91–100 of 205 posts
It's worth reading the underlying OECD report: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... Two points based on the charts on page 44, 46. 1) Looking at just "middle income" people exaggerates the situation in the U.S. because part of the reason the U.S. has a smaller middle class is because it has a bigger upper class. About 15% of the U.S. is "upper income" versus 5% in countries like Denmark, No…
Don't ignore the safety net.
In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact…
The alternative view is that most Americans have only ever known one type of government: an incompetent one. We spend more per capita on Medicare than most first world countries spend on their universal health care, but we only cover 15% of the population. We build roads, railroads, pipelines, and other basic infrastructure at 4-10x markup over the costs that other first world countries are paying. We spend more on e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't even get me started. I did a year and a half of university in Tokyo and I used and paid for the health care system there a few times. Cavities filled for 20 dollars at high end central Tokyo offices. Skin doctors for zero dollars and prescribed creams for 800 yen. I knew a brain surgeon there who told me that the max price you could pay for his services was equivalent to 700 dollars. He didn't even bother going…
I don't have anything to prove it but I swear countries like Japan and Germany are very good at this sort of thing because the people have a culture of strict obedience to authority be it the government or whatever. They love having and following well defined rules and are nonplussed (in the original sense of the word) when people break the rules. People in USA have the opposite attitude towards authority and rules.…
Lived there for 15 years, on and off. My son was born there. My father in law survived a bad heart attack there.
Yes, there are areas in the south where it's not so good, but any reasonably large country probably has some areas where things don't work as well.
People live long, healthy, happy productive lives there.
In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact…
This whole "But I've got mine" ideology that's circulating as "the essential America" right now is not historically accurate and is the biggest foot-gun the country has ever had.
My intuition about this as someone who grew up in America and has traveled internationally quite a bit is that nowhere else on earth are the middle classes so convinced that one day they will be "millionaires" than here. This causes them to act against their own best interests. (This was observed by Engels long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness )
Conversely, it's also what has attracted so many immigrants to America and created so much historic social mobility[0]. Note - I believe this has largely been reversed (and thus stagnated) due to a generation of "I got mine" attitudes, aka the Baby Boomers. [0]Example - in the UK there is very much a "these are the cards I've been dealt" attitude towards social mobility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have anything to prove it but I swear countries like Japan and Germany are very good at this sort of thing because the people have a culture of strict obedience to authority be it the government or whatever. They love having and following well defined rules and are nonplussed (in the original sense of the word) when people break the rules. People in USA have the opposite attitude towards authority and rules.…
The USA's ethos in based in the motto of doing it their own way. Sometimes that's good: when everybody is doing the same, it breaks from the status quo and can become a leader in an industry, or just generally break ground in scientific and civil progress. That has happened many times in the past. The flipside is that there are many things are a consensus worldwide because they _are actually better_ but that the US s…
The reason we aborted the conversion to the metric system is because a generation of idiots couldn't stand the pain of switching, and the longer we delay the more painful it will be.
In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact…
The alternative view is that most Americans have only ever known one type of government: an incompetent one. We spend more per capita on Medicare than most first world countries spend on their universal health care, but we only cover 15% of the population. We build roads, railroads, pipelines, and other basic infrastructure at 4-10x markup over the costs that other first world countries are paying. We spend more on e…
The quality and quantity of services are so much higher in Europe that the minimal additional cost isn't burdensome, but our services are so few and so poor in the US that any additional cost I couldn't abide and I think we should be pushing hard for the government to do more with less.
In the end, this is what Eisenhower warned us about. It's a consequence largely of the military-industrial complex, and then similar complexes between government and other industries. These situations with the intentional incompetence to drive cost overruns is effectively a fraud committed against the American taxpayer, and it is absurd to expect us to want to pay one red cent more into what is effectively a scam.
Interestingly it seems from this articles figures that the actual disposable income of the middle class and lower class of the US is much higher than in Europe [1]. "The United States’ smaller middle income group still earns more than almost all its Western European counterparts. The average disposable income among middle income Americans in 2010 was $60,884, placing it comfortably ahead of Norway, which averaged $56…
That is the median American household doesn't produce much more than their European counterparts, but they tend to consume much more.
There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that many land is cheap and abundant, which lowers the cost of living. Two is that US multinationals make a ton of profits overseas, which get remitted to mostly American shareholders. E.g. Apple makes a $1000 iPhone in Asia, which doesn't count towards US GDP, but $500 of that revenue gets paid in dividends to American pensioners.
Third is that Americans tend to earn much more return on their investments than foreigners. This means that America manages to get by with substantially lower saving rates than other countries. This is particularly true with oil producing countries. A country like Norway has high GDP, but it has to continually reinvest a high proportion of its production back into a very capital-intensive industry. The US's economy is heavily concentrated in services, which require very little capital investment.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact…
The alternative view is that most Americans have only ever known one type of government: an incompetent one. We spend more per capita on Medicare than most first world countries spend on their universal health care, but we only cover 15% of the population. We build roads, railroads, pipelines, and other basic infrastructure at 4-10x markup over the costs that other first world countries are paying. We spend more on e…
It's worth reading the underlying OECD report: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... Two points based on the charts on page 44, 46. 1) Looking at just "middle income" people exaggerates the situation in the U.S. because part of the reason the U.S. has a smaller middle class is because it has a bigger upper class. About 15% of the U.S. is "upper income" versus 5% in countries like Denmark, No…