The US is a great place to make a lot of money if you're lucky and successful, but a terrible place to retire.
It's really expensive to support homeless population since they use up critical important resources such as emergency care, compared to just giving them a home. They may recover faster and become a productive member of society again.
For sure, it costs real dollars in a national budget, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing for the economy.
But then who's gonna be the delivery man who delivers your post/packages? Who's gonna be your teachers in school? Who's gonna be the baker making your food? Who's gonna be the builder and plumber building the shelter you live in? Who's gonna be the doctor healing you? If nobody needs to work.
Communist nations force people to work, there is no need for that in capitalist nations, people work for the extra rewards.
Yeah they do. I live in a socialist European country and if you refuse to work you'll end up on the streets and only live off charity of others or starve/freeze to death.
You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get sent to you by the unemployment agency, like for example working in a warehouse or in an Amazon fulfilment center. Nobody would willfully take those shit jobs if they wouldn't have to work.
Yeah, there's some people who made a lifestyle out of gaming the system who choose not to work and still get welfare but that's a minority.
That depends on the country, but in the USA you get food stamps regardless of anything else so you wont starve. Then you can live on public lands in a tent or so, many do that in California.
Virtually no one wants to live on the bare minimum, no idea why you tend to create this rather absurd straw man...
Many people prefer that to working.
The Seattle Times wrote an article decades ago where they interviewed a woman on welfare. They asked her what she'd do if her welfare was taken away. She replied "get a job".
They asked a couple of guys in a car with fishing equipment why they lived on welfare instead of getting a job. They replied that on welfare, they get to fish all day and enjoyed it.
I also knew a fellow for years who was on and off unemployment. He said he'd work at a job long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he'd f'up and get laid off. He'd then live off of unemployment, and would fail the requierd job interviews (amazing!). When that ran out, he'd have no trouble finding a job.
A friend of mine ran a nursery. He tried to hire a couple people who said they wanted the job, but would wait until their unemployment ran out before taking it. They were quite open about it.
Not that "absurd" at all.
Hence why I said "virtually", having a few anecdotes from interviews or from someone you knew doesn't cover it. Of course there will be people who choose to live on welfare, the vast majority would rather not. It's a small price to pay to have welfare programs saving countless lives from falling deeper into the hole of abject poverty... We just view this very differently, you prefer the "stick" approach, punish people who you deem unworthy because of their lack of motivation to work; while me on the other hand prefer the "carrot" where I think it's an okay price to pay to have some people choosing to not to work while society can protect people caught in bad times from falling away from the margins.
It's still absurd the straw man you created, please provide me data covering the whole population and we can discuss it, while it's based on these anecdotes you just being guided by your feelings and ideology.
> punish people
It's not about punishing people or whacking them with a stick. It's about paying people to fail.
There's also nothing wrong with you, me, or anybody else freely helping those who you, me, or others deem to be in need.
In reality, most US states are insanely generous.
I recall once my mom had to help a friend's dad who was uninsured and dying of prostate cancer simply apply for benefits. He didn't think the state would pay for it and had just resigned himself to death. My goodness, how silly... Instead, he applied and it was paid for.
I myself have fallen into this trap. When I was laid off, I was going to pay COBRA, instead of just biting the bullet and applying for medicaid. There's almost always a free government provided option if you need it. Literally people don't even bother.
It's just that "normal" housing in the US is what's only attainable to the very rich and only because they inherited it, in most of Europe let's say: even 1% won't be able to buy an equivalent of median new US single family house, in EU - that 1% probably owns a similar or somewhat better house but simply because they bought or built it generations before.
But if you compare the price of the SAME sized house to the average income, the situation is opposite. U.S. is the 3rd best after Oman and Saudi Arabia. It's just that Americans are not satisfied with houses even twice the size of what people in many rich countries are happy with.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
Price per square foot is not a very useful metric, because neither utility nor construction costs scale directly with the size of a house. A 3000 square foot house is not 2x as good as a 1500 square foot house, and it should not cost 2x as much to build. Roughly speaking, walls are expensive, while making the rooms larger is cheap. And bedrooms are cheap, while bathrooms are expensive.
Well, in Germany health care is affordable in terms of cost. However, while 20 years ago you just went to a doctor when you were sick, these days you will wait hours and hours even at your family physician's crowded waiting room. You need a specialist? 6 months if it's something serious like a cardiologist. If you're on private health insurance, alright, only 3 months.
I don't know if this is specific to Germany, or similar in all of Europe.
But that is a change many people notice that I speak with.
They are then finding out that for profit businesses have no interest in re-hiring all the workers they had before the pandemic, because they didn't lose as much business as they saved money in salary, so everyone is just running a skeleton crew that they overwork.
Meanwhile the data I find for emergency room visits are that there's barely been any increase in percentage of the population that visited an emergency room since 1997.
Companies are spending less on services and letting us just suffer because we don't have better options and YET AGAIN dumb Americans for some reason blame the government for completely independent companies making self serving choices?!
Shortly before Obamacare I went to the same variety of specialist in that closer city. I called on a Monday and was in to see him on Thursday morning. Now, the three closest clinics to me have no doctors at all between them, just nurse practitioners and physician assistants. If your condition isn't on their short script you get an appointment in six months with a different nurse, or directions to the emergency room. I'm not claiming this is the general experience, but my experience has vastly enshittified.
The specialist nurse that took me six months to see? He ordered a test and scheduled me to come back and discuss it with him in another six months. Maybe I'll get another five minutes of his time then.
Basically, if you want really good healthcare, you need to live in or near a very large city. (Albuquerque is not a very large city.)
Another thing that's probably changed in the US is larger healthcare companies taking over doctors' practices and enshittifying them to increase profits. Doctors are happy to sell because they're getting close to retirement, and/or tired of dealing with all the administrative hassle on top of actually being a doctor and caring for patients. I've read about this type of thing greatly affecting veterinary care in the US too.
As another commenter said, there’s been an exodus of specialists from rural areas. This is a global phenomenon, not limited to the US.
In the U.S. I can see a midlevel the same day by paying $200 for an annual membership in a mass-affluent pseudoconcierge practice plus $800ish for the appointment+labs, the $800 may be partly or entirely covered by insurance depending on how the conversation goes with the "provider". I have to wait several months if I want to see a real doctor outside of an emergency room. 6 months is about right for seeing a specialist with a preexisting relationship, might need a little more lead time for an initial consultation.
Much easier in Europe, go work in Switzerland or some high paying country then go retire in a low cost area with healthcare.
Could it be that moving to a place with high salaries means that job market is more competitive with higher bar to entry, with more stress, and CoL and housing is proportionally higher so once you factor in housing, healthcare, childcare expenses etc you realize that unless you scored some FANG job that pays orders of magnitude more than the local median, you're more or less at the same wealth point as in the lower CoL locations?
Feels like the solution is to find the place when you can earn more than the median there and not just blindly move to the most expensive places in the world hoping that will make you rich.
Language barriers, mostly. USA doesn't have those, that is the biggest difference I'd say, language barriers is such a massive hindrance to movement even if you are legally allowed to.
Even if the work language is English you still have to live with all the signs etc being in a language you don't understand, and learning a new language is a massive undertaking.
However if you don't care about that then it is really simple. And lots of people are doing just that, people spending a few years working in a high wage place isn't uncommon at all.
Not to mention people tend to not move asmuch in europe compared to the US, and people like to stay close to their community and families in my experience.
Welfare and social programs did not make them successful. Opportunity did.
Even Elon Musk arrived with just a suitcase. He stayed in hostels because of lack of money.
It's instructive to see what's happening in Britain right now where many people dare not take jobs or even join training schemes to improve their prospects - because they will lose their benefits. To quote from the Spectator: "A Channel 4 (TV) program Britain’s Benefits Scandal hears from some of those affected – people who are often missing from the debate. We have 3.2 million trapped in a system in which they are given a decent payout – some I spoke to said about £1,300 a month, some significantly more – but who want to get back to work."
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sickness-benefit-tra...
So we have accountants and scientists who need back surgery intentionally working part-time barista hours.
As a programmer I’m all for gaming the system by knowing and navigating the rules, but the situation is comical.
[0] https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine
[1] https://www.the-sun.com/news/7911051/elon-musks-dad-errol-em...
If you live in the USA already, why didn't you start SpaceX? Millions of immigrants come to the USA. Why didn't anyone else start SpaceX?
With that being said, I'm not sure personal bankruptcy is a particularly meaningful risk when the individual in question can enjoy substantial riches by sheepishly(?) returning home to the care of their parent(s).
Granted, neither you nor I know if this is an option for Musk, but given that his mother speaks quite fondly of her son in public, it seems reasonable enough to me to believe that it is.
What I'm trying to say here is: Musk's risks are not mine. Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Celebrating someone for having taken a risk while omitting what exactly was on the line for them is a debate tactic built on a false equivalency which can be used as a cudgel to beat opponents down in arguments if its foundational trick goes unnoticed.
>> He jumped from the building and survived! Why can't you jump from the building too?
> The fire department erected a life net for him beforehand. All I have is sidewalk.
> Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Musk did spend time in the US with no money. He got a job. It was a dirty job cleaning industrial machinery. A job anyone with a willingness to work could get.
Instead of doing all this guessing and assuming and making up things about Musk, why not read an actual biography of him? The one I read is by Vance:
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
It costs $1.32. No excuses!
It took $100M to start SpaceX. The argument works better if you start with one of the more modest earlier efforts.
I don't live in the USA.
Because very few people has US$100 million of initial capital investment.
Why didn't you start SpaceX? As far as I know you're an aeronautical engineer, so why didn't you do something bigger than the D languge?
The same answer might apply to anyone else who you ask that question.
If you know you can always go live with your rich family, then the cost of failure is pretty close to 0, so you can repeatedly take big risks until one of them pays off.
Worst case? You end up a trust-fund brat.