Well I've been to Scandinavia and despite the countries having less GDPs, the quality of life, for the average citizen, is way higher.
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.
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.
> 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.