Media Can’t Stop Presenting Horrifying Stories as ‘Uplifting’ Perseverance Porn
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You know the famous Henry Ford quote: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
What seems to be taboo is to connect these two together. You have one group of people who don't get even the most basic healthcare or go into debt over school lunches and then you have others who have more luxury you can imagine. But somehow it’s not ok to point out that maybe one has to do with the other.
It seems to me a lot of these stories are about telling poor people “stop complaining and be as resourceful as the people we are writing about. And certainly don’t ask your boss for more money or your politicians for doing a better job”
"Unfortunately Keith, you lost the public vote and also your left foot to diabetes"
"Tune in next week!"
In my experience from Poland, people who lose health coverage find a way to get it back if they really need it. Get any legal job, enrol in school, apply for disability, etc. Sometimes pleading with the staff to skip the eligibility check works, too. And if everything else fails, the out-of-pocket costs aren't insta-bankrupting.
I have family who can't afford health insurance. And those same people would vote against a president promising universal healthcare.
I don't understand it. But a lot of people don't agree with universal health care (even many low/middle income people)
Lots of people who worry a hell of a lot about the federal deficit when talking about whether they would like to be able to afford going to the doctor. Nevermind that this discussion rarely covers the deficit when it comes time to give tax breaks to "job creators".
Also the Democratic party is comically bad at politics in the US. Like "oh but you might lose your private insurance" is a discussion people in the primary are having _when you would be replacing private insurance with free healthcare_. What sort of positioning is even being had here? So many people are stuck in the 90s
A common fear is that wait times to see a doctor would be much higher with universal healthcare compared to a system with private insurance.
Horror stories about people in Canada and the EU waiting months for a procedure that would be available immediately to someone with private insurance if in the US.
I don’t mean to start a health care debate in this thread. My main point is that there are reasonable (logical, rational) fears that people have causing them to be against universal healthcare. Understanding those fears and addressing them upfront is one way to get past them.
Why are there going to be lines and waits with expanded healthcare coverage? Because people who need to see doctors will be seeing doctors. If your logic train is "Expanding coverage will create lines, therefor don't expand coverage" and not "Expanding coverage will create lines and therefor we will need to find solutions to new problems when we expand coverage" IDK how you're not just doing some gatekeeping to keep services high for yourself at the expense of others.
Yes, either that or one's own health being potentially at fault and having to wait too long for treatment. I didn't mean to insinuate that it was a morally correct choice; only that I thought it was a perspective not being considered. Better healthcare for all is a good thing and is something many people support, but doing so at cost of a loved one's health makes the decision far more difficult.
I will die on this hill. If you oppose expanding healthcare because you feel that then too many people will have healthcare and that will cause problems for you, you're a terrible person. "What about the smaller number of people who have a great situation" is never a counterpoint to "what about the much greater number of people who have a terrible situation"
All systems have problems. Other systems don’t seem to bankrupt or kill as many people.
Also consider that as a "NYC Googler" you are not getting the true American healthcare experience.
Google is also self-insured, which means that Google is actually paying for healthcare, not the insurer -- the insurer just manages the networks & relationships with providers, and it's just pure profit for them. Google, meanwhile, wants healthy employees. No one has an incentive to deny claims, so ultimately you are seeing the best side of the system, in which almost every actor wants good outcomes.
Contrast this with Medicare or Medicaid, or private insurance on the individual level, where the incentive is to reduce "medical loss", the industry term for...actually paying for healthcare. Arguing with insurers over denied claims is par for the course -- so much so that some insurers just routinely deny things (and patient is on the hook) that their own plans say should be covered, with the hope that patients won't realize they can appeal.
Having experienced both ends of this -- as a former Googler myself and in the individual market pre-ACA ("Obamacare") -- I can tell you the difference between the wealthy corporate insurance plans and the individual market is night and day.
Ignoring the rudeness of your comment, who is to say that the implementation of universal healthcare in the US will not wind up as dysfunctional as the system in the parent poster's country?
> There is a country where government-run healthcare is bad. Therefore a proposed government-run healthcare system is probably also bad.
This simply doesn't follow. I could make the same argument backwards by pointing to a country where government-run healthcare works well, and concluding that therefore universal healthcare in the US is going to be awesome.
endtime is demonstrating his/her sentiment, but does nothing to advance the discussion.
> No. There is a very large number of people in the US who are (for whatever reason) against universal health care.
I was responding specifically to the "for whatever reason" part, giving an example of a reason.
Basically, people who have a job and get health insurance dont want to be lumped in with the commoners and get worse care/longer wait times/less options/etc... Its fucked up, but its not hard to understand the pushback. They dont want their health care experience to turn into a 6 hour trip to the DMV.
It's actually quite baffling how Americans generally seem much more generous, warm and helpful to their fellow human beings, but the idea of potentially paying for someone else's medical treatment seems absolutely outrageous to most.
this is just my personal take as an american. I think the disconnect has to do with locality/proximity. americans who have some surplus income (ie savings and not living paycheck-to-paycheck) are quite willing to help people they know with cash or free labor and will happily donate time or money to help people in their broader community. what americans hate is being forced by the government to help people far outside their circle. I think partially we are suspicious that the money doesn't get where it's supposed to go intact, but there's also an element of "fuck them, what do those people over there have to do with me?"
obviously this is suboptimal as entire communities can be disjoint and have serious imbalances in funds available. also it tends to leave a lot of efficiency from scale on the table. but perhaps this at least explains some of your bafflement.
Meanwhile, I (SRE at a hedge fund) and all my liberal coastal elite friends can absolutely afford private doctors in an emergency without having to think about cost up front, and we do support universal healthcare—and we know it would be a larger tax bill for us.
(BTW, in practical terms, putting liberal elites in well-paying, politically-connected industries on your healthcare system is a great way to make sure it doesn't turn into the VA. America cares deeply about our happiness. It doesn't care about our veterans and sort of wishes they hadn't survive, so we could just remember their sacrifice instead of actually facing up to what we did to them.)
> (BTW, in practical terms, putting liberal elites in well-paying, politically-connected industries on your healthcare system is a great way to make sure it doesn't turn into the VA. America cares deeply about our happiness. It doesn't care about our veterans and sort of wishes they hadn't survive, so we could just remember their sacrifice instead of actually facing up to what we did to them.)
this is a pretty common talking point, but I don't really see this happening with the systems that already exist that wealthy people have to use. I, an upper-middle class white person, still have to take at least a half day of PTO any time I need to go to the DMV. my dad, wealthier than me, still had to spend a whole day at city hall disputing a $40,000 water bill (the city doesn't even have a functioning water meter on his property because DPW paved over the access; it's been "estimated" for twenty years).
It would quite possibly be a net saving. The UK, for example, spends less public money on healthcare than the US. There's no necessary reason why you should end up paying more in taxes for universal coverage than you pay currently for insurance.
there are definitely some good arguments for universal healthcare, but software devs should not delude themselves that they will do any better than break even in most cases.
edit: probably not true, I didn't investigate the UK tax system enough.
edit: On an individual level, a lot will depend on your income, and how expensive your US health insurance is. Here is an informative post:
https://www.quora.com/If-you-make-100-000-in-UK-what-percent...
That works out to about $560/month for someone with a salary of $100,000. If you take into account employer contributions, that's still less than a lot of Americans are paying. If you're on a lower income, you're likely to be paying significantly less in the UK for much better coverage.
And I almost forgot - copays! The amount you're paying in taxes in the UK really is paying for virtually the full cost of your treatment when you're sick.
It's because doctors et al don't want to work for less than $x/hr and there are people who don't produce enough to trade with doctors or prefer to spend their money on other things. There's no way to get a free lunch out of this.
There are veterans who are still waiting to get paperwork processed to show a service connection for health issues -- they're still waiting to get into the VA system -- but that's a different bureaucracy. The wait time at most VAs once you're in the system is substantially less than through my employer-provided insurance.
BUT.
I have a hard time thinking of getting a doctor's appointment in 20 days as "incredible access." If I need to see a doctor, I can get an appointment at the local clinic within a day or two. And my employer-provided health insurance is pretty crappy! If I tell the clinic I think it's important (like I'm in pain but it's not an emergency), they'll try to fit me in the same day if possible.
And that's not even considering the Urgent Care facilities 15 miles away..
According to kaitai, those "20 days" are the absolute upper boundary. As a German, I don't find that upper boundary particularly high. When I need to see a specialist about something that's not an emergency, a wait time of a few weeks is normal since there are only so many specialists per area.
In Spain the public health system is still better than the private one and most of the long and most expensive treatments are done within the public circuit. You can wait months for "minor" issues and there is where a private insurance can help (actually I think is beneficial for the system that anyone being able to afford a complementary private insurance should pay for it)
Also, having experience in both systems I feel better when I am treated by someone with no economic interests.
US politics, specifically from the right, lobbies pretty hard and uses fearmongering to the max. Lower standard of care? What’s that? Wait times? Sure, you may wait a bit longer that one day, but someone will see you. I remember when my wife needed to see a therapist for her depression, we had to wait 2 weeks to see someone “in network” in CA. This was with good insurance. Here, walk in, wait, see doc, walk out. My fellow Americans need to wake up to reality and try to understand that powerful interests are lobbying against you and using fear as primary means for arguing against “universal” healthcare. Let me be clear, I still pay a monthly premium and I still have co-payments, but one this is for sure - it’s practically impossible for me to go bankrupt due to a medical issue.
"Why doesn’t the United States have universal health care? The answer has everything to do with race." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/univ...
At the same time, they allow ~1 million mostly non-whites to legally immigrate every year.
I think insurance/medical industry lobbying is a far more consistent explanation. In general, if a story starts by bringing up racism from 150 years ago, it's more concerned with building a narrative than with explaining the current state of affairs.
Rather refreshingly, the NYT admits this: "It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."
I mean, I totally understand avoiding the subject because it leads to flamewars, because some people respond very poorly to the suggestion that racism exists and has practical effects today. But then you're better off not having a discussion about the topic at all than a skewed, censored one where one plausible answer is just too politically incorrect to be debated.
-Yes, racism still exists and, yes, it is a huge problem. We should work together to support all minorities.
-No, racism is not the primary or even a significant cause of every single bad thing that happens.
It's like the people in the story of the boy who cried wolf; hearing "racism" being trotted out by one-note progressives as a response to any question about the United States' woes (particularly when it's not even very plausible) is viewed as tiresome and unconstructive. And I say this as a minority who has experienced racism!
A lot of Americans see it as a threat to their sense of individualism, and that is why they fight it. To them, any government program which makes our lives easier will cause people to be lazy and dependent. If we want universal healthcare, we need to address that message.
"Sure, I would love to get healthcare. But I don't want /them/ to get it. Especially if they are immigrants."
The tribal divide in American politics is another reason ("if they want it, it must be wrong), but since this level of hatred is quite recent, I think it cannot fully explain it.
Indeed, it's like a wide band across the middle of the globe that do not have such standards.
Heck - look at the Wiki entry for some insight into how diverse in definition it is, let alone the historical aspects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
But I think the debate about values and principles is way more complicated than you are acknowledging. A lot of it boils down to terminal subjective value systems.
Do you value “freedom from” financial ruin more highly than “freedom to” spend your money however you see fit (e.g. low taxes)?
There’s no easy high level argument for why someone should normatively prefer “freedom from” over “freedom to” ways of thinking.
You won’t get anywhere just decrying the “freedom to” crowd and dismissing their sincerely held values and beliefs.
People are not going to the doctor when they have something treatable and preventable, because they're not covered. They'll go to the ER when whatever they have progresses far enough, and the associated monetary costs and risks to that persons life will be of course be higher because they let the problem persist.
I also take issue with the idea that this would cost more than the current system does. We spend almost twice as much per capita than other industrialized nations with universal healthcare do.[1] There are cost savings involved when you get rid of the middlemen and redundancy that comes along with our current for profit system.
The number I keep seeing in the media is that, for example, Sanders healthcare plan would cost 32 trillion dollars over a ten year period. Yet we're currently paying 34 trillion dollars.[2]
[0]https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/13/the-r...
[2]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/32-trillion-price-tag-sander...
There are going to be people who are worse off with universal health care due to higher taxes, there is no doubt about that. The question is how much worse off will they be versus how much benefit will the average person gain as a result? How many losers will we have and how many winners, and by how much will the losers be hurt / the winners gain?
Like I've already mentioned, the costs that I've seen in the media are 32 trillion for universal healthcare, versus the 34 trillion we're paying now. So already the universal health care system is saving money and thus increasing "freedoms."
There will of course be people who have a higher burden than they used to, though. The idea is that this burden would be put on the wealthiest among us, who have, by the way, seen their share of wealth grow over the past 30 years while the wealth of the bottom 90 percent has fallen. Today, the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.[0]
Given such facts, I for one am comfortable with the idea that we sacrifice some of the "freedom" of these individuals in order to increase the "freedoms" of everyone else. By the way, even under such a tax system, the freest among us will still remain the most free.
This is all ignoring the fact that the current status quo is needlessly killing tens of thousands of people per year, which you neglected to address in favor of talking about some abstract decrease in freedom for people due to a decrease in income for people who are already extremely well off / the most free.
Am I massively misunderstanding you here?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-r...
This is not about any analysis of taxes or numbers of people who will die from lack of care: it’s a normative value. Sort of like saying “murder is wrong” ... okay, but why?
Some people just sincerely believe that it’s better, from a moralistic standpoint, that your personal property and money are unrestricted. To them that is a high ideal state of humanity flourishing, because they look at the fact of the number of people who die from lack of care and they think, our freedom is well worth that unfortunate cost, and the world where we give up freedom (so they would say) to reduce the number of people who die from lack of care is a worse world (in their way of assigning value to states of being).
You’re coming at it from a point of view where you seem to think the facts you cite “speak for themselves.” But there’s no such thing because many people are well aware of the exact facts you mention and yet think that universal healthcare represents a reduction of personal property freedoms that is morally wrong to such a degree that it’s worse than enduring the social costs that come with an absence of universal care.
I actually think the left’s dismissiveness of this way of life, spurning sincere engagement on moralistic ideals to try to use government to push compromises on people, is what fails to move the discussion forward, even though I personally subscribe to most of those pragmatic social welfare approaches.
It's not sunshine and rainbows in many European countries either. Maybe it is that way in the rich ones, but not all of them.
I'm saying that this is not true. Estonia requires you to contribute (pay for it through taxes), or be registered as a student, retired or be a recipient of unemployment benefits to have healthcare. If you're unemployed, but don't receive unemployment benefits (eg you don't qualify) then you don't get healthcare.
A family member didn't pay for a while. He had to pay up for the entire duration eventually, even if he had switched providers. So I'd expect that insurance would have gotten the bill in case emergency aid would have become necessary. That's very different from the US, where you would have to pay the bill yourself (from my understanding).
What happens if he can't afford that? Will they garnish his wages?
In Poland, if you don't pay, then in theory the hospital bill comes to you (as otherwise, there would be no penalty for not paying). In reality, 99.9% is insured one way or another and it's really hard to find someone who actually did not pay the insurance and needed serious/expensive medical help to see what actually happened in his/her case - I've never heard of anyone like that. Also, our consitution says that "the authorities provide equal access to publicly funded medical care, regardless of one's financial situation". Which IMO makes the whole system unconstitutional, but no one bothered to challenge it yet.
In the US, hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment. When I was uninsured and needed emergency treatment about 14 years ago (before the ACA/Obamacare), the hospital made an attempt to help me apply for public assistance (Medicaid), because they assumed I would not be able to pay. I ultimately paid the bill in full, out of a (perhaps misguided) sense that I should because I could, but I was told at some point that they normally wrote off half of any bill not covered by insurance.
But when one uses a country with a population of a bit more than 1 million as an example of how it’s not all sunshine in a continent of over 300 million, then I’m not really impressed with the argument.
PS: "rugged individualism" based on "pulling oneself up by their bootstraps" was taken from a children's fairytale about an impossible task.
Every system has its flaws. Some have many more than others.
Another thing with the "all other western nations" line is the population in the US. There is really no western or "developed" nation with anywhere close to same number of people.
Look at it from the other side. If European governments were as inefficient at providing public services as Americans are, would Europeans support mass transit and universal healthcare? If it was going to cost $6 billion to build a light rail line through the suburbs, mightn’t the Danes say: “fuck it we’ll build a freeway?”
Concrete example on the healthcare front. In Europe, universal healthcare is typically paid for with social insurance taxes primarily imposed on people making under $70,000. If you look at the proposals for Medicare for All that have been proposed by Democrats, you see two remarkable things:
1) Nobody proposes taxes to actually fund the expected cost;
2) Nobody proposed the level of middle class taxes (VAT and social insurance) typically imposed in European countries to find universal healthcare. Sanders’ proposal comes the closest, but is half the level of say France’s.
There is an important political observation here: there is little support for European-style healthcare in the US. What would happen if we had a straight up/down vote on Germany’s healthcare system? Or France’s? Or the UK’s? The support that exists in the US is for universal healthcare that is paid for by billionaires and corporations rather than the middle class. That’s a system that exists nowhere in Western Europe. It’s completely unprecedented.
I'm not saying that is the cause of all govt failure in the US bit it's a significant one.
In doing so you're preventing the Democratic Party from being held accountable, so that they may be pressured to fix the serious problems that exist with their ideology and political structure, which ensures that more people are drawn to the Republican party, simply as the less unpalatable one of the two.
The people who are going to agree with your tenuous explanations for the failure of Democratic-run cities were always going to vote Democrat anyway. It's those people who are on the fence who are not in your political bubble who you are going to push away by turning the Democratic party into one that does not accept criticism and does not operate in the realm of evidence and reality.
A mayor has no chance of fixing the city when the tax base is decimated because of these national policies.
For example, consider the housing and mortgage policies over the last 50 years where redlining literally systematically destroyed the real estate and tax base of the very cities you cite as examples of the democratic parties failure to effectively manage city services. When no one can get a mortgage to buy property in a city, prices drop, which means the tax base erodes, which means social services are reduced, which means property values drop further; very nasty negative cycle. Then add a national highway bill that gives preference to suburbs and exurbs and you should clearly see that the cause is not local party mismanagement but broad national policies.
Median household income in Baltimore is about double that of Spain or Italy. Median household of African American households in Baltimore, though much less than that of white households in the city, is still about as much as Spain or Italy. There is an ample tax base there to support good municipal services if the government was capable of doing so efficiently.
1. Some of these cities spend huge amounts of money per capita on public services. You need to actually look at the statistics and not just make assumptions that fit your preconceived ideological narrative.
2. Social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP has massively grown since the 1950s, which totally contradicts this idea that the social safety net has been dismantled. Before 1967 there wasn't even a Medicare in the US.
3. The most dysfunctional major cities in the US have been strongholds of the Democratic Party for decades. If the problems in Democrat-run cities are attributable to federal policy then Republican-run City should be doing just as poorly but they're not.
For all these reasons, I repeat my charge you're inventing conspiracy theories to blame Republicans instead of accepting facts that condemn the Democratic Party
2. Yes, some government social safety net programs are new. But they weren’t designed to fix or replace local services or bring the cost of those services down. In fact since they were enacted elderly and child poverty is drastically lower. Generally very successful result as what they were intended to address. But other many programs like food stamps, Medicaid, housing benefits have been drastically cut. Those that haven’t have been tied to work requirements that end up pushing people out of the system. The US has among the lowest social mobility among peer nations because the safety net isn’t there when people need it. So my point stands.
3. I did not refer to any conspiracy theory. - Republicans policies have been clear and public. Reagan vilified welfare queens and said government was the problem. - The rhetoric about “starve the beast” is as out in the open as you could ever have. - The recent tax bill that explicitly targeted democratic states is easy to find. - The history of the damage from highways cutting through minority neighborhoods and destroying their business districts is as clear and documented as anything in social science as is the racist motive and attitude of the leadership that pushed the actual design. - Redline mortgages to prevent lending in minority communities was explicitly in the contract and you can read examples. You can find actual maps that were used to approve or reject loan origination based on race.
- There is a Supreme Court case dealing with property covenants that made it impossible to sell property to non-white buyers. Many suburbs were +90% white until these provisions were ruled unconstitutional. -Should I go on? You’re telling me Baltimore should be able to single handedly fight these trends?
By all means hold the Democratic Party accountable. But first be accurate and complete in was is causing the problem. I never even said these were republican policies. I merely said federal vs local.
However, In reality only the Republican Party is on record saying they want to literally destroy the government because it shouldn’t exist in its present form. Only the Republican Party is on record supporting policies that target “takers” and target people based on race.
I don’t have a preconceived ideological narrative. I have an informed, descriptive theory of political economy based on years of fact gathering, research, and predictive testing. I was a libertarian when I started, now I am here.
By "wealthy", you could mean billionaires, you could mean people making a couple million a year, or you could mean people making $300K a year.
I believe the latter are a large part of what make large cities wealthy and underpin the tax base, and I'm not so sure they are mostly Democrats.
it's true that wealthy people dominate politics in pretty much every municipality in the US, but at least in baltimore the shot callers are likely all dems.
[0] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/metro-are...
As for public services sucking...it's easy to point to obvious failings but hard to compare public service suckiness overall. Americans are generally unhappy with their public services but so are most Europeans.
When A and B are correlated, it's not necessarily the case that A -> B or B -> A, it may be that C -> (A and B).
Also see: https://xkcd.com/1138/
There are urban areas controlled by Republicans, and they don’t do public services any better—they just don’t do public services. E.g. Phoenix.
USA hasn't had a left wing party since 60s or so.
Besides, Western European countries manage to have good public services even though they:
1) Are more “pro business” in key respects, especially from the point of view of taxation. Western European countries generally have lower reliance on corporate taxation than the US, and much higher reliance on consumption taxes (VAT). They also rely much more heavily on payroll taxes paid for by middle class individuals than on corporate taxes.
2) Are more deregulatory in key respects. There is an E.U.-wide directive that requires rail to be deregulated and opened up to competition. If we had something similar here, instead of having government departments operate commuter rail service in say Virginia, the state would have to separate ownership of the tracks and allow for-profit companies to bid to actually operate the service. In DC, the WMATA Union is fighting tooth and nail to prevent one part of one line from being operated under contract to a private company. By contrast, the entire Stockholm subway is operated by private companies (one being MRT, the Hong Kong rail operator).
In another example, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Sweden have school vouchers: https://www.edchoice.org/school_choice_faqs/how-does-school-...
> Scholar Charles Glenn noted that “governments in most Western democracies provide partial or full funding for nongovernment schools chosen by parents; the United States (apart from a few scattered and small-scale programs) is the great exception, along with Greece.”2 Or as Diane Ravitch pointed out in a 2001 article, “The proportion of students in government-funded private schools is sizable in countries such as Australia (25 percent), Belgium (58 percent), Denmark (11 percent), France (16.8 percent), South Korea (21 percent), the Netherlands (76 percent), Spain (24 percent), and the United Kingdom (30 percent).”
“Businesses” are a total red herring. Those nice public services in Europe aren’t paid for by “businesses” they’re paid for by taxes on the middle class. The middle class agrees to pay those extra taxes, because the government has proven it can run the public services effectively. Democrats would love to raise taxes and expand public services. (See, e.g., the Democratic primary.) They just can’t convince voters that voters would get their money’s worth.
Likewise, the idea that public services in US cities is bad because Democrats aren’t far left enough is totally absurd when in Germany you can ride around on a partially-privatized passenger rail system and send your kid to a private school 85% subsidized by the government.
My impression is that in the US, the existing system basically gives priority to freight, and that passenger rail is poor because of that.
I have been on an Amtrak train that had to wait and wait for a (private) freight train, and of course people blame Amtrak and the government for the delay which is a little unfair.
But in the big picture, I think it's not intuitively obvious that prioritizing freight in the US is the wrong decision for the country. I mean, you could argue it, but maybe freight is the best use of rail given the overall lack of density of the country.
Where is the evidence of this? Healthcare is not the same as infrastructure. Medicare and Medicaid do a better job controlling costs than private insurers: https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20190211/NEWS/19021...
America and Americans are deeply optimized for the Individual, including giving them more flexibilities and freedoms, but also sparing them the burden of societal obligation.*
I think this choice is why America is responsible for so much innovation and why it's a fantasy for immigrants to come and achieve their dreams.
I would venture a guess that America is relatively the easiest place in the world to become a millionaire or a billionaire.
However it's also why it's a dystopian hellscape if you ever slip and stumble off the path. It's also the easiest place in the developed world to become homeless, destitute, or die from a preventable disease.
So what does it mean. Should this kind of society exist? Conservatives always optimize for people who opt into this by choice. Privileged entrepreneurs, working hard to make their mark, without the same obligations and burdens that exist in other flatter egalitarian societies.
But most humans, even in America, don't choose their circumstances. They are born into them.
Which means that for them, the American Dream is a delusion, a fantastical tease, as likely as winning the lottery.
So I would venture that the American system is a net negative for their citizens, and for world humanity at large (not that other intervening super powers like China are any better).
Student loan debt, lack of healthcare, private individuals actively working to undermine the government from effectively operating, government contractors using public funds to fuel their entrepreneurial growth, all of these are symptoms of a deeper societal sickness.
But only 30% of the country (at best) wants to see it fixed. Another 30 thinks everything is just fine. The last third actually wants to make things even worse, and is inspired by either Atlas Shrugged or The Old Testament or The Handmaid's Tale.
So what now? The cynic in me thinks that "the American dream" will become in the 21st century that "the British empire" became in the 20th. A historical relic of past relevance, while the country slowly decays.
* Except when religious-based policies Trump everything else (E.g. "Personal freedom to live your life, unless you're gay."
I wonder what segment of the population in Europe provides the lion's share of tax revenue overall.
It made an impression on me that I once ran across IRS charts showing that the US relies heavily on taxpayers who are between roughly $200-500K in yearly income. So, not CEOs and billionaires, but not people making $70K either. These are the people who have to be, and are, taxed heavily to keep the system running, but not to the point where it kills the golden goose.
I don't know whether this is how Europe works, or whether they don't have nearly as many people in that income bracket.
Here in the EU (Spain, but also lived in Germany and the UK) we are quite heavily taxed and there’s always talk about having the rich pay more but we (the middle class) have also accepted that we get what we pay for. Our healtchare systems are far from perfect, but no one with cancer or a serious liver condition is left behind. Never ever seen one of these feel-good stories on this side of the Atlantic.
I 100% blame the decades long hollowing of the civil service by republican administrations.
That isn't purely partisanship. It's been a stated goal, publicly, of the republicans, their propaganda wings, think tanks, and most importantly, their noxious donor overlords.
corporations are forcing the us working class to give them a discount on their labor costs. this is why so many companies have heir headquarters in the us. plus they have the added benefit of ip protection. the wealthy people of the world are literally raping the us working class.
the american worker must be paid more to make up for the lack of social services. but us minimum wage is very low compared to other first world countries.
clearly one solution is for the us working class to form a massive worker's union. but another possibly more realistic solution is to destroy the US's reputation as a haven for the protection of intellectual properties. If the US is less known for ip protection, the wealthy will stop fighting the working class from implementing social services. they will start moving their companies to the EU.
“Other modern countries” don’t pay for these services through taxes on “companies.” Of the big 5 EU countries (which together comprise 70% of the EU population), 4 countries rely less on corporate taxes than the US. The UK is the only exception, with corporate taxes making up 8.3% of revenue, versus 7.6% in the US: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highl... (page 3). By contrast France is 4.5%.
Nor do corporate taxes fund the Nordic welfare states. Corporate taxes make up between 4.9-6.2% of tax revenue (less than the US) in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Norway is the only one that’s higher than the US, and that’s only because of the special 55% tax on oil company profits (the normal 23% Norwegian corporate tax is in line with the other Nordic countries, and lower than the US).
In Germany, 65% of tax revenue comes from social insurance and consumption taxes, which are paid for by the middle class. (Those who make more than about $70,000 per year are exempted from having to purchase the mandatory health insurance, and from the corresponding payroll taxes.) In the US it’s under 40%.
Put another way, Germany’s higher consumption taxes amount to 3.7% of GDP, and its higher social insurance taxes amount to 5% of GDP. That’s almost all of the difference in total tax burden between the US and Germany.
> In Germany, 65% of tax revenue comes from social insurance and consumption taxes, which are paid for by the middle class.
that's wrong half of the social security contributions comes from the employer in germany. and is close to 50% greater than the contributions required in the US.
vat (what your talking points refers to as consumption tax) largely exempts everyday expenses that people need to pay in order to live. however, it does increase the cost of doing business greatly as all transactions are taxed.
look at just germany and the us from your documents.
US
24% for ss
0% for vat
total portion of tax revenue = 24%
Germany
37.6 for ss
18.5% for vat
total portion of tax revenue = 56.1%
my point is proven. it's cheaper to run a business in the US because there's a huge discount from not having to pay for public services. and companies are further reducing their cost by hiring foreigners who are willing to game the system by taking advantage of their own country's social policies and in exchange giving their US employers a discount on their salaries.
Another important point is that these social insurance contributions are deliberately regressive. In the US, the Medicare payroll tax is paid on all income, and Social Security is paid on the first $130,000. There is a big push in the US to eliminate the Social Security cap. In Germany, by contrast the pension contribution is only paid on income below about $70,000, and workers making more than that are exempt from the public insurance system. (So someone making $10,000,000 per year pays almost nothing in social insurance taxes.)
Likewise, VAT is primarily borne by consumers, and consumer-facing small businesses. Even though the business pays it, some of the tax is passed onto consumers through highs prices. Who bears the VAT depends on relative elasticity of supply and demand. In highly competitive industries like restaurants, the owners and workers can bear most of the VAT. But large corporations m in high margin businesses have the pricing power to pass on most of the VAT to consumers. (E.g. an iPhone is 25% more in Germany than the US, more than enough to completely cover the VAT.) VAT is not paid on investment income, nor on banking services. So the wealthy, who invest most of their money rather than spending it on consumption, pay little (as a percentage of income) on VAT.
Combined with low corporate taxes, the end result is rather right-wing. American Republicans would prefer to have a low overall tax burden because it boosts the economy. But if we had to raise taxes to say 35% of GDP, they would much prefer to have the European system, where the middle class bears most of that burden, than scaling up the US system, which would cause businesses and the rich to bear most of the burden. Notably, the only serious proposals for a VAT in the US has come from conservatives like Ted Cruz, Herman Cain, Saxby Chambliss, etc.
Every other western country does it by piggy backing on all the innovation happening in the US.
Next there's the costs. Universal healthcare isn't going to make it cheaper. It will get more expensive since it's hard to set up in such a way (read: free market force way) that certain people have ownership and can be held accountable. With a government solution everyone gets incentivized to avoid as much ownership as possible. When things go wrong is when the the blame game begins. Departments pointing their fingers at each other. Or pointing at the department that should've been. The easiest way to resolve conflicts is by simply accepting the money lost. It's just tax money anyway.
Or are you suggesting that the American people must sacrifice their poor so that Europeans can “piggy back” on the gains?
Home Depot employees can’t change national attitudes to healthcare but they can build someone a walker, so they’re bad people?
Policy discussion is about bringing cohesive context to information. Reporting is about reporting information.
Facts tell a story. The reporters for these stories are choosing what facts tell the narrative they think people want (triumph over adversity) without mentioning the facts that they think people don't want (acknowledging that the healthcare system in the US is broken for most Americans).
To get a better perspective of this, imagine a reporter that earnestly believed something you disagreed with. You'd probably want them to stick to the facts instead of tying every world event to their favorite policy.
That is not (all) reporters do.
It’s against site guidelines here to accuse people of not reading the article - please don’t do this.
That does happen sometimes and as a result the poor do-gooder that was just minding his own business and trying to help a family member or friend ends up being vilified and receiving threats.
Even just saying hey here's a person that did a nice thing brings out haters. It gets much worse if the action is associated with a political viewpoint that significant numbers of people oppose for any reason.
I would never ever ever want any of my good deeds to be highlighted in some media article. It would be no end of trouble. Don't talk to cops. Don't talk to reporters.
e.g. Those kids who came up with a creative solution for a disabled 2 year old to play and be entertained deserve to be commended.
Yes, it's horrible there's a disabled two year old, but...
My NHS is most certainly not perfect, but provides a decent safety net. They'd have provided a walker, and maybe the local DIY store might build a playground for local kids in the park.
Well yeah it was bizarre enough in the US to be a news story as well.
It's incredibly strange visiting/talking to Americans how many (of all backgrounds) have this aversion to "socialism"
If somebody steals your wallet, you're fine with calling a Police force. If your house is on fire, you'll call the fire brigade. If somebody attacks your country, you'll invoke your military. If your child is sick, you'll dig out some insurance paper-work and see if you're covered for treatment - as god-forbid you could just consider "getting sick" something you might want resolved by your government as an acceptable use of your taxes.
The normal pushback when I raise this is some weird idea that this would in some way force sub-standard treatment on all (tax can't pay for great treatment for everyone). This isn't the case.
I have private healthcare insurance in the UK from my employer (like many of us do) - but it tends to be used for the little things. Sports-injury clinics, elective surgery at the time of our choosing etc.
If anything serious happens to us - then the NHS is the preferred option (private healthcare doesn't even provide A&E, trauma etc). If your need is great, then you'll be triaged to the top of everything and get whatever you need.
But this isn't news, is it?
This is the way US healthcare has always been.
Everyone's asking why a news story doesn't mention something that is not news to anyone.
Maybe equivalent would be a "Heartwarming story of how a 9 year old in Oregon has defended his family home, with his .22 rifle from the Isis caliphate that invaded back in March"
Err that sounds like more spin not less?
I’m aware though that discussing reality is sometimes “too political”...
Several paragraphs to say that in first world countries these people wouldn't be needing to do whatever they painstakingly did would shape a public opinion of "hey, government, you're sort of failing us..?".
But maybe that would be propaganda, or activism? I suppose one function of the fourth estate is to challenge the government, and when the sort of mentioned shit is happening in the richest country in the world...
More importantly, though, these stories rarely criticize the systems that cause these horrors — America's broken healthcare system which revisits injuries upon the poor and sick, zoning and development practices that breed homelessness, cruel school lunch programs that punish poor kids for having poor parents.
I think the article means to take it a step further—these are stories by rich people for [mostly] rich people about poor people that build and reinforce a narrative and expectation that the context of the perseverance isn’t the real story. By crafting/telling/writing/broadcasting perseverance porn, media are objectifying and fetishizing perseverance in a manner that enables the audience to ignore the context and enjoy the “good stuff”—all while normalizing the horrific circumstances of each story. Perseverance is not only possible, it’s the goal! Meanwhile, viewers can sit back and blame those who didn’t persevere for their outcomes.
> The problem with perseverance porn is not the brave subjects of the articles, but the lack of any journalistic scrutiny examining the failings of society that placed them in such desperate circumstances to begin with.
> What these articles highlight so clearly is not only the grim, inhuman and unnecessary conditions so many Americans are forced to live under, but the degree to which mainstream corporate journalists have completely internalized them as unremarkable, inevitable facts of life, rather than the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies that have robbed Americans of dignity and basic human rights.
Neoliberal policy may have built a house out of dry wood, but neoconservative policy lit the match.
tl;dr — neoliberal and neoconservative are on totally different planes of existence in the world of political philosophy and policy; neoliberal doesn’t mean “new-style liberal (left-leaning) ideas”; neoconservativism is an American right-wing policy framework, it does not mean “conservative”, and it doesn’t engage the same arena of thought as neoliberalism does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Current_usage
My specific concerns are regarding deregulation & privatization, as well as a lack of attention related to the consequences of the (relative) free flow of trade, people, and capital across national borders - these (potential downsides) are not discussed in the mainstream. Rather, it is typically reported that "free trade" is an undisputed good, and implies that anyone that disagrees must believe that economics is a zero sum game. (See how the MSM initially reported on Trump's complaints about China's trade practices, until something seemed to change behind the scenes and they all simultaneously got on the anti-China bandwagon).
These feel good stories are entertainment. They leave out those success stories that would make people sick in their stomach.
Like a woman getting cancer and her mother working as a prostitute every day to get money for the treatments. I would like that story told with chirp voices and beautiful guitar tune in the background with the daughter and the mother smiling.
"And we finish with a beautiful inspiring story of love. It's about a churchgoing mother in a small Arkansas town who prostituted herself for three years to save her daughter."
They can highlight what the employees did, but at how insanely broken the system is, that this needs to be done. Maybe ask their representatives for an opinion, and writing "The area's congressmen and senators did not respond when we contacted them" is enough of a wake up call, to make the public see...
I mean, sure, Home Depot employees can't change everyone's attitudes to health care, but the folks talking about it and giving it national attention could frame it differently.
"If we had national health care, our Home Depot employees could spend time helping folks with fun things or growing food instead of building children wheelchairs"
You can still pile on the praise of the individual while denouncing the system that made this situation be necessary.
In focusing on the individual perspective, you could argue that articles like this subtly promote a certain set of views/assumptions - "people get what they deserve", "those that work hard get ahead", "individual charity is better than gov programs", "this is just the way things are".
The societal failure perspective is at odds with these and would like to see things approached from a different set of view/assumptions - "unequal opportunity from birth results in people not getting what they deserve", "success in life is mostly luck", "societal problems should be solved for everyone that has them", "we can make things better".
Reddit actually has a perfect reflection of this - stories that appear on r/UpliftingNews will sometimes also appear on r/ABoringDystopia, with the different perspectives becoming apparent in the discussions.
But why is it normal that a 2 year old can't walk and nothing can be done to help him EXCEPT by Home Depot employees?
Why isn't part of the story mentioning how there's no affordable or free program to help 2-year-olds walk?
It's not normal that Home Depot helped. That's why it's a new story.
> Why isn't part of the story mentioning how there's no affordable or free program to help 2-year-olds walk?
Because that's not news - that's how things already are.
News is unusual and interesting things. Reporting that the state of US healthcare is unchanged is not news.
"Such a terrible {condition/experience/situation} -> But look they {over came/received crowdfunding/received support}. Everything is okay, and aren't you moved by the {courage/support} of this story?"
Instead of saying all of that AND then also noting
"And this child who clearly needs a walker, would not have been able to get one due to an INSANE cost of {price}, yet when a suitable replacement came about from literally a hardware store costing {price}? Why is our healthcare charging 50x more " etc etc
Do you see where thats really fucked up now? All of these stories typically and conveniently skip over the root causes of these issues -> Where did the {tragedy/trial} come from?
I'd say you're wrong on two counts. The first is that no one is saying it's the Home Depot employees that should be doing it. The article makes it clear that the media should be presenting the story in a way that ties it to the national conversation, instead of ignoring the implications of how these stories keep happening.
The second, is that actually Home Depot employees can change national attitudes. There is this thing called Unionizing that allows workers to call for strikes and bargain for better working conditions. Such a union could help contribute to a difficult conversation about the need of our companies and government entities to protect the health of our most vulnerable, which most likely would include a sizeable number of those same workers.
Can someone tell me where the companies are that will return such loyalty? I've been looking and they don't seem to exist any more (if they ever really did).
I'm going to add them to my RSS reader for a while. If they realy are 'fair', it should be a breath of fresh air.
I guess these are the types of stories we'd get!
The horrifying part is that the overton window in the US is so out of whack that somehow people consider these stories uplifting.
Sure better health care or whatever could have prevented the situation, but that's not the subject. We don't live in a perfect world, and these stories tell you that even if you can't change the world, you can still solve your own problems.
And if such articles are a problem than what about celebration of war heroes. Do we need to forget their resolve in the face of adversity just because war is essentially state sanctioned mass murder?
The psychological benefit of such stories is that we can comfort ourselves by telling others that if they didn't manage to cure their own leukemia and run a marathon while supporting three children and a disabled spouse, they just weren't creative and perseverant enough.
A similar criticism can legitimately be made of glorifying war heroes. It makes it easier to pat ourselves on the back for sending them into a situation in which they can prove their resolve by avoiding death for a while, and we can ignore all the dumb schmucks who just got blown up right away -- they simply didn't show much resolve, did they.
It's all sort of the converse of "the personal is political"...