That's because most of us are not obsessed with wealth. We tend to be satisfied with some level of comfort and security and focus on other things in life. I guess that's a cultural thing.

> Everyone knows our healthcare system is asinine. It doesn’t require more money to fix.

It's not only about health care, but other aspects such as how the society is structured, poverty, incarceration rates, access to education, homelessness, etc. Again, probably a cultural thing but Europeans seem to care more about these matters than Americans and so we structure and drive our politics and legislature towards addressing these issues.

You might have more earning potential in the US, but I’d much rather make a bit less money and live in a country with a functioning healthcare system, a welfare system, a (mostly) functioning legislative branch, much less police violence and racial tension and less political polarisation. I just don’t feel anxious living here. No matter what happens I’ll be ok. In Australia you don’t need to be super rich in order to feel safe.

My guess is it will be years before we correctly understand exactly what worked or didn't and why.

Apparently the #1 predictive factor for a country to have good health outcomes is trust between the citizens and their government. Small countries have done better than big countries, but that may be a side effect of public trust generally being better in smaller countries.

Source: this podcast (based on a study) https://overcast.fm/+YQ31Gx6tw

Please do not take offense to this. This will be infuriating, but I want you to understand the American mindset that causes this behavior.

Please know that I am found of Australians: In primary school, 2 of my neighbors were Australian, and I played with them every day. They were wonderful, very kind, loyal friends, and their family was amazing. In high school, one of my best friends at the high school was Australian, along with her sister. They were always kind to me and talked to me about thoughtful things. I have serious health problems, and one time I had a medical emergency (severe low blood glucose reaction) at school after hours, and her older sister took care of me for a what really was a long time, before adults could take over. I will be forever thankful to her and her family.

Everybody knows that Australia can be very cliquish, which really sets Americans off. While Australia does quite a phenomenal job of taking care of and looking after its citizens, if you are not a citizen then there is outright hypocrisy on that standard. This is awful to say, but it is true.

Just an example: you must be very healthy to become either a permanent resident or an Australia citizen (naturalizing via work--not marriage or descent), as there are medical inadmissability clauses in the immigration laws. Basically, if you cost more than $8,000 AUD/year total for both health care and other related social services, then you are medically inadmissable to Australia. If one of your immediate non-citizen family members in Australia exceeds this cutoff, then all of you cannot live permanently in Australia. It is brutal.

You also pay a lot for housing in Australia, and things are just not as well built or insulated there. It is an engineering problem, and Americans find it appalling. I posted this link in an r/IWantOut post, and prior to doing so, I said, "Australia truly is a great country, and its people take care of its own citizens, but there is going to be a serious housing crisis that is going to occur in the future. You need to be aware of this issue." Anyways, I got a TON of flak for it, by Australians, and rightfully so, as Australia is a great country:

Expert warns Australia could turn into slums in 20 years | 60 Minutes Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRSdiq3sOTc

Americans tend to find the "happy-go-lucky attitude" of some Australians to be appalling. In that sense, many Americans find Australians to be jarring and they get under Americans' skin.

As for American hypocrisy: Americans think that they are the center of the world. Many Americans think that we are the best country in the world, which is laughable at best. Those people are in for a rude awakening in the future. But, my point is, that in the past 4 years of Trump, American Empire has declined in reality about 40 years, due to Trump's "work".

Also, Americans are big on their BS "freedoms", in totally hypocritical ways. One could write books about it. It would actually be great satire.

We always had the strategic capacity, at least in theory, with our institutions and infrastructure (if Trump was not our president) to at least attempt the elimination strategy, although places like Australia and New Zealand have natural geographical advantages.

The problem is that very few Americans are willing to take pain in solidarity with others, for a short period of time, to potentially eliminate such a terrible infectious illness that will cause everyone even more pain long term.

In America, there is always a baseline level of fear and anxiety too, present all the time even pre-pandemic, which a president like Trump knows how to appropriate in "hits" of pain onto the right groups of people. Americans expect a lot of pain, just in general.

So, when Americans see failure (which is a very mild failure) in Australia from coronavirus leaks into the community, the Americans are doling out a "hit" of pain to you (Australians), in an "in your face way".

They are trying to say, "see social democracy and social solidarity don't work: you failed" and "see, look, we are better than you and for so many reasons" and "The pain you had to go through for those lockdowns never worked and never will work: you might as well give up--we have it better than you no matter what!"

Mostly, Americans are projecting this onto Australians: We (Americans) are better than you, because we never had to give up ANY of our freedoms: we can choose to live life on our own terms. Do not (you: Australians) tell us what to do with our country, which is the "best in the world".

And that anxiety you mentioned that’s strangely ever present in the US disappeared when I came home. I was on a bus and had the revelation that nobody was going to try to talk to me. It was bliss.

The lockdowns we had in Melbourne to keep covid down were utterly harrowing and I think a lot of us are still processing that experience. We gave up some freedoms temporarily to save lives. It was a temporary sacrifice of personal freedoms, because not making that sacrifice would have been worse. Letting covid out would have risked the lives of my parents, and I would have risked long covid - and who knows how many complications down the road. And it’s proof we as a nation can take collective action when we need to. I worry that the US might not have been able to do what we did to contain the virus, even if the fatality rate was 20x higher than it is. And that’s a tragedy from the country that invented the internet and landed people on the moon.

I definitely agree with all of this.

Yeah, sorry my fellow peers in America are being pricks, and are being so mean that they are not just inflicting pain—-but are retraumatizing Australians (usually strangers) on the internet.

In the US, sadly, if somebody dies of coronavirus, then they are really nothing more than a statistic. It is sad but true. A lot of this existed before big tech, but big tech brought it to a totally different level.

I agree that America probably would not come together in solidarity to stop a virus 20 times more fatal. I have been so worried about where America has been going for the past 6 years especially.

Even if we do somehow get our act together, we will need profound structural change. We will need to flood our politics with ambitious positive plans in general in the future to stop this kind of stuff.

Also, the first 5 years of life determines many outcomes in life. It can set up a child to have an authoritarian personality for life, for example. To stop this, our government needs to put extreme emphasis on young children’s development so this kind of stuff can never happen again. I mean like hardcore investments, projects, and human rights towards the best development of young children.

The depths of how far low it can go are profoundly deep.

Funny, talking to my friends in Asia (to which I consider Australia/NZ to be a part of) it feels the exact same way!

I can tell them how I go anywhere without wearing a mask, some people make snide remarks but that's it - while they have to declare their address in restaurants, and face all kind of restrictions like not being able to return to their country without a quarantine.

> I’d much rather make a bit less money and live in a country with a functioning healthcare system

With money, in the US you'll get the best healthcare money can buy (or you can travel to Asia to get it cheaper)

For the rest (welfare etc), I really prefer the US way - it feels better to me to have people strongly incentivized to behave, yet free. I guess we are different.

I’m not going to lie, it’s been tough sometimes. Masks are no big deal. It’s the occasional city wide lockdowns have been the worst. But the USA has just shy of 500 000 deaths. (There are 440k men/430k women in SF, if that gives you a sense of the scale of the tragedy). We only had 909 deaths in Australia.

Maybe to you those deaths were worth it so you didn’t have to wear masks? That’s horrific, and I don’t know how to respond to that. I suppose we are different.

Yes, we are different, because they are fully acceptable to me. Even 2x, 3x or 10x more. Even if I was at risk myself. Freedom is not negotiable.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/535344-biden-req...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

I don't mean to be rude but please look at that above link and understand how poor you as a citizen of USA are. It's frustrating to come from a country thats ~3X as wealthy as the USA in terms of median wealth (i'm Australian) and see the idea that higher taxes are an issue. The higher taxes are on the very wealthy. Median wealth captures this. The USA fucked up somewhere along the way and taxed the poor (those <1million a year) and this is why you are posting what you are posting. More taxes are ok if they are on the rich.

> what it is about Europeans on American websites telling us...

There's this strong sentiment among Americans that I see on social media so often these days that the Internet is somehow an American thing and we need to watch our mouths or get off their lawn.

Sorry dude, but my country’s vast stores of natural resources don’t exactly help me afford my mortgage payment next month.

That list certainly doesn’t reflect the average person’s disposable wealth. I’ve lived in two of the countries that rank “higher” than the US and in no way is the average person more wealthy. Not even close. In fact I’d say the average person in one of those countries has about half the disposable wealth of the average American.

What I meant was my country’s vast wealth in the form of natural resources hardly helps me pay for my day to day expenses. What matters is my income and my personal, disposable wealth. Which your ranking is not measuring.

That’s why you have bizarre numbers like the average Australian having 3x the wealth of Americans.

You basically referenced a link you didn’t read.

And like I said, when you look at the ranking it doesn’t make sense unless they did include things beyond personal wealth. You really think the average Spaniard is wealthier than the average Norweagean?

Sorry for the "downvotes are the disagree button" that you are experiencing for raising good and interesting discussion points, and frankly calling out misleading numbers that were posted. I didn't know that the average German was worse off and poorer than the average person from Greece (I guess finally the wealth transfer from Germany to Greece is being reflected in the numbers! - kidding, kind of).

First it was Australia was 3x wealthier than the US. Now it’s that the US is poorer on a median level, yet I see no data.

What am I reading? No wonder the OP is frustrated. Rightfully so.

Just because the median citizen is “only” in the top 25 countries in the world, doesn’t mean that what the OP said is incorrect.

It’s also difficult to do proper comparisons. Notice anything out of the ordinary in that list? Check out the population of the countries. Of course Australians are wealthy, they live on a continent nearly the size of the US with the population of L.A. county. That’s a lot of resources to go around for a small number of people.

I echo the OP in the constant anti-American sentiment I find on the internet being frustrating. “Your healthcare sucks, your taxes suck, look at how poor you are because of this chart”.

A lot of that doesn’t even reflect reality for many people. Let’s talk about healthcare. My experience in healthcare is I schedule an appointment at the university medical center, get extremely high quality care, and that’s that. I pay $0 for co-pays, or for medicine. Other people with health insurance can do that too. Obviously we have a healthcare problem in the U.S., which is why even to my own personal detriment I support UHC, but the experience people have in the U.S. varies widely. The U.S. government is responsible for like 70% of U.S. healthcare expenditures.

Ask yourself, why does the U.S. make citizens file taxes if they live abroad? I wonder if it has anything to do with people becoming massively wealthy and then conveniently living in another nearby country so they don’t have to pay taxes? Or maybe someone works at a company and that company can just relocate them somewhere cheap so they can avoid taxes? I’m not sure, but I hear a lot of “people in America need to pay taxes” but then they also get mad when the government makes people living in other countries pay income taxes. Why should it matter if you live in Japan as an American? You’re still a citizen. If you don’t want to pay taxes then give up your citizenship. How are we supposed to pay for healthcare for example if we allow lots of people to exempt themselves? And the U.S. exempts the first $108,000 of that income. What’s the big deal? That you have to report it? How can we fight corruption if we don’t even make people report their income?

USA's tax burden is 27.1% of GDP

Not an enormous difference.

US median wage USD49,764, Fed + CA tax is $9,611.02 - 19%

Median wage in Australia is far higher than in America seems more important than the tax rate at the 50th percentile

Speak for yourself! I prefer not to be taxed, so I'd rather have the poor taxed than the rich.

What American websites?