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The Differences Between Germany and the United States

math-www.uni-paderborn.de

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Re: The Differences Between Germany and the United States

#6
post #3

just glanced though it but most of the stuff regarding Germany is pretty outdated

"By Axel Boldt, 1995-2010." - most of it seems to be from 1995. The section about "communism and socialism" (not really major topics these days) also suggests that this is rather old.

Re: The Differences Between Germany and the United States

#9

Americans living abroad are not even allowed to give up citizenship to avoid paying U.S. taxes. That's wrong, along with many other facts in this article.

I guess you cannot avoid a few misses in that much information. I found most of it to be true.

That said, I think it glosses over the fact that US states have huge differences and he has only experienced a subset of them.

Re: The Differences Between Germany and the United States

#10
On charity:

I see two reasons for these different approaches to charity: first, Americans distrust big organizations and third world governments; they fear that money they donate to global causes will trickle away in bureaucracies somewhere. Second, Germans intuitively don't feel much of a need to help local organizations or schools: "that's the government's job, that's what I pay taxes for."

I think the main driver for these different approaches is that the German state basically says "in the end we'll help you" while the US says "in the end you're on your own".

The German approach in my opinion does more to alleviate outcast-scale poverty. However, the quality of helping loses because:

a) those who would help mostly help people from other continents since they think that their countrymen are well off anyway

b) those who do help, are put there to help in form of public officers

But even with a strong social-net as in Germany there are still poor people. What happens when a)-people don't care and b)-people just follow orders is that our poors usually never get on their own feet and out of their dependency because their is no one telling them how to help themselves. That's what I mean with quality of helping.

And yes, this article seems very outdated, but to me the subject would still make a promising headline. One thing I observed is that both countries got less different over the years: If you look at the policies regarding the social-net, Europe has tried to become more american (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept) while the US has tried to become more european (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Health_Care_for_Amer...).

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