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Comment by softcactus | Hacker News Reader

People have high standards, but you're assuming that everyone has a decent level of information/education. Most people don't have a clue what's going on. I mean just look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGjaNXNXm-Y

How many people in drug-ridden rural communities will take this at face value? Who can blame them when their entire circle of acquaintances thinks the same and the TV and radio says the same thing?

Accountability is important but our media is incredible at misdirecting our attention. Compare the media attention given to the Panama Papers vs the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. The gatekeeping of information is by design, if people knew how badly they were getting screwed over, there would be riots in the streets.

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That assertion doesn’t pass the smell test. Americans are among the most highly educated people in the world. And significantly more educated than folks in most European countries, and significantly more educated than Americans of previous generations.

I’ve got an engineering undergraduate degree and a law degree, and when I saw that ad, I remembered the 2020 Democratic debate where nearly everyone raised their hand to decriminalizing border crossings and free healthcare for illegal aliens.

You can split hairs and say that Biden didn’t raise his hand, and he’s the President, not Elizabeth Warren. But the ad doesn’t depend on folks being “uneducated.” It merely requires them to make some uncharitable inferences about how much influence the supporters of those other candidates have over Biden. In my opinion it’s a legal tackle.

As to people being “screwed over” they’re not. Noah Smith, a liberal, has done quite a good job showing how most Americans are better off than their European counterparts, except folks at the very bottom: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americans-are-generally-ri...

> but again this is just one more data point showing that the typical American enjoys a higher material standard of living than the typical European.

> A person at the cutoff of the bottom 10% in the U.S. takes home only $11,287 per year, while their counterpart in Denmark takes home $15,607.

Instead of assuming that people are just uneducated and irrational, maybe educate yourself and understand what dynamics are really at play. The median American is choosing greater consumption capacity at the expense of safety nets for those at the bottom. That’s arguably selfish, but not irrational.

Yup, that’s the idea behind democracy, you vote for your own self interest.

Look at Germany and it’s voting pattern for Russian interests, did voting to supply Russia with vast amounts of money to rearm get it anywhere?

Visa overstays are a bigger problem than illegal crossings and putting "illegals" on a plane to Mexico is not an especially coherent policy proposal (for instance, Mexico can say no to Alabama, no problem).

Are we supposed to infer that they are stand ins for immigration policy in general?

Visa overstays are a “bigger problem” according to whom? Could someone reasonably consider illegal border crossings a bigger problem because they involve completely unvetted people, as opposed to visa overstays which involve people who were at least minimally vetted in getting a visa?

> I’ve got an engineering undergraduate degree and a law degree, and when I saw that ad, I remembered the 2020 Democratic debate where nearly everyone raised their hand to decriminalizing border crossings and free healthcare for illegal aliens

Look at the actual policy. One example off the top of my head is that Biden hasn't repealed Title 42, which is used to prevent asylum seekers from entering the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_42_expulsion

The only benefits illegal immigrants can take advantage of are WIC and emergency room services:

https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-immigrants-a...

Again, the reason you remember The Democrats talking about giving away free stuff to immigrants is because our media circus shows a false reality and never discusses the actual boring reality. If polled, most conservatives would agree with Biden's border policy because it's the same as Trump's, except without a wall to funnel money to his cronies.

> Instead of assuming that people are just uneducated and irrational, maybe educate yourself and understand what dynamics are really at play. The median American is choosing greater consumption capacity at the expense of safety nets for those at the bottom. That’s arguably selfish, but not irrational.

I'm not some "big-city liberal" looking down on the "poor uneducated rural folk". The reason I speak with authority is because I have seen this firsthand, these people are my family members. The bottom 10% you mention, know that something is wrong with their lives. Small towns have corrupt police forces, horrible social services. Several of my relatives have been sent to the hospital from drinking the local water. They are upset, but the media they consume deflects their anger towards people they have never met. They blame illegal immigrants for "taking money away" from tax dollars that belong to them (never mind the immigrants are in California/Texas and the city water is a municipal thing).

Also from the beginning of the article you linked:

> By almost any economic statistic we can find, Americans tend to enjoy higher material standards of living than their European counterparts. But when it comes to quality-of-life measures that aren’t included in GDP, Europe tends to come out ahead.

I don't know about you, but I would prefer healthcare that isn't tied to my employer, more time off, better retirement, lower crime rates and rates of homelessness. The only reason I work so hard today is because I need to save money now, not later, since our economy is an infinite-growth ponzi scheme. But hey, at least I can buy more crap I don't need. Take that Europeans!

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