It’s no wonder. The pols, the Koches and many other industrialists sold us all out.
On the other hand we can afford heaps of cheap junk that doesn’t last longer than it takes to ship it over cargo ship.
I concede that globalization has changed the economic landscape, but it's effects didn't have to be nearly this negative. Had we invested in infrastructure and prioritized the building of new homes people could have adapted. Now we have homeowners capturing an extreme share of wealth for doing nothing but further exacerbating the problem.
And relying on protectionist policies to subsidize certain industries certainly isn't a plan for long term success. How would American manufacturing compete with a fully industrialized India and China?
Are they? How about Detroit? I know it is shocking to Californians, but many people would be happy working at the Lordstown GM plant in Ohio if it was still open. Telling those people that the real problem is that rent is high in San Francisco, not that they lost their job is a total misread of the problem and the causes of the problem. If we magically had 10 million free apartment units in San Francisco, it does very little to help the rust belt.
I get that the statistics show billionaires owning the majority of the wealth while the common-person in America makes $30k/yr but... there are plenty of Americans doing a-ok too. Who is really to blame?
Take a trip down to South Florida. You'll see a lot of Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini, Ferrari. Lots of high fashion and packed restaurants. Workers are getting left behind, sure. But some workers are making it too.
Especially those on HackerNews in IT who are fiscally savvy, packing away six-figure salaries responsibly.
Impactful policy decisions are based on data, not emotion.
United States: 0.17%
Germany: 0.37%
Canada + Sweden: 0.36%
Not as many as other countries.
This is the wrong question that Americans love to ask when they don't want to solve any problems. The right question is how can this be fixed? But as long as people focus on blame, they can ignore solutions and things get worse.
> Workers are getting left behind, sure. But some workers are making it too.
Yes, I think we're all aware that the upper class and upper middle class are doing well. That's about 10% of the population or so. Meanwhile, the other 90% are left behind. Somehow this is supposed to justify the current status?
I don't think that can happen with a hyperfocus on profits over meeting people's needs. The number one reason that ratio has become this way is the lack of government protection for workers: enforcing proper minimum wages, providing proper time off, healthcare, childcare, housing, and education options. There's plenty more. When people's basic needs (Maslow's hierarchy) aren't met, we shouldn't be surprised that they're not living up to their full potential, or in some cases, any potential at all. That's why most of the other 90% of people can't make it. Their physiological and safety needs (levels 1 and 2 on Maslow's hierarchy) are simply not met.
As the articles points out there are 30 billionaires but "Miami-Dade’s middle class is relatively small and shrinking steadily, the report found. Just over 43 percent of Miami households qualify as middle class, the 11th-lowest proportion among the 53 U.S. metros with populations of more than one million. And that proportion has shrunk significantly over the decades"
That doesn't even address the fact that the HN crowd will never be owners of the bentleys and rolls-royces, billionaires have unattainable wealth, a FANNG engineer has to work for centuries to be even close.
[0]https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...
Shipping jobs to the lowest wage country and shipping goods back to the country that lost that job and expecting that worker to buy things from low wage countries to prop up their economy to the benefit of big Corp while the union worker loses the job, the benefits, the healthcare and then imply it was that worker’s responsibility to support workers living under a government the newly unemployed has no say in kind of ridiculous.
Then people cry about wage inequality. Globalization enables that. Check out Europe, check out Germany, the iconic example of wage equality, they’ve all suffered from globalization.
Democratic socialism (healthcare, education, labor unions, etc) is still Capitalism, just with guardrails.
Similarly, it's difficult to control costs on social outlays if the population expects a 4-bedroom ranch house with miles of million dollar pavement and other connecting services, cheap goods, a platinum health insurance plan (or at least the prospect of one--I don't think many ACA opponents realize how crappy their pre-ACA plans were and how precarious of a situation they were in and may be in again now that coverage mandates are no longer being enforced), etc.
The politics of the United States is in many respects like that of much poorer, more dysfunctional countries. The poor, working and middle classes are promised the stars and get scraps; but they vote based on the promises. And to the extent the promises are delivered, they're paid for with mountains of debt. We've even convinced ourselves that "deficits don't matter" (literal mantra of the GOP), ironically right at the moment (dwindling debt purchasers) when there's a regression to the historical mean.
Democratic socialism isn't viable in the U.S. The U.S. has all the bad qualities of conservatism and, increasingly, leftist populism, with little of the restraining characteristics of either.
> Democratic socialism isn't viable in the U.S. The U.S. has all the bad qualities of conservatism and, increasingly, leftist populism, without any of the restraining characteristics of either.
We shall agree to disagree. See you on the campaign trail, the floor of Congress, or on the picket line. I see no other path forward for delivering compassion and a reduction of suffering at scale. We tried American Capitalism, and it has failed us miserably.
But how? The only plans I've seen from Sanders, Warren, etc. are wealth taxes and specific taxes on stock transactions. I think anyone who thinks those can be implemented successfully and people are not going to change their behavior to evade them is just dreaming. Yang proposed a VAT tax, which seems to be the only thing that's somewhat viable for preventing evasion. No matter how well-intentioned these plans are, they're not going to work if they can't be funded.
Disclaimer: I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary. Based on his 2020 campaign, I would not do so again.
We will, will we? No, at best you will try to do so. I seriously doubt your ability to do so, though. Especially that "sound governance" part. Everybody says they're going to do that, but delivering it turns out to be harder than people seem to expect...