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Comment by 3131s | Hacker News Reader

If you are not an American it's hard to understand the extent to which there is a cultural vortex where everything around you feels manufactured.

I left seven years ago and now live in a terrible third-world dictatorship actually. It's not that America is so bad to live in (if you have some money), but that things should be much better for young people especially and the justifications for why it can't be better are so deeply warped.

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I see this on HN all the time - there will be some discussion about a problem that America has, and some one will suggest some solution. And then there'll be resounding cries of "that's impossible, too expensive, can't be done etc", but the suggested solution is something that > 50% of other western nations already do and there's plenty of evidence for it's effectiveness.

And often, implementing that solution is much cheaper than inaction, and people still complain about cost.

Except when the solution is war.

Those other nations have very different setups though. I don't believe anyone thinks it's "impossible, too expensive" as in physically impossible, but rather "impossible to do it and keep the basic setup of the American society as it is".

Of course it's possible for the US to have the same social systems as European nations, but every American would have to pay a lot more taxes. I understand "it's impossible" to mean "it's impossible to do in this configuration". You can build a sky scraper instead of a single family home, but it's impossible to do on the same budget.

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