holy cow america is mighty
Russia can huff and puff all it wants, but Ed Snowden is still basically the only prominent American who has ever moved to Russia. This while millions of people from the FSU moved to the US, Israel, Europe, Australia and Canada over the past thirty years, which is the fundamental difference between the US and Russia, etc.
Now if only there was a way to send the people who want redistribution to places where they have that sort of thing. That would be great! But guess what: Norway doesn’t want these people :(. They have enough people jockeying for the dole.
Also, I am not saying the U.S. is a horrible place to live in, I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
What now?
I focus on immigration because where you choose to live seems like the single greatest vote of confidence that you can make. So I wonder why people here in the states want to make the states more like other places when clearly people from other places want to come here.
> I am just saying that it has the potential to be more liveable for all citizens, not just the very "best".
Yeah it definitely could and should be. There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
You can't discuss either of those two things without also recognizing the other half of those policies: the massive xenophobia, racism, and outright genocide that motivated and fueled them, all under FDR's watch.
There are only two stereotypical places I can think of it being "squandered". The first is the military which, who knows, could be NPV if you consider what the world could be like without it. Ultimately its unknowable. The second is the money not taxed. Which is a particularly frustrating mindset that I encounter on the internet.
In either case, we're not "squandering" money anywhere. You may disagree with the allocation of some resources but that doesn't mean its been squandered.
...haha what was I thinking never mind. Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Hah! I didn't say you couldn't have an opinion on it. Only that you can't know the world that "could have been".
> Also what does net present value have to do with any of this?
Squander is a word which means to waste. If a government project has a net economic (or public health) benefit then by definition the money was not squandered.
Just want to point out that this statement doesn't account for opportunity cost. if it could go to something of greater net benefit, the difference between the two could be considered squandered.
I imagine it'd be a lot more like the conflicts in the rest of Africa.
> It's not "unknowable";
Yes it is, unless you have a time machine.
> we just have to start voting...
Ah see, but we already do that. The US votes to keep a massive, mighty military.
Voting just isn't all it's cracked up to be!
> America is mighty but that doesn't translate into the life quality of its citizens at all.
Countries can vary in development and quality of life but your original statement is demonstrably false.
It would be helpful for you to explain how life in, say, Sweden is vastly better than life in Georgia. Before you cite poor uneducated Georgian hillbillies, keep in mind that Georgia is home to Georgia Tech, not to mention Atlanta, which was quite prosperous last time I checked. And if you're going to cite Sweden's "free" universities, you might as well go ahead and throw in a side-by-side comparison of Georgian/U.S. Federal and Swedish tax rates as well.
The US does have an awful lot of support for people, but our society is also hostile to poor people and we have awful workplace regulation for low quality jobs.
You've said nothing. Every country has economic strata. Pointing it out only in the case of the U.S. is specious.
The US is a rich country and the lack of resources for people at the bottom is more likely to be arbitrary than it is to be contributing to that wealth.
How many people are hustling two or more jobs to make ends meet in the US? How many of them afford day care? What happens if they break a leg and can't work for a month?
So, your argument is basically, "Yay, we're better than two theocratic monarchies whose prosperity is based solely on oil wealth and importing a bunch of virtual slaves from poor countries, maybe better than one technocratic dictatorship, better than a bunch of undeveloped third world countries, but worse than every other single Western democracy. Go us!"
I like how you casually discard the vast swath of data that doesn't agree with you.
It is not an accomplishment for the US to be doing better than a bunch of third world countries that are poor as shit because they were on the losing end of colonialism. It needs to be compared to the other comparably developed countries.
I never said it was an accomplishment, just that the U.S. is better than many countries. That was in response to a comment that was implying that the United States is somehow worse than the majority of countries period, not just developed Western nations.
You shifted the conversation by arbitrarily declaring that the U.S. should only be compared to a select group of developed countries, which is not the point that I was originally arguing against.
But let's go with that for a minute. I assume you're measuring stratification by the Gini coefficient, since you don't say. In that case, what you failed to mention is that the list of countries "less stratified" than the United States also includes Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among many other decidedly unpleasant places. Your implication that some other countries are necessarily "doing it right" compared to the United States because they have a lower Gini coefficient assumes that a lower Gini coefficient is always necessarily a good thing, which is obviously false when you consider all of the data. A lower Gini coefficient does not equal a higher quality of life.
The Scandinavian model relies on many incompatible tenets that could be mentioned, including but not limited to immigration. The Swedish system is already practically collapsing from its first major influx of immigrants ever.
If we want a country in which everyone is welcome, it can't be a country in which we offer a fantastic quality of life automatically through living there. I mean, not until we have some post-scarcity economy, at least.
Another issue is that maybe part of the States' success is related to having more income to yourself, to spend at your discretion after taxes, rather than it being spent for you by the government. It inspires a lot of immigration from people with big ideas, and that could easily change if the U.S. surpasses other countries in taxes.
I think there are models the U.S. should adopt from Scandinavia, however they're smaller in scope and address efficiency with tax money. One example is that all your income tax goes to the local government up until a certain point (~65,000 USD?), and it's redistributed at that level, rather than being siphoned through so many levels of bureaucracy like in the States. It's funny, while being the polar opposite of the U.S. and its conservative values, Sweden still manages a smaller federal government!
A lot of the differences between Sweden and the US comes down to things like whether health care should be a human right etc. Do you think people are less inclined to want "free" health care if they live in a community that's ethnically mixed? I don't buy it.
Australia still manages to have great quality of life (unless you are an Aboriginal). I'm not sure how they manage it, I haven't looked into it, but somehow they have.
Their housing market value as a share of GDP, is about 2.6x that of the US rate.
https://i.imgur.com/h0BOtzE.png
The other thing has been the rise of China and selling them a vast supply of commodities.
In 2002, Australia's GDP per capita was $20,000, while the US was $38,000. A dramatic gap. China's GDP explosion began in 2003 (their economy went from $1.4t in 2002 to $4.6t in 2008, and on upward from there). Australia's GDP soared right along with China's economy.
A very intriguing idea. I like it on the surface, but it falls down a little bit because local taxation is varied. Some cities have their own income taxes, while others don't. Some states have income taxes, while others don't. Some states|counties|cities have sales tax, while others don't. It's a hodge-podge.
The local jurisdictions use this as an incentive to draw in new businesses. The idea is for local control of taxation. But your proposal seems to give the locals more control over taxes than the top-down structure we have now. It's worth thinking about.
It's currently infeasible in the US due to how substantial our federal government is, but it's funny as it's a libertarian dream to minimize the government; Sweden's success is in fact doing so, but also keeping tax rates high in the process.
We are nowhere close to collapsing, first of all. I don't know if you've been back recently or if you get your information from social media only, but really things are fine.
Secondly this was hardly the first major influx of immigrants ever. We saw a major influx during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the 90s, lots of people came here after the US started wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 00s. And back in the 60s there was a huge amount of workforce immigration, so much so that Finnish people are still the largest non-Swedish group in the country.
Fun fact: the second largest group of people to come to Sweden in 2016 were repatriating swedes.
And obviously single examples are not representative of the whole, but they're far more useful than GP's blanket assertion which is based on nothing other than, I suspect, the fact that it's currently edgy/fashionable to whinge about all the "free" things Europeans get that Americans don't.
Impecable logic, technically not even wrong, but ... you are saying the wars didn't cause colataral damage to a significant degree because ... you cannot live without air conditioning?
GP was implying that Iraq would be nice if it weren't for American interventions. You appear to be making the same point, given your reference to collateral damage.
I'm saying that's highly unlikely considering that Iraq has always been quite poor compared to the U.S., even before any of these wars.
I see this whiny argument repeated over and over ad nauseam--"Iraq would be an oasis of civilization if only it weren't for those mean imperialist Americans coming in and breaking our toys". Utter nonsense. Iraq was a mess long before the Americans showed up.
But that's all beside the point anyway. This discussion is about relative GDPs of various countries and U.S. states, not an analysis of whose fault it is that the ones at the bottom are at the bottom.
Are you capable of staying on topic? Do you actually have an argument? Or are you just going to fling childish insults in lieu of one?
What-if historical arguments are always fluffy, but we have examples of similar sorts of states experiencing similar initial growth that weren't crushed by an empire's geopolitical interests. Where are they today?
Edit: In any case, the point I was going to make is that the reason why it is the way you observed is because the economies in Oklahoma and Iraq serve different purposes within the context of global capital, Iraq being a client state to the United States and primarily serving as a vehicle of resource extraction and exploitation, while in Oklahoma at least some of that economic activity is going towards the well-being of the people there.
Now, the upshot is that the relative wealth of normal schmoes in the United States and other nations of similar economic development shows the discrepancy that it does because of the same sort of forces in a less extreme way. Americans are more exploited per capita by the capitalist class than they are in, say, the EU. Other people in these threads have described how, e.g. deregulated healthcare is a manifestation of that exploitation.
But to be honest, after your reply I wanted to yank your chain :^)
Ah, the 1970's--the decade that ended with Iraq opportunistically invading Iran and promptly getting its ass kicked. If you want to make the case that America's imperialism is the reason for Iraq's troubles, that's probably not the example you want to go with.
Calling Iraq and Oklahoma similar closes that door, because those two are not similar at all per capita.
I choose to interpret GP's comment to mean what it actually says. You may choose to put words in GP's mouth so that their argument says what you wish it to say, but for me that's a waste of time. If they wish to clarify and restate their argument, they are welcome to do so. But then they will have to provide some evidence that per-capita GDP "goes farther" in other countries than in the U.S. So far nobody has done that.
Well, I do, and I hope this answers your question of why I replied to your post and not the the one above (which did not add much to the discussion to begin with).
If this is an outside looking in scenario, I'll just say that I'm amused and disappointed by international press coverage of the US whenever I travel abroad.