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Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

The United States is consistently in the top decile of least corrupt countries globally. Don't really care for your second to last sentence either, let's tone that kind of rhetoric down. (The author of the Twitter thread should absolutely sue- he'll probably get a pro bono attorney from a libertarian or good government nonprofit after his thread gets attention)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

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It's not, though, according to your own source. Also, you may also want to look at the assigned not-corrupt index rather than only a ranking, in which the US scores only 67 out of 99.

This list measures how corrupt people think their own governments are, which is not necessarily the same thing as a measure of actual corruption.

That’s a very important difference. US corruption especially at the local level is well hidden in part due to a recent drop off in investigative reporting.

It’s also been institutionalized via regulatory capture etc such that things often go unnoticed by the general public. On top of this trying to bring up how corrupt other countries are perceived is pure whataboutism.

It's not corruption when you call it lobbying

As it relates to this story, it most certainly isn't caused by lobbying.

Heh I see lobbying as equal opportunity corruption.

You don’t need to be from the right family or even have gone to the right school. As long as you can pay, you can play.

You probably meant quintile. It is not in the top decile.

Number 27 - a bit more corrupt than United Arab Emirates, Bhutan, Uruguay and Chile. How on earth could someone read that as a good position for the USA to be in? The US is constantly touted as some great leader of the world but it is never in the top of any statistics of Good Things. The US should be compared to the best (Denmark) not just be like "yeah 27 out of 180 is great" or "#25 on the Democracy Index, marked as a Flawed democracy, is amazing!"

Indeed. The methods mentioned make it quite clear that we do not know how bad it really is very corrupt countries.

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