I am honestly trying to avoid the flame war here - but I do it know how else to frame the question?
In Germany top income tax rate is 50%. In the US, it's 37% if you live in Texas and 56% if you live in California. In Germany long-term capital gains is 25%. In the US, it's 24%. In the US the corporate tax rate is 21%. In Germany it's actually lower at 16%.
The primary difference between Germany and the US is not taxes on the wealthy. It's that the German middle class pays significantly more than the American middle class. A couple with two children, each earning $65k/year will pay 28% of their income in taxes. Then on top of that they'll pay 19% in VAT tax on nearly every purchase. Effectively for every Euro earned, they're left with post-tax purchasing power of 59 cents.
In contrast, the same family in America will only pay 11% of their income in taxes. Depending on state sales tax comes in at 7%, and unlike VAT at most applies to maybe half their budget. For every $1 of income, this American household is left with 85 cents of post-tax purchasing power.
And that's the main difference right there. European welfare states are powered by taxes on the middle and upper-middle that are simply unacceptable to the average American voter. Imagine a politician running on a policy of tripling middle class taxes. It doesn't matter how much single-payer healthcare, free university education, and expanded public transit they promised. Americans would simply never vote for that.
America is a welfare state. If you truly can't afford to go to college, the government will pay for you to go. Look up FAFSA.
If you can't afford medical care, the government will provide it for you. Look up Medicaid.
People pay into Social Security for Retirement, Social Security Disability if you get disabled, Medicare is universal healthcare for anyone 65 or older. Affordable Care Act subsidizes healthcare for anyone else that can't afford it.
I could go on and on and on. There is no black and white - we are just another shade of gray out there.
Americans see themselves as the descendents of their own unique "first generation" ancestor who broke ties with his people of origin and came here to stand on his own two feet. We don't see ourselves as responsible for YOUR first generation ancestor's home country problems or failure to make it here. We may in our newly formed ethnic enclaves take care of each other, but that's opt in. Patriotism to us is about preserving that independence- not a shared lineage. I am generalizing here obviously, but you were asking a kind of zeitgeist question. Hope I help something click for you.
I don't believe it's sustainable. I don't believe it's sustainable here, and I don't believe it's sustainable there either (in fact, as far as I can tell, we've starting to see the cracks in the European welfare state for a while now). We have some welfare state-like programs here - social security, for example, is supposed to provide guaranteed retirement income to the elderly. Both of my grandfathers lived on it for decades before they passed. My father collects it now, but it's not enough to survive, even at his meager standard of living, so he works as a security guard at 72 (and yes, I've offered to let him come live with me but he's too proud to accept). I don't believe that there will be anything left over when I try to collect it in 20 years. If it was actually free, there wouldn't be any reason to be upset, but my social security payments are far higher than what I contribute to my actual 401(k) retirement plan that I do expect to be able to live off of when I'm ready to retire. The welfare state takes everything and eventually provides nothing.
If I lived somewhere like Sweden where there is heavy taxation with equally heavy social benefits, I’d probably be fine with the arrangement and wouldn’t fight it. Sounds nice.
I’m not trying to equate welfare with tyranny, of course. The use of bread and circuses has been associated with the downfall of empires to sway public opinion with a short term good at a long term cost. If you start disrupting our major economic systems like that, we’re more likely to dissolve and those with power would use that weakening to their advantage.
But that's exactly what your first paragraph did, at least in the case of the US. Why do you think welfare "works" for Sweden and would not work for the US? Is Sweden tyrannical?
There’s nothing inherently tyrannical about bread or circuses (unless you’re gluten intolerant or fear clowns). Are you familiar with the use of bread and circuses in the Roman Empire?
“The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.”
Besides that, I think I already addressed your point if reread with good will.
The challenge isn't getting people to say "Yes" when you ask them "Hey do you want all of this great stuff?" That already happens, per the above popularity of individual benefits.
The challenge is getting people to say "Yes" when you ask them "Hey do you want to pay for the government to give you all of this great stuff?" Those two details: higher taxes and government administration, are what erode support for these policies.
The median US citizen believes that "government run" is a synonym for any of dozen negative adjectives: wasteful, won't work, abused by the rich, bureaucratic, untrustworthy, and so on. Are those true or false in any given instance? Would a private sector alternative would avoid those negatives? The specifics do not matter when people are acting on deeply-entrenched, life-long perceptions.
As for why that perception came to be? That would be a historical thesis of its own, and might be tangential to your question.
This article is about a government program managed so terribly, they did not keep track of payments. You had to call in and trigger a review to be forgiven. These 40k loans forgiven are essentially the lowest hanging fruit.
Providing free stuff to layabouts isn't a recipe for success. These "investments" will never pay off. The way to incentivize economic success is via competition.
Unfortunately the US is already far down the path of handouts and participation trophies, and has nurtured an utterly entitled generation who think everything should be handed to them.
And anyway, the problem with education isn't that it's not available to enough people. Smart, motivated kids can get a university education even if they're poor. We have enough academics and highly-educated workers for our economic needs. The problem is that it's become a class marker. Many, many people don't want more degrees out there, because it would make their own degree less valuable. Others are desperate to get a degree at any cost, not because it improves their career prospects, but because it confers high status. So taking on huge debt for a useless degree is fine, and in fact good, because it's conspicuous consumption. Of course, debt sucks, so once they have the degree, loan forgiveness is very much in their interest, but not publicly-funded university.
On the larger question, I think it's a cultural thing. America was settled by people leaving stifling societies to go it alone: Europe at first, then the American establishment on the east coast. The frontier is gone, but that value system persists, and self-reliance and independence are hugely important to many people in the US. There's a pretty good argument to be made that American democracy arose because the wilderness was right there and if they didn't get a say in government, people would just move beyond its reach. That culture is has served us well, but we've run out of frontier, and we're starting to feel the social pressures that Europe has had for millennia. There's no escape from the state, so the way to get ahead is to work the system, get a larger share of the pie rather than growing it, and so on. The pushback to that is to demand more fairness from the system, ie, a welfare state.
This is false. The cost of tuition at public universities has grown faster over the last 20 years than at private universities, for both in-state and out-of-state students.
The average tuition and fees at private National Universities have jumped 144%. Out-of-state tuition and fees at public National Universities have risen 171%. In-state tuition and fees at public National Universities have grown the most, increasing 211%.
Source: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
What the US has is more like "I'm fine with being screwed as long as the others are too" kind of mentality. Look at healthcare. There would be people rejecting Obamacare just because it has "Obama" in its unofficial name, then not be able to pay for treatments.
There is an additional layer to this that some "blue collar" workers feel it is unfair to tax them for education benefits they don't utilize as a working class.
Hopefully we can reframe the debate to include technical skills training like this in addition to university to be inclusive of all of the modern skills people are going to need and that we as a nation need to invest in.
What if they want to get a PhD on how autumn leaf colors in New England impact the emotions of rattlesnakes from Texas? You want to pay for that?
Why are people so focused on this straw man? The problem isn't bad humanities degrees or programs. At all. The problem is the cost of higher ed and the number of people going to get a degree that is effectively a certificate to work in the US economy. Then people needing to take out loans to pay these gate-keepers.
A strawman is an intentional misrepresentation of a proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.
So where's the strawman? People do get degrees that many people and the labor market itself finds useless. Lots of people get them! No strawman.
The problem is the cost of higher ed and the number of people going to get a degree that is effectively a certificate to work in the US economy
The cost of higher education has been driven by the misguided attempts by the government to make college affordable. As for a degree being necessary to work in the U.S. economy - I know first hand this is not the case. At all. But trying to convince someone with a PhD and "a few masters" of this fact is going to be as successful as trying to convince an 80 year old life-young devout follower of a religion that they're wrong about their religion on their deathbed.
For one thing PhD's teach statistics no matter what's studied...and if more people...you included....were good at statistics to evaluate good policies, the world would be much better off.
I learned statistics as part of the CFA program. I also learned economics and can spot a dead weight loss when I see one.
Be careful what you wish for. if the US was a VC fund, they'll have to not invest in every company they come across and perform due diligence, which probably means excluding disadvantaged people with poor academic records.
In Europe education is largely public and thus its subject to budgetary concerns. It's why Germans go to vocational training and have half as many people in tertiary education, there's no degree or cost inflation.
People in the US who aim for European policies need to understand that it consists not of liberal fiscal policy but of robust public services provided by and largely paid for by the middle and working class.