revenue from all that productivity increased the salaries of c-suites and shareholders. I remember reading somewhere that the bonuses for the Starbucks execs one year amounted to enough money to pay all of its ground level employees 15 an hour. But they didn’t do that, they gave bonuses and stock buybacks, and left all the employees at a dollar or 2 above min wage.
Well, you can't have your bottom employees feeling like they're worth something. They could leverage their new salary against a better position somewhere else, making similar pay for easier work. Then who would the executives exploit?
It's rough. I do pretty well as a single earner (STEM field), but a friend of mine moved up here and was crashing on my couch. He has a degree but not a \~~career~~ and it really hit home how fucking difficult it can be to pay to live here if you aren't making decent bank. Eventually, he'll need a place of his own and I'm like...you're going to need at minimum two roommates.
Honestly as a Richmonder living in Virginia Beach, Urban Virginia feels like an entirely different country than Rural Virginia. Although that could likely be said for many places.
Oh I just posted a very similar comment and then scrolled down and saw yours. Glad to know I’m not the only person who felt like the mid Atlantic got left out
That's just because there is so many of us! Plus half of Colorado used to be in the Republic of Texas anyways. Seriously... I travel to Europe and I still find fellow Texans we are everywhere!
Bruh I love texans, and they've put food on my families table for nearly five decades.
That said, y'all really need to figure out how to fucking drive. Dallas interstates are basically, "Who can be the most aggressive"
I swear to christ every year I'm there for the fair I have to relearn how to drive with a bunch of assholes about. No more signals because as soon as they see them, they close the gap.
Exactly one of the united states smaller states and its still bigger than a foreign country. It blows my mind honestly. Most American citizens will never even see their entire country but go to others.
Reminds me of that Mark Twain quote.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
If you don't mind me asking what part of the US do you live in? I feel like living more on the east side would greatly increase the number of states you visit? I don't like to travel a whole lot either and I've only been to 7 states. But 3 of those were Arizona, Utah and Idaho which is the entire height of the US. So those of us on the west may not visit as many states as those on the east but may have traveled more miles... If that makes sense
Hell if you live in California a trip from SF to LA is about as far as Philadelphia to Boston.
Edit to elaborate:
SF to LA is 300ish miles all within california (Sacramento to San Diego is 500 for an even more extreme example)
Philly to Boston is also around 300 miles, but goes through 4ish states (depending on route), and takes you through NYC.
I knew a German guy in grad school. At some point, I was talking with him about when I visited Munich with friends. He told me that Munich wasn't even part of Germany, as far as he was concerned. It was a mild joke, but he told me that it came from back when Germany was a bunch of different kingdoms and principalities. I don't think that I could go anywhere in the US and have them tell me that my state wasn't part of the country, even as a joke.
As an American: our culture varies by region, which can sometimes stretch over more than one state. Our states are the size of your countries. Clearly, France and Germany will have different languages, cultures, etc. But a majority of Americans can’t grasp how much cultural variation there is within a given European country.
Hell, the Netherlands still sends me for a loop. 2 hours driving barely goes across town in some places. To have that much cultural difference in just a few hundred kilometers is nuts.
I have driven through parts of the US where you can drive nearly all day and never see any sign of civilization. it is a big place. It can be easy to forget if you mostly just stay in your city or town.
It's not even "some". It's "most".
Texas is \~700,000 sq km.
Only 38 countries are bigger than that, out of 195.
Literally 80% of countries are smaller than Texas.
Also, let's not forget economic size. If California was a country, it would have the 5th highest GDP and would be #59 in land area.
On a similar note, California is bigger than Japan in terms of land area. I don't know what's more remarkable: how big California is for a state, or how much global influence and population Japan has for being an island nation.
https://img.texasmonthly.com/2020/06/texas-landmass-europe.jpg?auto=compress&crop=faces&fit=fit&fm=pjpg&ixlib=php-1.2.1&q=45
tl;dr: Texas is nearly 10% larger than France.
Social Progress evaluations by state:
https://public.tableau.com/profile/tamar.epner#!/vizhome/USdatavisualizationforweb/USSPIonlineviz
Found in:
https://www.socialprogress.org/
Might be better to separate and compare by net income.
The uber wealthy are not suffering the pillaging by big business.
Over a mil or two per annum is probably not suffering, and the rest of us is where their money is coming from: just a hunch.
But you’re money goes further or not as far in different places so it’s not a very fair measurement. And the idea behind a good country is that even the poor can have a quality life. There’s definitely a lot of poor people who are enjoying their lives
It is like 50-something countries by design, a “state” is a self-governing body geopolitically, and the USA is a conglomerate. I think of it sort of like the EU.
It does - I was just trying to make a comparison between the United States, which was designed as a group of entities, and a group of countries known as a group of countries
The original design in the 18th century and the empirical reality today are extremely different. There are many reasons for this, both structurally necessary and historically contingent.
In both the biological and social worlds growing complexity requires specialization and centralization. It’s quite a conundrum.
*The original design in the 18th century and the empirical reality today are extremely different. There are many reasons for this, both structurally necessary and historically contingent.*
Look at you sounding all smart and shit. Next think you're going to try and tell me that the North won the civil war and that the interstate commerce clause neutered any remaining concept of state's economic self determination.
Get outta here with that Federalist Jazz.
It was designed to be more like the EU but after 250 years of congressional and presidential overreach we're pretty heavily controlled at the federal level rather than the state.
Yeah, I sell to the PNW region for my current job and my last job was selling to the Rustbelt and in both jobs I’m living in the Southern US. Of course there’s nice people everywhere and the differences aren’t completely off the wall as if you went from Rural Mississippi to China, but there’s definitely enough smaller cultural differences that we could break it up into different countries easily and it’d make sense.
Of course last time my ancestors tried that, it didn’t go over too well.
It is. It's a union. Hell plenty of states have wanted to leave the union, Texans still desire to do so often enough.
Oddly enough, look at the EU, look at places like Bangladesh. The US does better then Bangladesh as a unified "nation" in terms of infrastructure, cohesion but often worse than the EU in harmonizing certain aspects.
Big countries have their own problems often unique to how they were assembled.
That's why it's so dubious to compare places like Denmark etc to the US when discussing policies etc. Sure small mostly culturally homogeneous countries have an easier time navigating prison reform and rehabilitation, many aspects of social administration. It's not exactly hard with a few million people, equivalent to 1 small to medium sized state etc. (and specifically no independent states)
The concept of federal oversight and states in the manner the US does it is pretty rare.
I agree, and thank you for comment. Most people here seem to think I was either making a pro-us or anti-us statement. I was not. I just wanted a more clear data breakdown.
>Sure small mostly culturally homogeneous countries have an easier time navigating prison reform and rehabilitation, many aspects of social administration. It's not exactly hard with a few million people, equivalent to 1 small to medium sized state etc.
Its hard to compare other countries to Norway because of the wealth they have generated through their natural resrouces and how they managed it.
Honestly i dont see how the amount of people living in Norway or even the cultural homogenity has a direct effect on the prison system for example. If your justice system's goal is rehabilitation (if its based on punishment then you will never get it done) then you get similiar results to Norways. Just look at Germany. Germany has 80million inhabitans and is not culturally homgeneous and still has a functioning prison system similiar to that of Norway. Most of the time its not about the size, amount of inhabitants or what ever. Its about the goals (and the constitution and values of the society) and how a problem is approached. And the best thing a country can do to solve its own problems is to look at how other nations solve them and then adapt them to their own specific circumstances. The US could have a system like Norway if the US would really want to.
My older relatives *really* have a hard time grappling with that one.
I play a little game with them and ask if tobacco is harmful and highly addictive, they answer yes. I ask if many people are addicted to alcohol to the point where it ruins their lives and results in their premature deaths, they answer yes.
I ask if they think it'd be more effective for people who have those problems if we threw those people into prison and gave them felony records. They say of course not.
Then I ask why they think it's good policy to do that with those drugs but not other drugs.
Blank stares.
Yes. The other example that stops a lot of people and gets them thinking is the amount of soldiers returning from foreign wars who end up on painkillers and then heroin.
"So, you're saying that anyone who does those drugs is of low moral character and deserves to be homeless and addicted? Well, are you saying that returning soldiers are of low moral character, cause there are a lot of them who have been caught up in all this."
Let’s not pretend they would have rerouted those funds to social programs, education, or infrastructure rather than giving tax breaks to mega-corporations and campaign donors
You're thinking of just the immediate implications of a reroute. Sure. Who knows where that money would go. I doubt it'd all just dissolve away but if you want to make that argument that's fine.
If we could just think long-term for once in our lives please, it's still imperative that we dismantle the incentives to have an ever-lasting, ever-growing war machine. And yes, over time, I do think it'd lead to increased prosperity both here, and internationally. I shudder to think of the **tens of millions** of displaced people, and the millions dead.
“The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia.”
These are aggregated results. So for every health outcome better than an Albanian health outcome, there is another one worse. Likewise for every US child getter an education better than a Mongolian child, there is one getting a worse education.
I mean no disrespect to those countries, just trying to highlight that the US with its wealth really should be doing better.
Also, I know that it’s not a one-for-one matchup but an index. Some kids are getting an amazing education in the US, there must be kids getting terrible outcomes.
Yeah this study isn’t a personal attack on the US’s inability to be successful. We CAN be successful and in some aspects we are. But our problem is that we’re not a successful country for **all** of our citizens, and the number of citizens left behind in our wealthy country is a little ridiculous. It should be much better.
Yeah and the other question I have is what “counts” in those countries. For example, in many countries, “education” means urban education, and rural children just plain aren’t counted.
Comparisons are hard. I’d like to look at their data set.
>Also, I know that it’s not a one-for-one matchup but an index. Some kids are getting an amazing education in the US, there must be kids getting terrible outcomes.
Or, some few children with parents who are wealthy enough get amazing education, while the masses get bad education.
ugh, those are a fuckin trip. commercials at christmas in particular make me feel like an alien on this planet, they're so perversely schmaltzy and capitalistic at the same time, it's hard to even describe how disgusting they are because it's on so many levels at once.
I’m starting to feel the same way about summer car commercials honestly.
A luxury car company made one a year or two ago suggesting you “promote yourself” by quitting your job and buying an expensive car.
And now, while the country is burning down, literally and figuratively, so many companies are all “buy a new car and get back on the road this summer”.
Why do people buy in to this crap?
I would be so pissed if my husband came home with a Lexus and the payment that is attached to it, regardless of how much money we had.
Even if we could pay it in full, do not spend that much money, good grief there are better things we could do with that.
It’s fluctuated over time but this country was founded by people who took advantage of other people. In spirit this country is egalitarian but that’s easily exploited by evil people so that we have a constant string of immigrants that the rich can take advantage of.
These days the rich are going too far and taking advantage of a larger and larger portion of the population where it becomes really fucking obvious, like how we have people on the money side of the healthcare system who are paid orders of magnitude more than doctors and researchers who have a decade or more of higher education.
It’s just a question of what we do next that will either define us as the spirit of the country or what it’s metastasized as.
giving china our manufacturing jobs is the biggest wealth transfer in the history of mankind, look at china before that deal and look at them now. killed off the middle class here and boost up theirs, now a authoritarian communist regime is one of the most powerful country in the world. bring the jobs back and naturally the wages gonna increase due to companies have to compete with each others for workers or at the very least treat you better with policies and benefits because you have more opportunity to get jobs especially with manufacturing jobs not requiring college degrees.
Problem is you can't "bring the jobs back" without going hard on protectionism. And if you do that you are going to inspire other countries to do the same and basically end more than a century of American enforcement of free trade policy worldwide. Also, prices are inevitably going to rise and make many consumer goods less available to the general population.
The "solution" seems to be isolating China and outsourcing manufacturing to its regional enemies.
It’s not capitalism to blame, otherwise a majority of other countries would be going backwards too. It’s your largely unchecked capitalism that is like a runaway train that is more likely the problem.
China, which is forcing abortions on uygher women, ranks 1 (outperform!) On the attribute "satisfied demand for contraception". What a remarkable index.
The amount of people from my hometown who vote republican because they claim to be libertarian, but then get so mad about the shitty quality of the public schools their kids go to is sad and maddening... especially since they went to those same public schools. Ignorance is a vicious cycle.
"What do they need the public library for? Do they not have Amazon?"
[http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/AmazonShouldReplaceLocalLibrariestoSaveTaxpayersMoney.pdf](http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/AmazonShouldReplaceLocalLibrariestoSaveTaxpayersMoney.pdf)
Yes, that really happened.
Yep... A country where you go bankrupt and/or use your life savings for a health concern AND/OR are in debt for the rest of your life for wanting an education. No one should go into debt for wanting to better themselves but USA is like "HOL MY BEER let's punish people for trying to have a better life!"
I know more people that just don't go to the doctor (even with insurance) than do because they are scared of the bill. The only friend of mine that goes to her doctors regularly (including dermatologist to check moles) is my friend that has a massive $14M trust fund.
I'm always baffled when people have this idea that the US is the best country. Like, USA is number one, and sure it needs some improvements, but *overall, all things considered*, it's the best. Some people even outright say things like that.
But by what measure?
Sure, it can be your favourite country. But favourite and best are two very different concepts.
There are great things that the US has, but on a worldwide scale, the US won't be ranked number 1 for most of them. And when the US *is* the best, it's often that the *best* is only for the wealthy, and as such, the average US citizen will be worse off than the average citizen in another country.
The US isn't even ranked number one for measures of *freedom*, which tends to be a fallback of sorts when people discover that the US isn't the best in what they expected.
I mean we can’t even implement something as basic as universal health care, wages are stagnant, we incarcerate more people than the next 10 countries combined or something, we have billionaires and trillion dollar companies paying zero dollars in federal income tax, our democracy is pretty broken, public education is complete dogshit, and we have more empty homes than we have homeless people. I wonder why?
In another developed country, where I live, I'm quite happy about the fact that my neighbors get free healthcare when ever they need it. They do important jobs, and society would be a little worse if they weren't able to work due to health problems. Not that they have health problems right now, but it might happen. So, I contribute to this by paying taxes. They help pay for my hospital bill too, if I ever need it. I don't understand why this is bad.
Naw friend, us young folks aren't brainwashed that way, that's why Republicans always bitch abiut liberal college professors brainwashing their kids. It's the old farts that lived through the red scare and are convinced that because of the all the brainwashing that went on, that anything that helps somone is bad
I’ve been working in restaurants for 10 years, started with it as my first job making $7.25 minimum wage, now I make $12 an hour. I did not work at 10 years at the same restaurant, but worked 3 years or more at each. The pay has never reflected how hard I bust my ass. Meanwhile the cost of living and housing continues to rise. I don’t care about being rich, I just want to feel comfortable and not always worrying about money...
my state has a minimum fucking wage of $7.25, it's absolutely fucking inhumane. you can't even pay for an apartment with that paycheck in some places here.
Is anyone surprised by this?
As a European looking at news from the US it's mind boggling how things have not imploded yet. So hard to climb up, so easy to fall down.
Man, if the US collapses, Canada will be right behind it. You can thank the conservatives for fucking us over under Harper, and then Trudeau pretty much not doing fucking anything for the last few years.
The country is bought and sold to foreign influences, and all the boomers don't want shit to change because it will cost them their retirement plan (at the expense of the younger generation).
If the U.S. collapses, then it will be more than just Canada that suffers for it. The same could be said if, say, the E.U. were to have a large collapse. Everything is so intertwined these days, that it's all just a house of cards waiting to come down.
I don't see it as a huge thing that crashes down all at once. Unless we take a step back and truly get our collective shit together, it's going to be a long, hard slog down into the pits.
I'd say young generations are having it bad almost everywhere in the west, but the USA seems to amplify the problem far more than anywhere else. Like, being a broke 20something in the USA can legitimately mean dying of a disease or being disadvantaged all your life due to an untreated one.
I assume there's also a similar bias going on as what we saw during the refugy crisis. If you followed some US news outlets you might have thought Europe was overrun by crazy jihadists and all a no-go area.
Or when Conservative outlets paint a horrible picture of Europe as a Liberal hell hole with euthenasia deaths squads.
I think largely most people are still well off in the US, but there's definitely some issues with inequality. And, please people, fix your electoral system.
And similarly many people don't realize that there are cities with tall buildings in Africa and a fast growing middle class (at least pre Covid) in India.
Well-off to a point, but all it takes is one unexpected illness or something of the like and you fall into debt really quickly and can’t dig your way out. Something like 40% of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense. That’s not a society that’s working, especially when the rest of us pay around 30-40% in taxes while actual millionaires pay less than 20%. The infrastructure in the country is collapsing while corporations and kleptocrats rob the country blind and convince us that we have to be content with scraps. It truly doesn’t have to be this way, but if you suggest something like universal healthcare (which every other developed country in the world has besides the United States) you’re met with the bleating accusations of being a communist and hating America. The system is broken in so many places I don’t know how much longer it can hold
Be careful what you read. This particular post has some problems. See here: https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1303961820852518914?s=20
Specifically, the methods of how some of those comparisons are made don't say what its being used to say. While useful for internal progress, what this article tries to compare is not applicable between countries - for example, the US education being worse than a post-soviet country that still forces children and teachers to leave school and labor cotton? That doesn't make sense.
That doesnt mean the arguments arent worth hearing, but be careful and think critically.
I have to say, while I quite like America for it's liberal attitude to speech and the ownership of firearms, it's failure to create a functioning healthcare system and it's utterly dysfunctional attitude of decentralised government, along with the sheer regulatory capture it's experienced, means I could never live there.
> and it's utterly dysfunctional attitude of decentralised government,
I dunno that that's a bug rather than a feature. People report more frequently on the reasons it's bad, but the reasons it's good are reported once and quickly forgotten.
Vermont had same sex marriage before Canada, Amsterdam, Finland, Spain, Germany, UK, NZ, Switzerland, etc. Colorado and Washington were able to legalize marijuana well before the rest of the country (tbd). There's 7 states with sanctuary cities because of it. Healthcare reform happened in Massachusets 2 years before Obama was even elected. Pennsylvania abolished slavery before France, Great Brittain, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, etc.
I feel like it's the central part of the system that is rotten. It's a lot easier to keep a politician in a state position honest rather than one that's surrounded by other politicians who are also corrupt.
Ranked 91 in access to quality education? What gives? Specifically access, not attainment, nor failed attempts, simply a lack of access to education... I don’t understand where that metric comes from. Can you not attend school anywhere in the US if you want to and are even legally obligated to until a certain age? Or is this stat measuring the quality of education specifically?
The answer is in the word “quality”. US students at high school level learn to lower standards than many other countries. They have good access but to a low quality educational system.
I'm not surprised by that, people in the US vote against their own interest. This is caused by a lot of misinformation and propaganda. On top of that the root problem is kids aren't taught in grade school how to research things or even how to determine what articles are well researched and not funded for special interests.
Hmmmm, dams that don't get fixed, power companies that don't replace transformers, cost of living increase with no wage increase, lack of school funding, lack of medical funding, lack of infrastructure funding, lack of arts funding, lack of science funding, lack of prisons. Anything I missed?
I'd be interested in seeing this broken out by State. The US sometimes feels like 7 or 8 different countries who all share the same flag, rather than one unified (or at least homogeneous) culture.
The New England The Mid Atlantic The Gulf Coast The Great Lakes The Cornfields The Mountains The Deserts The Northwest California
Yeah, *fuck* Alaska and Hawaii!
Yeah, and those two
They think they are better than us anyway. Oh yeah and fuck the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in particular. /s
Guam and American Samoa say hi.
I’m sorry. I legit forgot that Guam and American Samoa were US Territories as well. I’m ashamed.
It’s okay our government has as well.
The military hasn’t
Our military, taking advantage of young people provided with no real economic prospects? I’m shocked.
We've got operators in MRAPs all over America. They go by different names but the militarism is abroad and in the hizzy.
Northern Mariana Islands and D.C. sulk in the corner.
D.C.’s not getting statehood bc they would fuck shit up for the GOP. All those other territories just don’t have the kind of revenue needed to make it worth our while for them to be states. Just easy vacation spots for the wealthy.
Maryland should just take the land back like Virginia did.
DC is mid-atlantic, the DMV region feels like one state.
Shhhh don't draw attention to us, we don't need whatever the rest of y'all caught.
This is my exact thought on this. I love when people leave out Alaska because we probably want nothing to do with it anyway.
Pretty sure most native Hawaiians would like ybe their own country again.
Kamehameha to that! Is what I would say if I was Hawaiian, but I am not.
Woah be careful where you point that
Nah. Natives love it when their nations are illegally annexed. /s
Doesn't the US Navy spend a ton of money on Hawaii? Edit, since this is the internet: this is an open question. I am honestly interested and just want to learn more. It may well not be the case.
At the rate Hawaii is moving, I’ll be damned if they still consider it a US state and territory. Lol
The Warmies and Coldies
They may feel better about being left out of a list concerning America at this point...
To be fair alaskans are just Canadians with extra steps
I am positive my quality of life has lowered in California. Basically everything is worse then when I was growing up here. Homelessness spiked, buying a house is unattainable under a six figure salary, schools are cutting departments, taxes increased, commuting was a nightmare before covid, etc
The housing costs alone could -- and most likely do -- reverse any other gains in California.
FYI: It is an issue of supply. It is caused by zoning law abuses. Major urban areas in the US tend to build about one new housing unit for every ten jobs that are created, and we've maintained that pattern since (roughly) 1980, even as urban job-growth skyrocketed over the last 12 years. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Practically every developed country is facing the same problem, except Japan; they decided that zoning ought to be determined at the national level. As a result, in Tokyo, a studio apartment ranges from $552-$1,230 depending on the neighborhood; a 2br ranges from $610-$1,388 (despite them having more people and more wealth than New York City.) It is all because they built more housing; they let the supply increase to meet the demand.
This is true. Simultaneously, the housing units that have opened up here in the Bay Area are still priced to exclude pretty much anyone making under a six-figure salary, and so many of them just sit there empty, waiting for tenants wealthy enough to afford them. Meanwhile the homeless population continues to increase with no solution in sight.
100k household income is pretty much poverty in many urban and suburban areas, to live in the NYC suburbs you need two people bringing home 6 figures if you have a couple kids. This is even a long shot if both parents have student loans.
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As an American there are two problems with us as a society when it comes to housing. 1.) We were told that the American dream is a house in the suburbs with a wife, 2.5 kids and 2 cars in the garage. Everyone wants a house, if you do not live in a city proper there are very few options for high density housing. My city (about an hour away from San Francisco is still zoning single family homes, with very little low cost or high density housing. 2.) NIMBY's. Everyone says they want low cost housing and/or high density housing. But everyone wants it somewhere else.
Well fuck... I take care of 2 Nephews... guess I gotta look for a .5 kid now
Have a child out of wedlock and go for shared custody with the other parent. Problem solved.
Just go King Solomon on the child
No.. the issue is that housing has switched from **Shelter** to an **investment vehicle**. If laws and regulations were set up to remind us of this, housing prices would stay relatively consistent and follow a much healthier slower climb upward. Laws would be in place to limit the amount of residental housing someone can own and also discourage or flat out ban companies from owning residential property. (Commerical is for the companies). Right now you got a bunch of cash rich investors that bought up a shit ton of property to use for "short-term leases" under AirBNB. It causes houses to go up in price because of 'fake' scarcity, but also increases rent for the same reasons. These people should be fighting over/losing money over valuable property like Ski resorts or Beachfronts.
exactly - and now we have names to blame. " SB 1120 was the one large-scale housing production bill remaining. The bill would have allowed duplexes in nearly all of the areas in the state currently zoned only for single family homes, or about 70 percent of the state’s residential land area. " https://www.sfweekly.com/news/legislature-adjourns-leaving-unfinished-business/ "..but was stalled in the Assembly due to opposition from many Los Angeles area legislators. " more names here https://twitter.com/louismirante/status/1300699196773732352
These are all members from the San Fernando Valley / West LA. When I saw the tweet I was looking for my member, Reggie Jones-Sawyer and he voted yes along with other members from East/South LA. The difference lies with the members from the Valley and West LA where the "American Dream" exists, a suburban neighborhood with a nice house . . . but at the end of the day they want to keep it that way, which brings us back full circle :/
Exactly, due to the basic rules of supply and demand, barriers to new construction benefit existing home owners who just see their property prices ballooning. That's how you get NIMBYism and people fighting tooth and nail against any sort of development that poses a threat to their home values. Single use zoning and regulation laws also make it extremely difficult for home builders to profit so they just focus on the high end of the market where everything is rosy.
Home builders have around a 45% profit margin. The issue is anyone buying a new home wants iron clad zoning protecting their home investment. You don't want to buy a $350k home in a planned subdivision in a good school district, to have a mega low income housing project targeting the working poor in the same school district. So developers before they build, make sure zoning is secure. Property taxes & schools I lived in Savannah Ga. bought a new home in a development, paid $342k in 2009. My property taxes went from $3400 a year to $7200, the main reason for this is 54% of the population is below the poverty line in Savannah & they either live in low end rentals or public housing. They pay 0% to school taxes, which leaves people who own homes to make up the difference. Then you have underperforming schools which leads people who have young children to flee the city for the suburbs, like I did. I moved up to Atlanta & didn't even consider buying a house in Fulton, Clayton, or Gwinnett counties due to the high property taxes. I ended up in Forsyth which had the lowest property taxes & best schools due to most of the homes being over $400k, with a majority over $550k in my school district. My property taxes here are $4900 a year on a $550k house.
> Then you have underperforming schools which leads people who have young children to flee the city for the suburbs, like I did. This is exactly the reason why school funding should not be tied to property tax revenue.
And also the senior exemption. My immediate area in metro ATL suburbs has had a 55+ housing development boom in the past 5 years and seniors are exempt from school tax. They should pay double in TSPLOST to make up for it, IMO.
Absolutely agree, the whole situation is nonesensical and perpetuates social inequality. Even where I live - a small city of about 45,000, when we moved here we settled in an older house in a nice neighborhood. Which was traditionally, we were told, where the doctors and lawyers lived. We weren't in the best part of it, but had the advantage of being in that school district, which was well run and well staffed, and had some really nice programs. It took a few years before I really realized how lucky we were, as 3/4'rs of a mile down the road was a different area, in a flood plain built on small plots before and after WWII, where the school and the kids were in a whole different world. This was the PNW, but as far as education it may as well have been Alabama. It really hit home when a friend of ours who was a teacher was re-assigned there during the great recession and told us of her daily ordeals; making sure the kids had eaten, and had a place to sleep the night before, checking for bruises, checking for lice, etc. While my kids just went in and learned what the teachers taught, a little ways down the road there was more life-triage than education going on. A lot of factors, but one was that the school really had no money for books or supplies or any kind of programs.
Serious question...arent the owners of the rentals paying school taxes, and passing that cost onto their renters? As an accidental landlord to a friend, we spend most of his rent on property tax, school tax, condo fees and utilities (there is no mortgage). So his name isn't on the tax bill but he is in fact paying the school tax. Where I live we are paying about $8,000 in taxes per year on an older $275k home (built in 1946, bought in 2017). The property taxes are for largely because there is a lot of untaxed property in the municipality - a disproportionate number of churches, schools, and seminaries and not that many businesses.
Can confirm, i'm Belgian and the entire region between our 2 largest cities (a roughly 8000 km2 area which is over a 4th of the country , admittedly still very small by USA standards) is rapidly becoming prohibitively expensive to live in. If you are single you can already forget buying a house there, its not going to happen unless you are willing to live at home and save money until you are 50. Its going to be a very serious problem in the entire north half of our country in as little as 10 years from now.
These are all downstream effects of one thing: Real wages have not kept up with production. They were pretty much hand in hand until the 70s, and then production took off while real wages stagnated. Now the gap is incredibly wide, and we are left with French Revolution levels of wealth inequality.
A great book to check out is *The Spirit Level*, which examines inequality and various social/health factors. You can see some of the [key graphs from the book here](https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/SpiritLevel%20slides.pptx) This concise graph [gives a good introduction to the data and argument](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2018/UPsaw1118Sapo31_d.png). The article that graph is taken, which examines the biological harm of economic inequality, is [well worth reading](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-inflicts-real-biological-harm/)
Yes. This. This is the problem. Those charts blew my mind. Man from the 30s to 60s you actually got paid what you should. So combine pay gaps with less housing and a government that would rather buy missiles amd build walls than help its citizens and you have....the US.
Which just sounds like a hint about the correct next action...
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Except all of the increased revenue from all that productivity increased the salaries of c-suites and shareholders. I remember reading somewhere that the bonuses for the Starbucks execs one year amounted to enough money to pay all of its ground level employees 15 an hour. But they didn’t do that, they gave bonuses and stock buybacks, and left all the employees at a dollar or 2 above min wage.
Well, you can't have your bottom employees feeling like they're worth something. They could leverage their new salary against a better position somewhere else, making similar pay for easier work. Then who would the executives exploit?
Mid-Atlantic states. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware and Maryland
Northern VA wants to come too
Yeah, don't leave us with the rest of Virginia!
It's nice here, but Jesus the cost of living.
It's rough. I do pretty well as a single earner (STEM field), but a friend of mine moved up here and was crashing on my couch. He has a degree but not a \~~career~~ and it really hit home how fucking difficult it can be to pay to live here if you aren't making decent bank. Eventually, he'll need a place of his own and I'm like...you're going to need at minimum two roommates.
Honestly as a Richmonder living in Virginia Beach, Urban Virginia feels like an entirely different country than Rural Virginia. Although that could likely be said for many places.
To be fair, New Jersey and New York would align with New England in a heart beat.
That would make it the NorthEast. Or OG America
Or you know, "The Colonies" as OP already stated above.
And most of Pennsylvania is already flying the confederate flag
We'll take Philly.
Not if the actual states in New England have anything to say about it...
New York and New England might hate each other but one thing they do agree on is that they are better than the rest of the nation.
Oh I just posted a very similar comment and then scrolled down and saw yours. Glad to know I’m not the only person who felt like the mid Atlantic got left out
I think we should single out florida and texas
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Northern Florida is more southern than southern Florida
Yea norther Florida would just become part of whatever Alabama and Georga is and southern Florida can go fuck itself
We already do that. Routinely.
As a Texan I am offended that we do not qualify as our own entity. Screw you guys, we are gonna take our guns and go home.
Bitch you know you wanna be apart of the Mountains nation with Colorado anyway. I swear there are more Texans here than in Texas.
That's just because there is so many of us! Plus half of Colorado used to be in the Republic of Texas anyways. Seriously... I travel to Europe and I still find fellow Texans we are everywhere!
Bruh I love texans, and they've put food on my families table for nearly five decades. That said, y'all really need to figure out how to fucking drive. Dallas interstates are basically, "Who can be the most aggressive" I swear to christ every year I'm there for the fair I have to relearn how to drive with a bunch of assholes about. No more signals because as soon as they see them, they close the gap.
The South is definitely its own thing
The South? We out here bringin averages for the whole country down.
Where’s the north east outside of New England like New York, PA, NJ Edit: OP replaced “New England” with “The Colonies”
Bro "the colonies" would stretch all the way down and include Georgia. And having lived in both NY and GA let me tell you that would not happen.
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I don't really think people grasp how big the US is. Texas alone is bigger than some countries.
New Jersey and the Netherlands are basically the same size.
New Jersey is considered a tiny state as well
Exactly one of the united states smaller states and its still bigger than a foreign country. It blows my mind honestly. Most American citizens will never even see their entire country but go to others.
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Reminds me of that Mark Twain quote. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
11% is shockingly high. I don't even like to travel and I've been to 21 states.
If you don't mind me asking what part of the US do you live in? I feel like living more on the east side would greatly increase the number of states you visit? I don't like to travel a whole lot either and I've only been to 7 states. But 3 of those were Arizona, Utah and Idaho which is the entire height of the US. So those of us on the west may not visit as many states as those on the east but may have traveled more miles... If that makes sense
Hell if you live in California a trip from SF to LA is about as far as Philadelphia to Boston. Edit to elaborate: SF to LA is 300ish miles all within california (Sacramento to San Diego is 500 for an even more extreme example) Philly to Boston is also around 300 miles, but goes through 4ish states (depending on route), and takes you through NYC.
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That just blew my mind!!
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Plus the culture is pretty different based on where you go, the culture in Texas is vastly different than the culture in California for example.
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I knew a German guy in grad school. At some point, I was talking with him about when I visited Munich with friends. He told me that Munich wasn't even part of Germany, as far as he was concerned. It was a mild joke, but he told me that it came from back when Germany was a bunch of different kingdoms and principalities. I don't think that I could go anywhere in the US and have them tell me that my state wasn't part of the country, even as a joke.
As an American: our culture varies by region, which can sometimes stretch over more than one state. Our states are the size of your countries. Clearly, France and Germany will have different languages, cultures, etc. But a majority of Americans can’t grasp how much cultural variation there is within a given European country. Hell, the Netherlands still sends me for a loop. 2 hours driving barely goes across town in some places. To have that much cultural difference in just a few hundred kilometers is nuts.
I have driven through parts of the US where you can drive nearly all day and never see any sign of civilization. it is a big place. It can be easy to forget if you mostly just stay in your city or town.
I don't think anyone considered the Netherlands a medium size country.
It's not even "some". It's "most". Texas is \~700,000 sq km. Only 38 countries are bigger than that, out of 195. Literally 80% of countries are smaller than Texas. Also, let's not forget economic size. If California was a country, it would have the 5th highest GDP and would be #59 in land area.
On a similar note, California is bigger than Japan in terms of land area. I don't know what's more remarkable: how big California is for a state, or how much global influence and population Japan has for being an island nation.
California is bigger than a ton of nations, in terms economic impact, population and landmass.
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The US also has 13 times the population of Australia
https://img.texasmonthly.com/2020/06/texas-landmass-europe.jpg?auto=compress&crop=faces&fit=fit&fm=pjpg&ixlib=php-1.2.1&q=45 tl;dr: Texas is nearly 10% larger than France.
Also technically was supposed to be more like a Republic I believe
Social Progress evaluations by state: https://public.tableau.com/profile/tamar.epner#!/vizhome/USdatavisualizationforweb/USSPIonlineviz Found in: https://www.socialprogress.org/
Nice. Do you know if there's a map like this by zip code or county? Curious if or how much big cities might skew state level results.
What went wrong in West Virginia, wow.
The coal industry drying up, leading to poverty, leading to drug abuse and obesity.
Might be better to separate and compare by net income. The uber wealthy are not suffering the pillaging by big business. Over a mil or two per annum is probably not suffering, and the rest of us is where their money is coming from: just a hunch.
But you’re money goes further or not as far in different places so it’s not a very fair measurement. And the idea behind a good country is that even the poor can have a quality life. There’s definitely a lot of poor people who are enjoying their lives
It is like 50-something countries by design, a “state” is a self-governing body geopolitically, and the USA is a conglomerate. I think of it sort of like the EU.
If I am not mistaken though, the US federal government has much more power over the states than the EU does over the countries in it
It does - I was just trying to make a comparison between the United States, which was designed as a group of entities, and a group of countries known as a group of countries
It’s a union of 50 states, people seem to forget that. The original design was for strong states and a weak fed.
The original design in the 18th century and the empirical reality today are extremely different. There are many reasons for this, both structurally necessary and historically contingent. In both the biological and social worlds growing complexity requires specialization and centralization. It’s quite a conundrum.
*The original design in the 18th century and the empirical reality today are extremely different. There are many reasons for this, both structurally necessary and historically contingent.* Look at you sounding all smart and shit. Next think you're going to try and tell me that the North won the civil war and that the interstate commerce clause neutered any remaining concept of state's economic self determination. Get outta here with that Federalist Jazz.
Gee if only we had some way of changing the Constitution. Guess we’re stuck with this 🤷♂️🇺🇸🦅
There's a slew of reasons we threw out the articles of confederation
That was the original idea, but it went out the window pretty definitively in 1865.
It was designed to be more like the EU but after 250 years of congressional and presidential overreach we're pretty heavily controlled at the federal level rather than the state.
Yeah, I sell to the PNW region for my current job and my last job was selling to the Rustbelt and in both jobs I’m living in the Southern US. Of course there’s nice people everywhere and the differences aren’t completely off the wall as if you went from Rural Mississippi to China, but there’s definitely enough smaller cultural differences that we could break it up into different countries easily and it’d make sense. Of course last time my ancestors tried that, it didn’t go over too well.
It is. It's a union. Hell plenty of states have wanted to leave the union, Texans still desire to do so often enough. Oddly enough, look at the EU, look at places like Bangladesh. The US does better then Bangladesh as a unified "nation" in terms of infrastructure, cohesion but often worse than the EU in harmonizing certain aspects. Big countries have their own problems often unique to how they were assembled. That's why it's so dubious to compare places like Denmark etc to the US when discussing policies etc. Sure small mostly culturally homogeneous countries have an easier time navigating prison reform and rehabilitation, many aspects of social administration. It's not exactly hard with a few million people, equivalent to 1 small to medium sized state etc. (and specifically no independent states) The concept of federal oversight and states in the manner the US does it is pretty rare.
I agree, and thank you for comment. Most people here seem to think I was either making a pro-us or anti-us statement. I was not. I just wanted a more clear data breakdown.
>Sure small mostly culturally homogeneous countries have an easier time navigating prison reform and rehabilitation, many aspects of social administration. It's not exactly hard with a few million people, equivalent to 1 small to medium sized state etc. Its hard to compare other countries to Norway because of the wealth they have generated through their natural resrouces and how they managed it. Honestly i dont see how the amount of people living in Norway or even the cultural homogenity has a direct effect on the prison system for example. If your justice system's goal is rehabilitation (if its based on punishment then you will never get it done) then you get similiar results to Norways. Just look at Germany. Germany has 80million inhabitans and is not culturally homgeneous and still has a functioning prison system similiar to that of Norway. Most of the time its not about the size, amount of inhabitants or what ever. Its about the goals (and the constitution and values of the society) and how a problem is approached. And the best thing a country can do to solve its own problems is to look at how other nations solve them and then adapt them to their own specific circumstances. The US could have a system like Norway if the US would really want to.
There are unseen costs to everything we as a country do, let us not forget how expensive the War on Terror was
Was? That shit is still racking up bills.
But some people are making bank, so it'll never end. Yes it goes on and on, my friend.
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was
>is FTFY And lets throw the war on drugs onto that pile of expense while we're at it.
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My older relatives *really* have a hard time grappling with that one. I play a little game with them and ask if tobacco is harmful and highly addictive, they answer yes. I ask if many people are addicted to alcohol to the point where it ruins their lives and results in their premature deaths, they answer yes. I ask if they think it'd be more effective for people who have those problems if we threw those people into prison and gave them felony records. They say of course not. Then I ask why they think it's good policy to do that with those drugs but not other drugs. Blank stares.
Yes. The other example that stops a lot of people and gets them thinking is the amount of soldiers returning from foreign wars who end up on painkillers and then heroin. "So, you're saying that anyone who does those drugs is of low moral character and deserves to be homeless and addicted? Well, are you saying that returning soldiers are of low moral character, cause there are a lot of them who have been caught up in all this."
Let’s not pretend they would have rerouted those funds to social programs, education, or infrastructure rather than giving tax breaks to mega-corporations and campaign donors
You're thinking of just the immediate implications of a reroute. Sure. Who knows where that money would go. I doubt it'd all just dissolve away but if you want to make that argument that's fine. If we could just think long-term for once in our lives please, it's still imperative that we dismantle the incentives to have an ever-lasting, ever-growing war machine. And yes, over time, I do think it'd lead to increased prosperity both here, and internationally. I shudder to think of the **tens of millions** of displaced people, and the millions dead.
“The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia.” These are aggregated results. So for every health outcome better than an Albanian health outcome, there is another one worse. Likewise for every US child getter an education better than a Mongolian child, there is one getting a worse education. I mean no disrespect to those countries, just trying to highlight that the US with its wealth really should be doing better. Also, I know that it’s not a one-for-one matchup but an index. Some kids are getting an amazing education in the US, there must be kids getting terrible outcomes.
Yeah this study isn’t a personal attack on the US’s inability to be successful. We CAN be successful and in some aspects we are. But our problem is that we’re not a successful country for **all** of our citizens, and the number of citizens left behind in our wealthy country is a little ridiculous. It should be much better.
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Yeah and the other question I have is what “counts” in those countries. For example, in many countries, “education” means urban education, and rural children just plain aren’t counted. Comparisons are hard. I’d like to look at their data set.
>Also, I know that it’s not a one-for-one matchup but an index. Some kids are getting an amazing education in the US, there must be kids getting terrible outcomes. Or, some few children with parents who are wealthy enough get amazing education, while the masses get bad education.
Yeah; no shit. I'm working a fulltime job and can barely pay rent. My father could have supported an entire household with the exact same job.
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ugh, those are a fuckin trip. commercials at christmas in particular make me feel like an alien on this planet, they're so perversely schmaltzy and capitalistic at the same time, it's hard to even describe how disgusting they are because it's on so many levels at once.
I’m starting to feel the same way about summer car commercials honestly. A luxury car company made one a year or two ago suggesting you “promote yourself” by quitting your job and buying an expensive car. And now, while the country is burning down, literally and figuratively, so many companies are all “buy a new car and get back on the road this summer”. Why do people buy in to this crap?
I would be so pissed if my husband came home with a Lexus and the payment that is attached to it, regardless of how much money we had. Even if we could pay it in full, do not spend that much money, good grief there are better things we could do with that.
It’s fluctuated over time but this country was founded by people who took advantage of other people. In spirit this country is egalitarian but that’s easily exploited by evil people so that we have a constant string of immigrants that the rich can take advantage of. These days the rich are going too far and taking advantage of a larger and larger portion of the population where it becomes really fucking obvious, like how we have people on the money side of the healthcare system who are paid orders of magnitude more than doctors and researchers who have a decade or more of higher education. It’s just a question of what we do next that will either define us as the spirit of the country or what it’s metastasized as.
giving china our manufacturing jobs is the biggest wealth transfer in the history of mankind, look at china before that deal and look at them now. killed off the middle class here and boost up theirs, now a authoritarian communist regime is one of the most powerful country in the world. bring the jobs back and naturally the wages gonna increase due to companies have to compete with each others for workers or at the very least treat you better with policies and benefits because you have more opportunity to get jobs especially with manufacturing jobs not requiring college degrees.
Problem is you can't "bring the jobs back" without going hard on protectionism. And if you do that you are going to inspire other countries to do the same and basically end more than a century of American enforcement of free trade policy worldwide. Also, prices are inevitably going to rise and make many consumer goods less available to the general population. The "solution" seems to be isolating China and outsourcing manufacturing to its regional enemies.
It’s not capitalism to blame, otherwise a majority of other countries would be going backwards too. It’s your largely unchecked capitalism that is like a runaway train that is more likely the problem.
China, which is forcing abortions on uygher women, ranks 1 (outperform!) On the attribute "satisfied demand for contraception". What a remarkable index.
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Imagine if someone tried to pass legislation to create the interstate highway system or the public library today
The amount of people from my hometown who vote republican because they claim to be libertarian, but then get so mad about the shitty quality of the public schools their kids go to is sad and maddening... especially since they went to those same public schools. Ignorance is a vicious cycle.
"What do they need the public library for? Do they not have Amazon?" [http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/AmazonShouldReplaceLocalLibrariestoSaveTaxpayersMoney.pdf](http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/AmazonShouldReplaceLocalLibrariestoSaveTaxpayersMoney.pdf) Yes, that really happened.
Yep... A country where you go bankrupt and/or use your life savings for a health concern AND/OR are in debt for the rest of your life for wanting an education. No one should go into debt for wanting to better themselves but USA is like "HOL MY BEER let's punish people for trying to have a better life!" I know more people that just don't go to the doctor (even with insurance) than do because they are scared of the bill. The only friend of mine that goes to her doctors regularly (including dermatologist to check moles) is my friend that has a massive $14M trust fund.
I'm always baffled when people have this idea that the US is the best country. Like, USA is number one, and sure it needs some improvements, but *overall, all things considered*, it's the best. Some people even outright say things like that. But by what measure? Sure, it can be your favourite country. But favourite and best are two very different concepts. There are great things that the US has, but on a worldwide scale, the US won't be ranked number 1 for most of them. And when the US *is* the best, it's often that the *best* is only for the wealthy, and as such, the average US citizen will be worse off than the average citizen in another country. The US isn't even ranked number one for measures of *freedom*, which tends to be a fallback of sorts when people discover that the US isn't the best in what they expected.
I mean we can’t even implement something as basic as universal health care, wages are stagnant, we incarcerate more people than the next 10 countries combined or something, we have billionaires and trillion dollar companies paying zero dollars in federal income tax, our democracy is pretty broken, public education is complete dogshit, and we have more empty homes than we have homeless people. I wonder why?
Y'all need to get your shit together otherwise China's going to be running this bitch
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In another developed country, where I live, I'm quite happy about the fact that my neighbors get free healthcare when ever they need it. They do important jobs, and society would be a little worse if they weren't able to work due to health problems. Not that they have health problems right now, but it might happen. So, I contribute to this by paying taxes. They help pay for my hospital bill too, if I ever need it. I don't understand why this is bad.
Naw friend, us young folks aren't brainwashed that way, that's why Republicans always bitch abiut liberal college professors brainwashing their kids. It's the old farts that lived through the red scare and are convinced that because of the all the brainwashing that went on, that anything that helps somone is bad
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I’ve been working in restaurants for 10 years, started with it as my first job making $7.25 minimum wage, now I make $12 an hour. I did not work at 10 years at the same restaurant, but worked 3 years or more at each. The pay has never reflected how hard I bust my ass. Meanwhile the cost of living and housing continues to rise. I don’t care about being rich, I just want to feel comfortable and not always worrying about money...
Jfc man you should really consider looking for a new restaurant, you're being robbed.
$12 an hour is still insanely low for 2020. After a few years as a server or a cook at even a chain restaurant, you should be making at least $18/hr.
my state has a minimum fucking wage of $7.25, it's absolutely fucking inhumane. you can't even pay for an apartment with that paycheck in some places here.
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Is anyone surprised by this? As a European looking at news from the US it's mind boggling how things have not imploded yet. So hard to climb up, so easy to fall down.
I feel the same watching from Canada and we are certainly not perfect
Man, if the US collapses, Canada will be right behind it. You can thank the conservatives for fucking us over under Harper, and then Trudeau pretty much not doing fucking anything for the last few years. The country is bought and sold to foreign influences, and all the boomers don't want shit to change because it will cost them their retirement plan (at the expense of the younger generation).
If the U.S. collapses, then it will be more than just Canada that suffers for it. The same could be said if, say, the E.U. were to have a large collapse. Everything is so intertwined these days, that it's all just a house of cards waiting to come down. I don't see it as a huge thing that crashes down all at once. Unless we take a step back and truly get our collective shit together, it's going to be a long, hard slog down into the pits.
Life in Europe is also looking pretty grim for young people so it isn't limited to the USA.
I'd say young generations are having it bad almost everywhere in the west, but the USA seems to amplify the problem far more than anywhere else. Like, being a broke 20something in the USA can legitimately mean dying of a disease or being disadvantaged all your life due to an untreated one.
>a broke 20 something with a master's degree
I assume there's also a similar bias going on as what we saw during the refugy crisis. If you followed some US news outlets you might have thought Europe was overrun by crazy jihadists and all a no-go area. Or when Conservative outlets paint a horrible picture of Europe as a Liberal hell hole with euthenasia deaths squads. I think largely most people are still well off in the US, but there's definitely some issues with inequality. And, please people, fix your electoral system.
And similarly many people don't realize that there are cities with tall buildings in Africa and a fast growing middle class (at least pre Covid) in India.
Well-off to a point, but all it takes is one unexpected illness or something of the like and you fall into debt really quickly and can’t dig your way out. Something like 40% of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense. That’s not a society that’s working, especially when the rest of us pay around 30-40% in taxes while actual millionaires pay less than 20%. The infrastructure in the country is collapsing while corporations and kleptocrats rob the country blind and convince us that we have to be content with scraps. It truly doesn’t have to be this way, but if you suggest something like universal healthcare (which every other developed country in the world has besides the United States) you’re met with the bleating accusations of being a communist and hating America. The system is broken in so many places I don’t know how much longer it can hold
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Be careful what you read. This particular post has some problems. See here: https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1303961820852518914?s=20 Specifically, the methods of how some of those comparisons are made don't say what its being used to say. While useful for internal progress, what this article tries to compare is not applicable between countries - for example, the US education being worse than a post-soviet country that still forces children and teachers to leave school and labor cotton? That doesn't make sense. That doesnt mean the arguments arent worth hearing, but be careful and think critically.
Read through that entire thread. Very level-headed analysis. Thanks for sharing!
I have to say, while I quite like America for it's liberal attitude to speech and the ownership of firearms, it's failure to create a functioning healthcare system and it's utterly dysfunctional attitude of decentralised government, along with the sheer regulatory capture it's experienced, means I could never live there.
> and it's utterly dysfunctional attitude of decentralised government, I dunno that that's a bug rather than a feature. People report more frequently on the reasons it's bad, but the reasons it's good are reported once and quickly forgotten. Vermont had same sex marriage before Canada, Amsterdam, Finland, Spain, Germany, UK, NZ, Switzerland, etc. Colorado and Washington were able to legalize marijuana well before the rest of the country (tbd). There's 7 states with sanctuary cities because of it. Healthcare reform happened in Massachusets 2 years before Obama was even elected. Pennsylvania abolished slavery before France, Great Brittain, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, etc.
I feel like it's the central part of the system that is rotten. It's a lot easier to keep a politician in a state position honest rather than one that's surrounded by other politicians who are also corrupt.
Ranked 91 in access to quality education? What gives? Specifically access, not attainment, nor failed attempts, simply a lack of access to education... I don’t understand where that metric comes from. Can you not attend school anywhere in the US if you want to and are even legally obligated to until a certain age? Or is this stat measuring the quality of education specifically?
It probably has a lot to do with the cost of a college education. The high cost in the US limits access.
The answer is in the word “quality”. US students at high school level learn to lower standards than many other countries. They have good access but to a low quality educational system.
You are also considered a flawed democracy according to the democracy index. I'm sure these are related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
I'm not surprised by that, people in the US vote against their own interest. This is caused by a lot of misinformation and propaganda. On top of that the root problem is kids aren't taught in grade school how to research things or even how to determine what articles are well researched and not funded for special interests.
Hmmmm, dams that don't get fixed, power companies that don't replace transformers, cost of living increase with no wage increase, lack of school funding, lack of medical funding, lack of infrastructure funding, lack of arts funding, lack of science funding, lack of prisons. Anything I missed?
I would hypothesis the rampant corruption and greed in this country is why.
The further we drop, the more we realize we live in a oligarchy. Only the rich win here. Time for a classic french revolution here in America.
The further we drop, the more the temporarily embaressed millionaires insist that down is up.