We seem to get these comments all the time from any Europeans gawking at the US here on Hacker News. Just to be clear, you understand much of the rest of the developed world has strong social safety nets, abundant public services, free to the payer healthcare, often free college? The US has none of this and workers are expected to bear all of these costs out of their own wages, so those wages need to be higher than they are in Europe for that to be possible. You can stare at us like we're all idiots, but what do you expect anyone reading this to do? If every American reading Hacker News agreed to all vote for candidates who would put in place stronger safety nets and public services and subsidize wage earners so they didn't need to bear every cost out of their own wages, we still may as be pissing in the ocean both because of how small a portion of the voter base we represent but also because our legislative system is more or less intentionally designed to make that kind of thing impossible.
Do you realize we just went through a crisis where the country nearly defaulted on its debt because our Congress somehow has the legal ability to pass a budget but then not agree to actually fund the budget they themselves passed just a few months earlier? The only way out of that was to agree to pass a law saying we'd cut public spending even further, outside of the regular budgeting cycle, even if the budgets themselves don't say to do that. We just pass laws saying we're going to ignore and contradict other laws we just passed, mostly because the structure of our representative system severely overweights the representation given to underpopulated states, originally because that prevented slavery from being banned and we had to give them that power for them to agree to be part of the country, but now who even knows why? Uncharitably, because billionaires and gigantic businesses that don't want to get taxed have convinced people in these states that stronger public spending would benefit atheists and foreigners and not them. Charitably, it's more inertia than anything else and it's more or less baked into the American identity that this is how we do things and it's why we're special and successful, not that we have a resource-rich country that was underpopulated because of smallpox killing all the natives and across two vast oceans from a couple of world wars that destroyed any plausible industrial competition for most of a century.
But again, what are any of us supposed to do about is? My choice as just a single person who happens to make more than enough money to pay well above the posted price for anything I regularly purchase is to tip generously or take this kind of principled stand that I'm going to singlehandledly change centuries of cultural habits and expectations by stiffing hourly service staff, because well, the rest of the world has done it.