America has problems with drinking, opioids, meth, prescription abuse, vaping bizarre things, health care, mental health, domestic violence, domestic terrorism and violent crime, school shootings and suicides because America has a misery problem.

A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that anymore, that had replaced well being with consumption and personal growth with work and public goods with privatized profits.

There is a pretty international audience here that can probably relate to seeing the difference between cases like the hard drinking work culture in many east Asian nations or the near constant casual drinking of much of Europe with the abject despair visible in the poorer parts of the US.

Naturally people have been crying for a social welfare system for basically the last 140 years with occasional fits and starts but mostly characterized by a complete failure to crib off the results of developed nations across the world that simply don't have constant ongoing crises about everything.