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Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

The US seems to be having a general collapse on multiple fronts due to the apparent unwillingness to tax corporations and the wealthy to a reasonable level. I’ve heard the same thing about infrastructure.

Yet European nations that are not as rich as the U.S. seem to be having issues but doing ok on healthcare, infrastructure and public education.

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Can you be a bit more specific with what you mean by "collapse"? When we talk about a bridge or a building collapsing, we're talking about a very obvious and immediate mode of failure. Are you using "collapse" to mean "noticeable degradation"?

FWIW, the European nation I'm from (France) is definitely not doing OK on healthcare and public education (and debatable on infrastructure). Hard to compare with the US 1:1 in any case, but I'm not sure I'd designate either as a collapse.

Im just taking it from Americans. I’ve never visited and maybe I best stay quiet. But the HN trend with these things is always to say “the whole world is like this”

No no it’s not. The US is lagging behind on many indicators. Another world is not only possible, it actually exists.

>Are you using "collapse" to mean "noticeable degradation"?

Do you believe that the Roman Empire never "collapsed"?

Probably every historian would agree that it did, however that collapse took centuries to complete.

Why do you think more taxing would fix it when we are already near the top of per capita spending per student?

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

Might not help there, I’m not an expert. I just said it because Americans will come in and say “there is no way”. Sorry, there is another way and Europe lives in that other way.

US public education (pre-college) is sorta similar to US healthcare: they spend the most per-capita in the world, and get, on average, very poor results.

Am I reading these charts correctly? They seem to be showing relatively high spending on education and health care compared to other countries.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281589/countries-with-hi...

The health care system is problematic not because it’s not well funded but because parts of the population can’t access it?

I have bipolar and I know online communities where the Americans with BPD talk about not being able to afford their meds.

It is not sufficient to merely fund something, you have to competently execute on it too. The US education system has more than adequately funding, but suffers from terrible administration.

On top of that schools are tasked with too much stuff. On top of general education, schools have to deal with child hunger, child abuse, mental well being, gender and sexuality issues. These should all be separate government provided services. Do we want our teachers to be educators or social servants?

Sounds like the public school system is being made into a scapegoat. Very easy to say “public schooling is broken” when you’ve assigned it 500 tasks and funded it for 10.

> Yet European nations that are not as rich as the U.S. seem to be having issues but doing ok on healthcare, infrastructure and public education.

They seem to be having issues with at least pensions, healthcare and public education

People keep speaking about "Europe" as if it's not 44 nations and many more languages and peoples.

the united states has a similar land area, similar number of states, over 500 sovereign constituent nations, two widely spoken languages, with largely unrestricted travel and trade within. europe does fund and coordinate social investments that involve multiple states. it's a useful comparison

It is definitely not reasonable to say that Europe is having trouble with public education or pensions or infrastructure.

sure it is. many aspects of the continent are subject to federal governance, and before that was the case, much of the social and infrastructural development was interdependent due to support+direction from the us in the west and the soviet union in the east

Federal governance?

No idea what he’s talking about. It seems to be a thing in right wing groups now to talk about Europe in this way.

infrastructure too: they have the same problem with old bridges, with a few recent collapses and many closed to freight; they have an ongoing energy crisis; they have coastal cities in both the north and south where the flood risk is both more imminent and more potentially destructive

You wouldn’t even need to raise taxes to improve some of these programs. Just stop spending such an absurd amount of money on the military.

The US doesn't spend that much on the military in terms of percentage of GDP. Compare it to other developed nations, and it looks pretty average really.

The US already spends more per-capita on students than any other nation. The problem is not funding. Throwing more money at the problem isn't going to help.

> The US doesn’t spend that much on the military in terms of percentage of GDP. Compare it to other developed nations, and it looks pretty average really.

All of the countries with higher GDP share in military expenditures than the US are in one of the following groups:

(1) Middle Eastern countries, (2) Non-Western-aligned former Soviet Republics, (3) Greece, Pakistan, and Morocco.

Of 145 countries with data, the US is #15. It is #3 in the G20, #1 in the G10, #8 of 48 among “high income countries” – with Greece and 7 Middle Eastern countries making up the top 7. It is nowhere close to “pretty average” among “other developed nations”.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil_spend_gdp/

> The US already spends more per-capita on students than any other nation.

Funny that shift from percent GDP to make your (false, even with that standard) claim about US not having high military spending, but shift to per capita rather than per GDP for education spending. On that, the US is merely fairly middle of the pack for developed nations, with 3.2% of GDP in primary/secondary education, compared to 3.1% OECD average.

The American social contract is broken. Government services are utterly broken, not just due to incompetence but because taxing the rich is seen as anti-capitalistic.

If it were not for the strength of the dollar, the US would have been no different from a third world country. Crony capitalists, uneducated populace, politicians lying to said uneducated populace, corruption at all levels (there is county-level lobbying too), healthcare is inaccessible to the average person and the homeless and prison population is greater than the population of some US states combined

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