To many Danes (everyone I’ve ever discussed it with) Americans are simply “ridiculous” in the way you keep electing people who hurt you. It’s like you’re in a continuous abusive relationship with your own democracy.
My wife and I just had twins, and while it went fine they needed CPAP to help their lungs develop fully because they were born with a c-section. Which put them in the children’s intensive care unit for around 12 hours and afterward we lived for 7 days in the specialised ward for children with troubled births. And it cost us around $100 because the lodging for spouses isn’t free for the first 3 days(3 meals a day + fruits and cake and all sorts of drinkable stuff that I don’t know the English names for… mostly concentrated fruit you mix with water).
Now, I do pay around 57% in taxes on everything I earn above $90k and 39% before that (my wife pays 37% since she doesn’t earn above $90k). But I do sort of “cheat” the system by investing 14% of my pay before taxes into methods that will let me pay 25% in taxes on another $10k a year, and some that goes directly into my children’s investments. Anyway, that is what we pay for everyone to have this opportunity in our country.
I’m not going to pretend our system is perfect. Like, I have a private health insurance through my job which led me skip a two year wait time when I was diagnosed with bipolar type2 after having some issues with stress. And that’s obviously not available to everyone, and a two year wait period is obviously terrible for people who can’t turn to the private sector. So everything isn’t perfect.
But when you then read about how US citizens pay ridiculous amount of money to have children… when they live in a nation which is significantly richer than ours… it just baffles the mind.
Similarly we have about 9 months of maternity leave. 2 months of which are with full pay for my wife, and 14 weeks are with full pay for me (I have really terms through my work often it’s only 2-4 weeks for spouses). But even when you aren’t on full pay, you’re still getting around $5k a month from the government. You’re also paid around $1k per child every 3 months for the first couple of years of their lives (something which should probably be limited by income if we’re honest since people like us need it a lot less than most Danes). My wife transferred some of her maternity leave and was decades sick for the first two months, so I’m getting around 30 weeks of paternity leave which does mean a significant decrease in income this year, but then you look at how US citizens basically have no paid leave and again… it’s just so weird.
And you’ve chosen this yourselves. I know it’s not as easy as that, but you are a democracy and you do elect your leaders and a huge part of you are basically wage slaves. I know a lot of HN’ers are likely to also have good terms, it comes with our line or work, but as a whole… I mean, just why?