And no, it's not because of reduced taxation from rich to working class, or missing taxes on property or some other policy. These policies didn't change that much in the last decade or two. Yet throughout the last decade the state and social security systems had record income, record levels of employment and managed to run down pretty much every part of the public system from education, over healthcare to defense. The money just vanished.
I am very much convinced that Germany as a whole doesn't have an income problem, but a spending problem.
To simplify it dramatically with an example, I'd rather pay $3 on the toll road and $50k for a surgery myself than pay $10 in taxes towards the road and $100k in taxes towards the healthcare system but receive both of them for "free".
I understand the advantages of a social safety net, I do. But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.
But at least they won't put you in prison if you decide not to buy their product.
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...
There's absolutely an equivalent, publicly elected officials lose re-election campaigns all the time.
If a government entity wastes too much money, their budget is increased for the next fiscal year. There is no feedback loop to govern the waste.
See: Everything you just talked about and cost-plus contracts. The US demonstrates both.
You can’t opt out of high taxes.
I highly doubt either any future city government would allow all the highways to be converted to privately owned toll roads.
I don't really think "Yankee Swap" is the best model for land management, my guy.
Roads, education, healthcare etc.
Also other people work as hard as you do.
And you know of course it's better for you obviously but only as long as you are part of that group.
There is a reason why people do gofundmes after they can't work anymore.
And the riots etc? Guess what social injustice increases either your life risk or the money you spend of protecting you.
Who has most from low taxes? Rich.
And yes I know I know hn also has plenty of fang people
That would be a nice scenario to choose to be in.
However, the US _government_ pretty much spends more per-person than those countries with a social net [1]. So in reality, you're paying those taxes of those social countries and also getting to pay private insurance ontop of that. Although current taxes are lower than the social countries since the government's expenditures are debt financed but if the USG were to stop they'd have to raise taxes to pay it with revenue and then you'll be really wondering why you're paying the same in taxes as the EU and not getting EU benefits.
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.PP.CD?most_...
- cities designed around cars
- bad worker protection laws
- corporate welfare first before human welfare
- monopolies driving up prices.
Walking is obviously better than not walking, but something other than cars is to blame for the ballooning of the American public. 75% of America is either overweight or obese right now. That alone puts you at risk for about a million health issues and diseases.
Do you have a citation for that? I'm seeing numbers closer to 30% (which is still bad).
"Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6%"
Of course that also shows how many Americans are overweight since the scrawny track kid is considered super skinny.
There are certainly inefficiencies out there, and we should always be trying to root them out, but sometimes if you starve an organization of funding, it doesn't perform very well. Shocker!
If the last couple of years proved anything, it's that money is all made up. It doesn't mean anything, like points on HN or Reddit karma. You happen to be able to use money to trade for goods and services, but outside of that, it's a made up numbers game, like Monopoly.
https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...
So, you'd have to show that since, let's say 1940, the QoL of Americans has improved as a direct result of lower taxes.
We should be able to look at things like salary, cost of living such as price of homes, education, and food all improving against inflation. So, unless you can do that, your argument for lower taxes is baseless and without merit.
> But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.
Hard-earned money that is earned because of the society supported by the taxes that person pays. Without that society, you would not be earning the same amount. No hard-earned money is earned by an individual in the US.
So yeah, I'd rather have single payer healthcare, and we can just fire all of the leeches.
The whole point of a single-payer system is that you will spend less, by virtue of the government using its single-buyer negotiating power to push down prices.
And also by virtue of firing all the useless parasites and middlemen that create, consume, and shuffle the mountains of paperwork that surround US health insurance, advertising, billing, etc. Unsurprisingly, these middle-men don't look kindly upon being eliminated, and have somehow convinced half the country that if it weren't for their heroic efforts, grandma would never get a cardiac shunt, and that the world would literally end if Medicare was actually allowed to negotiate drug prices.
It feels like this is the main goal.
Do you actually have any sources for this?
This is a misunderstanding. These people are not "delivering service". They are doing "governance and administration". And administration size on Germany is acting like a ratchet: growing sometimes, but never shrinking.
No one stops to ask why the program or government office doesn't do it's job well, the issue is funding!
How are low paid employees his financial responsibility?
"Social state": kleptocracy
Due to moral and ethics of course. I can't go to a burger flipper restaurant without a bad feeling if I know that the person working behind the counter is basically a modern slave and also works 40h but doesn't have any rights at all.
It's hard for me to say 'i want worker rights' and ignore everyone around me.
And as a backup mechanism: guess what? It can happen to you. But also your family or friends might be in the position. So it is also beneficial to fight for this for your friends and family.
It's the same shit with equal pay: I would have less strss if my wife would earn similar to me so I don't have the pressure to always work in my job to make it for my family.
And yes we're is your proudness for your country when you know there are people who can't afford going to the dentist and have to wait for a year with a rotten teeth to get it fixed 3h away in a sports gym because there is the once in a year free dental service event?
Proud American ey?
And that process should be supported by a high minimum wage - hitting the employers, not taxing productive work to provide tax credits to subsidise such terrible jobs.
Automation leads to more high-tech jobs and investment, and higher productivity, which leads to higher wages as companies compete for highly skilled employees, etc.
Economic mobility and productivity is the key to prosperity.
> And yes we're is your proudness for your country when you know there are people who can't afford going to the dentist and have to wait for a year with a rotten teeth to get it fixed 3h away in a sports gym because there is the once in a year free dental service event?
This is sadly the same in Europe, as dentistry mostly isn't covered under public healthcare in the UK and Sweden for example. So we pay almost 50% tax just to be in the same position!
But I support universal healthcare (including dentistry and opticians), it's a critical part of economic mobility. People can't move jobs or take risks if they'll lose healthcare coverage.
Adult schools for example. Or whatever else
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
[2] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=protests+by+poor+people+in+e...
In comparison, when the French Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, the life expectancy was about twenty-two years shorter than it is now. One would think it's reasonable to raise the retirement age a little to fit that.
I have a feeling it is due to high demand for those workers.
Also, SF is already over 60% rent controlled housing, so the cost of living for over 60% of the population is already being artificially reduced beneath the market. It's also interesting to note that the income level to qualify for rent controlled/stabilized housing is 77-160k a year depending on household size.
It's astonishingly expensive to live here compared to much of the rest of the country
You probably mean the US/Canada. 'America' includes South America for which this is not generally true.
However, replace 'America' in your sentence with any developed country and the statement is indeed generally true. And thusly of little value to this discussion.
Specifically it doesn't change the fact that the poor in the US are much poorer that the poor in most (possibly all?) developed countries. [1]
And I do not mean this in the sense of pure numbers as in e.g.[2] but rather what it means to be poor.
I.e. how dignified or undignified a life do the social support systems of a country and the view of the resp. society on the poor allow you to live, should you fall in that bracket?
[1] https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/ameri...
[2] https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-gap.htm#indicator-c...
Whether you like the colloquial usage or not doesn’t change its colloquial usage nor (on review) one of it’s formal definitions.
Curious why this is a crusade you’ve joined, though.
My source[1] disagrees with your source. It seems fairly close to Italy/Spain and slightly better than the much vaunted place on HN (Japan).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-...
Err, nope, they don't because you're looking at the wrong data. This was about poverty gap [1], not poverty rate.
I though this was obvious from the very sentence of mine you quoted. I.e. it pertained to the third column of the table in the link I posted.
According to that table, the only developed country with a higher poverty gap than the US in 2019 was Italy (US: 39.8, Italy: 40.8).
Since they were close and I didn't find current data for 2022/2023, I wrote "possibly all?" with a question mark.
As you can see in [1], in 2021 the US moved up from 2nd from last to 8th from last. I.e. better but the point still stands.
> The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America
> Demonym(s) American[b][8]
Pretending not to understand this is tiresome.
As a European traveling to South America frequently it is very obvious to me why all my friends there take issue with this. As a European this is also not my fight but I do take sides nevertheless.
From my post getting three down votes, two of which I must assume stem from this topic at least, I dare only conclude that the sensitivity is mutual.
So probably worth understanding and showing some consideration. Beers!
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/what-do...
If you want to refer to both North & South America just add an 's', Americas.
I don’t know why people from other continents think it’s some sort of gotcha to say otherwise. It’s incorrect.
I don't want to work for 5 years trapped with one employer and facing deportation with a matter of weeks if I lose my job, on an L-1 visa (and to do that I'd still have to find a position to move to in my company).
Quite a weak excuse though.
Almost $1 trillion was spent on Medicaid last year. What are you talking about?
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just pointing out that has been our schtick for hundreds of years. It's the land of opportunity, not the land of guarantee.
Absolutely.
> most people not making it
By any metric, there's at most a handful of countries where the median person is as well off as in the US. I struggle to say that most people aren't making it here; or if they really aren't, then not making it in America is better than making it in most other places.
That seems FUD. There are safety nets like Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and EMTALA for poor.
I've seen a recent trend in churches, where they use their excess funds to buy people's medical debt out of collections and forgive it. It's the best thing I've heard in a long time.
I also have been recently battling with Blue Shield of California (but they're all bad). They were denying me my medicine, in a similar way that Cigna was proven to deny claims by ProPublica recently. I also found out that a few years ago Blue Shield of California was stripped of its non profit tax benefits because it had billions in surplus that it was just sitting on, you know, making profit. Since then they seem to be spending money to out their names on things like opera houses in SF and advertising, but not putting it to work in the community to make real impact.
I propose we create a movement that demands that insurance companies use their excess profit, etc. to buy people's medical debt and free them of it. How do we get this movement going? Blue Shield of California alone has hundreds of millions a year in surplus, that would buy out billions of dollars in medical debt for people and completely change many people's lives for the better.
Blue Shield of California had a net loss of almost a billion dollars in 2022[0]. Should they do the reverse in that case and put their excess loss by putting more people in medical debt?
[0]: https://www.blueshieldca.com/en/home/about-blue-shield/corpo...
As you pointed out, they are being run very poorly, while the top executives still take home million dollar salaries (1) and have been spending money on things like the Blue Shield Field Club at Oracle park.
If they do the work, I'm sure they can do right by the general public and their customers, they are currently not. They have a 1.1 star review with 800 reviews on Yelp, it's lower than the San Francisco DMV which has 1.8.
(1) - https://www.payersandproviders.com/node/1509#:~:text=Accordi....
Your source shows ~375k to 2m non-business bankruptcies filed per year over the last twenty years, not all of which is primarily due to medical costs (but there appears to not be a definitive source of data on this), out of a population that went from 282m to 331m over the same time. So 0.1-0.7% of the population files for a personal bankruptcy every year for any reason, which is a far cry from one quarter of the country being on a brink of a medical bankruptcy.
Everyone knows healthcare costs are problematic in this country; no need to resort to hyperbole. Let's stick to the facts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35899436.
You do understand that USA rich people living of the life's of the poor?
No proper health care etc for people cleaning their flats or flipping their burgers...