> US has become a third-world country
Not sure why people like to say this
Not sure why people like to say this
Do you need more? Because there's more. Political corruption. Prison recidivism. Military spending at the cost of supporting education, healthcare, housing. Increasing limits on speech. (A state just said that men have to dress like men if they are performing for kids.)
Edit: because we still haven't addressed the Flint water crisis. Because we still have starving children despite producing more food than we can eat. Because care for even routine medical procedures can bankrupt a family.
Now make a list of things that make the US a developed nation rather than a “third world country”.
60 years ago I'd have a huge list. But we sorta stopped caring and we've been costing on that historical success.
Though to me, whenever I have been there, especially California, it looks more like the American South before the Civil War, with poor people doing bad jobs (people with broken arms at the cash register, Mexicans doing hotel rooms or people 70+ years old packing groceries) and rich people in big cars driving around with an oversized cup of coffee. There is the rich elite and the servants.
So this is why people say this.
The changeover happened in the early 1970s. The Powell Memorandum spells out the political program enabling it. Starting in the '70s, while the GDP has continued ever upward, middle income leveled off, and has barely risen since. All of the difference has been carefully diverted into the pockets of the 0.1%. Now the US has many billionaires and many, many millionaires, and "the rest", who are what is called a "managed population", our apparent collective consent to all this carefully curated.
Rebelliousness is channeled carefully into increasing the divide. The radical increase in fortunes of billionaires over the past four years is always blamed on something about COVID, not on very deliberate policies enacted by the government in power at the time.
I mean, this article.
You'd never experience injustice like this in any of my countries. It is the stuff of a second rate third world country, not at all becoming of a developed one.
We also generally don't need to fear random gun slaughter. I've not once worried about that for my children when at school etc, only errant drivers and pm25 pollution enters my mind.