If it were my home
ifitweremyhome.com
ifitweremyhome.com
I see similar data points, were figures are decade old. Some countries improved a lot in the last 10 years.
But if I work 22% less, that doesn't mean I get 22% more free time (because, for instance, if I work 20 hours and have 100 free hours, working 50% less will mean I get only a 10% bump in free time).
Similarly the "make more money" statistic is calculated based on GDP per capita rather than on earnings (so for instance, while the site claims a 33% difference in earning, the Germany mean income is c$47k-$52k USD depending on the source while in the US it is c$55k-$57k, so while earning is higher it is not at the 33% difference claimed). GDP per capita tends to increase with income, but will absolutely diverge depending on the economic situation, as it's actually adding up Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports and then dividing by the population, which isn't a valid way to work out how much is paid to workers.
Considering two basic stats are so far out, it doesn't fill me with confidence on the others...
For "be X times more/less likely to have babies" they use the per capita birth rate, which is strongly affected by age distribution, as opposed to the age-adjusted Total Fertility Rate.
For "spend X% more/less on health care" they show total public and private spending, i.e. they include government subsidies, so that Israel's less generous welfare state shows up as "you spend 50% less than Germans on healthcare". Which, no.
But this then puts, for instance, Botswana as green for healthcare spending when compared to the UK despite the UK health outcomes being better.
Also, when I clicked on Botswana I also noticed that their GDP per capita figures are completely wrong.
Absolutely agree with the first one, but for healthcare, public + private spending is the reasonable number to use. Not talking about the real number hides a lot of sins, such as the fact that US public spending on healthcare is already as much per capita as fully socialized systems, and allowed M4A to be attacked as "doubling" health care spending when it actually lowered it. Also, if I were a "run the government like a household" conservative, I'd add that the money comes from the taxpayer anyway (although that's wrong.)
Conclusions need to be data-driven, rather than agenda-driven.
A good sign of this is when data presented doesn't demonstrate a clear conclusion, and when different articles show analyses that initially seem to support different agendas.
Truth is about nuance and nuance complicated and confusing - often seemingly contradictory on the surface.
The only thing that is clear is that using more electricity could be accepted as 'bad' by many important metrics.
Example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/521886/travel-time-spent...
So in reality if I were in Germany I'd be spending way less on healthcare than if I were in India.
The OECD, which is Wikipedia's source, defines this stat as:
"Household adjusted disposable income includes income from economic activity (wages and salaries; profits of self-employed business owners), property income (dividends, interests and rents), social benefits in cash (retirement pensions, unemployment benefits, family allowances, basic income support, etc.), and social transfers in kind (goods and services such as health care, education and housing, received either free of charge or at reduced prices)."
The OP site uses a different statistic that does have the inaccuracies you described, but it correlates fairly well with the more representative statistic described above.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
As a similar example - I am taller than my sister, but if I adjust heights for the average for our genders she would be taller. That doesn't mean she is taller than me though! (But she is taller relative to the average girl than I am tall relative to the average guy).
Then your wiki link displays another statistic which is disposable income adjusted to PPP - which is again different to money earned. It's a fine statistic - and probably more useful than just looking at the amount of money people earn - but it's not how much money people earn!
I don't mind which is used, but the title should match the statistic.
On a similar note, I'd argue that "unequal society" was a better label than "class divide", which usually implies lack of social mobility and fractured social groupings rather than simple ranges of income. But it does tell you exactly how they calculated what it calls the "class divide"
"The GINI index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income. In Peru it is 48.10 while in The United States it is 45.00.
This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The index is calculated from the Lorenz curve, in which cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest. The index is the ratio of (a) the area between a country's Lorenz curve and the 45 degree helping line to (b) the entire triangular area under the 45 degree line. The more nearly equal a country's income distribution, the closer its Lorenz curve to the 45 degree line and the lower its Gini index, e.g., a Scandinavian country with an index of 25. The more unequal a country's income distribution, the farther its Lorenz curve from the 45 degree line and the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50. If income were distributed with perfect equality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the 45 degree line and the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the horizontal axis and the right vertical axis and the index would be 100."
I truly wish I knew how to get this point across with Americans: - Yes, we have expensive health care in the US - Yes, we are privilege because most of us have jobs that provide us with relatively good health care policies
I think this fight-for-a-greater-good has blinded people as to give examples like yours -- utterly disrespectful. Most of the time health care in those countries cannot and is nowhere close to be compared to the US, UNLESS, of course, you go to private practices where you're back to "uhm, so maybe it's not so cheap after all". If you're so inclined in advocating for new policy, I welcome you to travel and experience, ask the locals, etc, how their healthcare system works.
This site claims that people would spend 93.33% less on health care in Venezuela, that is, if you're lucky enough to even get health care.
This site claims that people would spend 88.81% less on health care in Argentina, that is, if you can afford to wait long enough to get whatever medical attention you need.
I'm more than willing to answer any questions if you have them. I'm just trying to raise awareness because I DO NOT want America to become what I escaped from.
On the other hand, the medical stats are generally tricky to parse, right? I guess most of the cost in the overall system comes from dealing with rare emergencies (such that most people won't encounter such an emergency during their lifetime) (I think this is the case, but it is just my gut talking, maybe someone can correct me). I guess the figure should will depend on how we price the availability of these emergency services, into the overall price. Or other sort of customer-service type things that aren't 100% related to just providing the best possible medical treatments. This seems more like an accounting thing to me. Also Americans are generally pretty unhealthy, so our costs will naturally be a bit high.
Which isn't to say I'm happy with the US system -- it clearly needs some improvement. I'm just not sure this 93.33% figure is why. I'm not sure we need to compare to Peru. It is unfortunate that the right in the US seems to have complete ownership of American Exceptionalism -- it ought to be possible to say "we're the most powerful and richest country ever, we should have exceptional healthcare."
Which country are you from? What happened when your cousin broke his leg? When your aunt had cancer? How do the blind and wheelchairbound fare? Did you ever come down with a tropical disease?
YES we acknowledge that the US system is better than third world countries. However medical debt is the largest cause of bankruptcy in the US by far!
The fact that employers provide healthcare causes it to be used as a ball and chain reducing freedom because losing that healthcare will always be hanging over employees heads.
Finally, many people who are "insured" are paying out the nose for terrible heath-care. 40% of Americans can't even cover a 400$ emergency but now they are forced into buying insurance through the "Obamacare" marketplace. Basic plans that have multi-thousand dollar deductibles essentially are free money to the insurance companies because if those people can't afford 400$, you really think they are going to shell out for the deductible for anything other than dire emergencies?
If you are rich, the US healthcare is by far the best of the best. For everyone else, it is a mafia racket that is not preferable to what Europe and the rest of the developed world has. The majority of natural born Americans want to move towards a kind of healthcare system that the rest of the West has because with the advent of the internet and increased travel we have seen our fellow compatriots in these countries and what they go through.
Yet we keep hearing these terrible talking points from shell shocked immigrants of Latin America and other poor nations who do not seem to understand what it is really like in the rest of the developed world.
[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...
The original poster has absolutely no clue how painful this system is to so many people. He had the good fortune of not having to deal with the system in a negative manner yet.
I've told this story before (and I recall your username so maybe we spoke before) but I'll tell it again. My father had a cardiac arrest in March 2021 and unfortunately passed away in the critical care unit of our local hospital. They rushed him in an ambulance to the hospital and tried to stabilize him for about a day so they could transfer him to a significantly better hospital 30 mins away(one of the best in NJ) for surgery. They never could successfully stabilize him and he passed away in the critical care unit. I watched him pass away at the age of 64. Just days before he was super happy because he finished his last Sharepoint developer contract and essentially the last job of his career before retirement. His birthday is April 8, he was about to retire.
He passed away March 2. About a month before this, he decided to opt out of his wife's insurance just to save the multi-thousand dollar bill. He was about to enroll in Medicare just as soon as he turned 65 so his thinking was that he felt pretty good, was eating super healthy and while he had occasional pain in his chest that he was working on(taking blood thinners), it shouldn't have been that bad. As you can imagine this was a unbelievably dangerous situation. He paid for insurance essentially his whole life and now his surviving family risked having a bill in the many MANY dozens of thousands of dollars. To make matters worse us while still panicking about him being in the critical care unit tried to re-activate his insurance on March 1 but it was too late. You have to do it by Feb 28 or else you are dropped. We ended up super unlucky. Fortunately, his wife(my mother) had recently had to take a leave of absense from her job due to her own medical issues. This allowed us to utilize COBRA and thank goodness COBRA allowed us to backpay insurance for both him and her for the prior month. We got so freakin lucky in that regard just thanks to a small provision when COBRA was enacted.
This whole saga makes me incredibly sad and angry at the same time that we have such a garbage system in this piece of shit country. There should never be a situation where you have to be stuck with insurance costs that takes up the majority of your income. Yet this trash system is doing exactly that. My dad was an immigrant from Pakistan and always hustled hard to make ends meet for his family. He successfully raised three kids and put them through college debt free (all successful software engineers). He never incurred much debt but struggled from time to time just due to difficulty finding jobs during the busts of our industry. Nevertheless the fact that he started off as an EE, then an embedded systems firmware developer, then a C Developer, then a Java Developer, then a C# Developer and finally finishing as a Sharepoint developer (with odd jobs in between) showed that he was talented enough to traverse the whole stack(which few developers manage to do and I wish I gave him more credit for) and that he achieved the American dream. He was robbed when it came time to collect on his life's hard work. ONE MONTH. Thats all it was. I can only imagine how so many others were not as lucky as we were that we were still in the COBRA period and had the funds to backpay 2 months of health insurance for two elderly people. I just spent the last year fuming while watching how Biden's trash bill went from including lowering the Medicare age to essentially watering it down until it had practically nothing left to being killed. What is it going to take until people wake up and upend this system?
It's a toxic, defeatist, abusive, and deeply unhealthy mentality to have.
Calculating percentage difference of two percentages overstates their differences in regards to the underlying statistic.
For example... 'be 12% more likely to be unemployed' is used to state the difference between an unemployment rate of 5.6% and 5%
Unfortunately that removes a lot of usefulness from the site.
If It Were My Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13709405 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
IfItWereMyHome.com: Your Life in a Different Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806405 - Dec 2015 (2 comments)
Compare your country to any other place - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9472001 - May 2015 (2 comments)
Living conditions in other countries compared to your own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2726967 - July 2011 (3 comments)
Website calculates how your life might be like in another country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119220 - Jan 2011 (106 comments)
For example, ask me my income, my family size, my religious views, etc. Then give me a "profile" of a fictional person in country X to whom I could relate.
Electricity and oil are essentially access to material wealth. An American uses more because they probably have a bigger house on more land and a fancy big car.
Spending more money on health care could be good if it means you have greater access, or bad if it means you're just paying a lot for the same.
A class divide isn't automatically worse, it could be great for you if you're on top.
I thought it would be more interesting if they asked you your age, sex and socio/economic percentile ("privilege") because in a lot of places the mean experience is quite different from many folks' reality.
You have to go to Compare Countries , and it automatically selects a home country. You have to click the small link in the text to select a different home country.
The first country is your home country. The second is the country you're comparing to.
Also strikes me as a little unlikely that anyone actually reading the descriptions rather than looking at the colours would prefer Libya to the US on the basis of the stats (sure, that healthcare is really expensive and that prison population is insane, but I'd rather earn 5x as much and live longer than have a smaller carbon footprint)
- quality of healthcare
- how much is actually out of my pocket
Compared to Australia, NZ, the UK, I have better healthcare in the US. And financially it’s insignificant.
The American system is so deeply flawed and broken in many ways; high inequality is one result. But the states is just that: a loose collection of highly varying fairly independent states. YMMV.
Agreed. In the US if you work at a very large company that predominantly has high value employees then you very likely have the best health coverage in the world by far.
I am the beneficiary of such a health plan. I pay $2,400 per year for my family plan. My total out of pocket after that is $750 per year.
Oh and unions. They have great health coverage generally as well.
Everyone else has from good to terrible.
Your company also pays at least as much directly, and it's part of your compensation.
I'm not sure how relevant the healthcare of wealthy people is, though. Wealthy people have good healthcare everywhere.
In many ways the system is not any different than a casino; the promise of winnings and riches, while the whole theater around it is purely meant to provide confidence (i.e, the con in confidence trick) to separate people from their money while making them think they had a good time (feeling good about themselves, the primary appeal to people's narcissism).
Yet, somehow no matter how much we blow at the Casino called education/healthcare/"defense"/social programs ... the only thing that gets better are the bank accounts of the executives and directors and presidents while all the measures and statistics and metrics have scraping a bottom for decades.
The only war the US government and the parasitic people that make it up have ever waged successfully, is the war on getting the value of the work the middle class does into their parasitic pockets through all manner of schemes and con jobs.
For example: If you consider the massive losses after WW2 and the effort it took to rebuild after the war, it seems like the aftermath resulted in many of those countries in Europe establishing programs with the idea that the society stands together as one and should help each other out. This mentality affects many European government behaviors to this day.
It is a challenge of human nature to restrain excessive and extremely inefficient behaviors when there are excesses of resources available to be squandered.
I have extensive experience in and with the US government at very high levels, as well as European governments. And although it really does not require my perspective, it has become exceedingly apparent to me over the years that the biggest problem of the size of government is that it breaches the bounds of human cognition. What I mean by that is that, to simplify it, people are put in charge of not only spending money that is not theirs and there is no accountability for it, and they are even compelled to get rid of it as fast a possible, but they also have essentially zero ability to, e.g., differentiate between thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, billions of dollars, or trillions of dollars because they are just numbers on paper/screen.
Think of it this way, do you think of run-on implications of naming a var 1000 vs 10000000000? No, you don't, it's just adding abstracted and inconsequential numbers in most cases. The impact is extremely minimal. I realize that is a simplification, but when you have seen it happen and have been part of it as often and consistently as I have it becomes a whole different thing to understand. And that does not even touch on the massive incentives to not only not care about frittering away and squandering money, but being incentivized to do so because you are making yourself or friends and a network that will benefit you rich ... again, with other people's money, i.e., theft.
It really is little more than if a gang were to break into your house and were able to steal most of your life savings, with impunity and kept doing it. Do you think they would be prudent and thrifty with that money, or blow it on partying, excess, and paying off others?
THAT is why people are against "large government", because only small government even has the potential to be "efficient".
If that were true then we wouldn't see multiple examples of that model failing so many countries worldwide (half the countries in the third world have 'small governments') or even look at the Red states. They follow this principle to the tee yet the overwhelming majority of them have worse outcomes, worse services, and overall worse governance than the big government states.
>It is a challenge of human nature to restrain excessive and extremely inefficient behaviors when there are excesses of resources available to be squandered.
I lived in France for a few months and while I definitely saw signs of the bureaucracy, I don't think this in of itself prevents effective governance. At the same time I saw this, I also saw a robust social safety net(in the form of friends losing their jobs and not being worried one bit while they took some time off and calmly got another job) , excellent infrastructure compared to the US(I wish we had the Paris metro), and an excellent health care system. Having to deal with very annoying bureaucracy at the post office, the local arrondissement administration or the embassy (all of which I did) is made up for the fact that the critical things are just run so well.
I agree with your principle from a theoretical sense and as a developer I often thought of ways to optimize Paris and other cities in Europe. Europe's greatest charm is the potential of its people. I saw so much 'gold' everywhere in the sense that if the EU really wanted to, they have all the ingredients to become a super power. They have the money, definitely have the talent but lack the the underlying will to make it happen. There were so many opportunities to optimize processes there and make the place lean (Especially Paris where I spent the most amount of time but this applies to Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam as well).
At the end of the day, they found a way to make things work and avoid the massive gridlock the US has. I'm convinced the reason people in the US are against large government is due to the fact that they haven't effectively seen any other system. Only about a third of citizens have a valid passport so many haven't traveled overseas. ~40% of Americans can't even cover a 400$ emergency.
[1]:https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/articles-reports/2021...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
“Use less energy” is highlighted in green (as if that’s better) even though energy use is one of the hallmarks of civilisational progress.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone advocating degrowth or depopulation in the UK. We're more into increasing renewable energy.
Some of the hard core environmentalists don't like nuclear energy, and they do tend to be more on the left side of politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
The concluding statements say:
"Chris Goodall, an author on low carbon living and energy, said: “The paper usefully reminds us what matters in the fight against global warming. But in some ways it will just reinforce the suspicion of the political right that the threat of climate change is simply a cover for reducing people’s freedom to live as they want.
“Population reduction would probably reduce carbon emissions but we have many other tools for getting global warming under control,” he said. “Perhaps more importantly, cutting the number of people on the planet will take hundreds of years. Emissions reduction needs to start now.”
Seems reasonably balanced to me.
The reduction of population would probably work but it would take too long, is terrifying to me. *Edit* "WILL" take too long is even scarier.
IMHO People are the best hope we have for innovating and solving the situation we find ourselves in, anyone preaching depopulation as a answer should be intensely scrutinized for what other beliefs they hold regarding final solutions.
The thing the American ruling class fears most (at least until now, the rise of China) is an alliance between Russia and Germany, and they’ll go very far to prevent that. The purpose of the continuing American occupation of Germany is not to keep Russia from invading Germany, there’s zero risk of that.
Granted that 1945-1990 was somewhat of an anomaly, it was a recent and important one...
While that would suck, why on gods earth would democratic Germany align itself with Russia? Looking for another Berlin Wall? They really loved that the first time.
There's no fear of either an alliance, or invasion, thanks to American and other Nato troops. But continue live ingin your ivory education tower - that's what we fight for after all.
Rather than get into the agenda behind such a site, I'll just scroll to the bottom of this page and find a comment beaten down by the mob and try to bring some balance.
Dying 30 years earlier certainly can reduce your lifetime energy consumption.
> spend 99.58% less money on health care
That is apparently a 'benefit' of living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When compared to:
> die 23.88 years sooner
perhaps the health care statistic should have been in red?
Your backlash against the representation says more about your beliefs than it does about the site.
Yes, this was understood. The context I gave my answer in was after seeing other comments which indicated that the site was somehow designed to make the US look bad. The only reason I can even fathom for how a commentor would question the inclusion of the healthcare cost metric is from embarassment at healthcare costs here and wishing to justify it with a discussion of outcomes (which, as I pointed out earlier, is already included in the life-expectancy metric).
I don't see how any interpretation of their comment can get around the fact that GP doesn't agree that healthcare costs should have been included as a "benefit", which I take issue with. Healthcare costs are a valid concern, and something I'd look into before emigrating. To me, big healthcare costs is a gigantic red flag for a country. In fact, health care costs (and other sensibilities around public welfare) are near the top of the list for why I might some day emigrate.
Why do you think GP doesn't see lower healthcare costs as a benefit?
I am not sure if the argument regarding life expectancy being tied to healthcare costs is a valid one as there are so many other factors, but I do know that there is somewhat of a brain drain that tends to draw health specialists from countries with lower health care costs to the US. Eg: According to Google... An anesthesiologist's average annual salary in Canada is $218,069 where as in the US the average is $403,300 and that is without doing any currency exchange. This results in a reduced number of surgeries in Canada as it is required to have an anesthesiologist present when ever someone is sedated, and that results in long waiting lists, especially for non essential surgeries such as those for knee or back pain. 2 years or more is not unusual before getting a referral to see a specialist and then there can be just as long of a wait for the surgery. Basically in Canada we have very low health care costs but also defacto bread lines for medical treatment.
I hate these numerical comparison between countries. Don’t I already know most of these facts? Aren't they really comparisons at the margins (rare event vs. rarer event)?
How about other considerations like some people like to live in a country where you can easily own a gun, homeschool your kid, or say whatever you want without fearing for your liberty (only your job)?
Germans would rather not have these things, and thats cool, for them.
>... some people like to live in a country where you can... say whatever you want without fearing for your liberty... Germans would rather not have these things...
I'm pretty sure Germany has roughly equivalent freedom of speech protection to the US.
Which is fine, Germans believe that they need mental straightjackets or they start invading neighbors. But those arent the rules I want were I live
Are you implying that Americans don't regularly (as in, at least once every decade after the last World War) invade other countries even without those "mental straightjackets"? :)
And yes, I know it's stupid to ascribe this to "Americans", but that's the same as saying that of Germans... perhaps we're both talking out of prejudice?
(Americans mind you. not their leaders. The leaders are cutthroat internationalists)
Germans invade their neighbors out of a feeling of superiority, or needing their “living space”. Again, look at the propaganda. (Not all! The German opposition to Hitler was heroic. But outnumbered)
What drives Germans to war should be suppressed. What drives Americans to war is fundamentally good and should be augmented with proper history lessons in the hope they’ll learn to stop believing their leaders.
And as disgusting as American wars are… you really want to compare American wars to the Germans’?
It's the kind of joke I would make with friends, like Woody Allen's urge of invade Poland if he listens to too much Wagner. I can laugh about it, but it's not an argument.
Obviously this is not an ethnic part of German’s being. Ethnically Im probably German, and as you might tell Im not in large agreement with them - racial arguments are boring. The Prussian educational model (still extant), however, has long been suspected and researched as a reason for German’s inability to disobey and effectively oppose Hitler’s murderous regime.
Im not the first to say this, btw
Second, you wrote
“I'm also quite sure it's harder to fire someone in Germany for something they tweeted, and "opinions are my own" is not as popular as a disclaimer.”
To which I countered that German law puts you in jail for saying things you’d merely loose your job for in the US.
Now, Im not one to judge or belittle others’ laws as long as they don't impose them on other countries (yes, I don't like America’s penchant for exporting “democracy” to the ME). I assume peoples have a reason for their society’s laws. In the case of Germans and their speech laws, I offered Germans’ standard explanation why they dont have free speech. Germans, shocked by the depravity of their crimes that the American troops literally dragged them into the camps to witness, believe they cant have total free speech because they’re prone to get over excited and start invading their neighbors.
Who am I to judge? I don’t, its their society to structure as they please. But in my society, we like American style total free speech.
Agreed that a patriot criticizes his country (btw, Im Western European, not American. Yet) Chesterton wrote:
“My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.”
And I agree. Where I disagree is these metrics are that important, or even relevant. Especially since they are differentials of small numbers (however more likely I am to get shot at in the US compared to Germany its still a very rare event. Nor do I need to be told about Germany to know that there is poverty in the US.
Instead, let’s criticize America on its own. There’s plenty of material,
“ I'm pretty sure Germany has roughly equivalent freedom of speech protection to the US. ”
No country has the legal speech protections the US has. No one is even in the same league. Thats why speech control is outsourced to private entities. The obvious example of German restrictions: try buying Mien Kampf or debating the veracity of the Holocaust. Or playing the original Wolfenstein with the real artwork in it.
We all agree here (I hope!) that ppl arguing against the veracity of the Holocaust are factually wrong, that Mein Kampf is horrendous; but I don’t want to live in a country that imposes that on me. Germans are cool with that. Germans recognize that they need these restrictions placed upon them. Thats the beauty of nation states - nations can impose their own rules on themselves.
You're right that this is an obvious example, in fact I would say that it's too obvious and doesn't really make your point for you. Of course any right-thinking nation that had committed vast and terrible atrocities during a major conflict could be reasonably expected to try to suppress the kind of rhetoric that led to those things happening in the first place. I don't see that as a freedom of speech issue - rather it underscores the point that freedom of speech does not equate to the right to incite violence or cause harm. Or is this the point that you're making? That a modern Hitler could easily come to power in the US and that this is somehow desirable? I realise I'm being somewhat hyperbolic but if protection of the right to incite violence or cause harm is 'the league' that the US operates in, then I don't understand why any sane person would want that.
Wow, these are the most important things to you? Sounds pretty dystopian.
These are the things Germans get hung on about the US.
What I like about America are Americans. Especially middle America. They’re salt of the Earth. I grew up in Europe, and Europeans are, not all mind you, cynical and bitter people. Its so weird to move to America and having complete strangers salute you, even strike a conversation with you.
Thats why I love this country. Now, Europeans and europhiles obsess over guns, schools and free speech. They can shove it. We like our society the way it is. Otherwise, to live in an uglier version of Europe (European cities are beautiful), I would have stayed… in Europe!
Ive never met an American who didn’t want health care so his neighbor wouldn't have it. Instead I find Americans extremely curious in how healthcare is done elsewhere since they keep asking me about health care wherever Ive lived.
To Republicans I tell them American health care isn't that great (its terrible) and elsewhere’s not that bad, even quite good.
To Democrats I tell them the problems others have America doesn't, and I remind them that “greedy” America spends more public money per capita on healthcare than almost any other country in the world.
Americans are far more reasonable than they’re given credit for.
Having been the victim of a home robbery, I might like to have a gun, although I can't say I like what it means on a societal level.
Sounds pretty utopic in my book.