There's an attitude here of "I'm gonna do the best for my family; fuck all other people". Such a culture isn't going to be globally competitive. The money machines have dried up and there's no obvious frontier remaining....
If I was going to rank countries best described by this statement the US would come in very close to the bottom.
Not to mention soft generosity like tipping culture.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/03/09/america-charitable-giving-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
Plus there are limits on how much you can deduct and it's less for assets than for cash. Lastly we have a thing called Alternitive Minimum Tax what is a catchall for anyone that thinks they can pay less by adjusting their income down. You need to calculate both taxes and you pay the higher one.
barfs
It is from 2022 and mainly focuses on pandemic times, so I'd be curious to see what these trends look like compared to pre/post pandemic. I'm sure I could do more digging and find the answers to this, but still I appreciate this, it is interesting.
One thing I think I would push back on though is the remark of 'soft generosity like tipping culture' which isn't mentioned at all in the list. I also would not consider US tipping culture generosity, but more of a social contract/obligation. Someone that does not tip anywhere, except for where they received great service, isn't normally seen as a non-generous person, they're seen as not abiding by the social contract that you have to tip.
But it’s not just tipping at a restaurant. We tip our garbage men, helpers, mailmen, doormen, maids, nanny’s, etc at Christmas. You don’t have to do this. But many of us do because we are raised to be generous if we are fortunate enough to be.
Yes, there’s definitely a lot of nice people there (most, even), but there’s also a whole bunch more that make it feel unsafe to just walk the streets.
A country with one of the highest income inequalities in the western world!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in...
Being generous is voting for healthcare and social welfare programmes for all, regardless of income.
Also, the charitable giving figures you quote are skewed as the US offers tax breaks to donate to "charities" which can be financially beneficial to the giver (charity oversight in the USA is notoriously lax).
> Not to mention soft generosity like tipping culture.
Don't take the piss!
There are various methods of rationing healthcare. I'm not sure choosing the government to arbitrate rationing is any more "generous". Regardless, American's that can't afford to subsidize their own healthcare (poor, disabled, child, elderly, etc) have many options from the government to assist them such as Medicare, Medicaid, a variety of state programs, etc. I also wouldn't use the NHS as any model of egalitarian or generosity in healthcare as any Brit that can afford it has private insurance on top of it since the NHS leaves a lot to be desired.
> Also, the charitable giving figures you quote are skewed as the US offers tax breaks to donate to "charities" which can be financially beneficial to the giver (charity oversight in the USA is notoriously lax).
You can deduct from your taxable burden certain charitable donations, but it isn't anywhere near a complete write-off. You'd save considerably more by just paying taxes instead of giving to charity. And this is a great policy as it allows citizens to fund things that would otherwise be well out of scope of government.
> Don't take the piss!
Waitstaff is what many people think of in this context. But waitstaff in the USA earns considerably more than in the UK or EU due to the generosity of tipping culture. I've never met a waiter that wanted a higher hourly wage to replace their tips as they can and do make a lot of money with tips.
But Americans tip far more than waiters. During Christmas we give tips to our garbage collectors, mail carriers, extra to maids and other helpers, tip to teachers and school staff, doormen if you live in an apartment with them. People give greatly to organizations they support and to their churches.
I've spent a lot of time in the UK and although a lovely place in many regards, I'm not sure there's a more stingy, tight culture anywhere else on Earth. Everything is precise and transactional and anything regarding helping someone is measured and on the lean side. In large part it's because Brits are very poor compared to Americans but it's also a culture thing too.
Globally competitive in what sense, then?
I do get the strong impression that there was a period of perhaps a century or so, from the mid 19th through late 20th, where we were at least a little less likely to be fighting against each other. Those were rather prosperous times.
Since then we've still produced some very big things, but it seems less widely beneficial. And we do seem increasingly to be at each other's throats. I don't know if they're related.
Americans are also among the most generous and charitable people according to a number of easily Googleable metrics. What is “fuck other people” about that?
Nowhere is perfect and America is far from it but at least 25% of the world (and likely higher) would immediately move there if they could.
In any case, the UK parliament has existed since 1705, which predates the American revolution.
Unless you wanna argue that age of majority is the same as disallowing black people and women, which I'd disagree strongly with. You don't grow out of being black or a woman.
I don't understand what the difference between restricting the vote based on age and race or gender. Universal suffrage must be universal, right? It's not clear what growing out of anything has to do with the concept.
Otherwise it seems to just be "universal amongst the groups I think should have it".
Illnesses are non-essential characteristics. A human doesn't necessarily have an illness. We're okay with discriminating towards people based on this. You can't become a pilot if you have severe problems with your vision and you can't operate heavy machinery if you get regular seizures.
Age is essential, a human must have an age, but it's mutable. A human must also have a height and weight, but they're also mutable. We're generally okay with discriminating based on all of these. You can't go on certain rides if you're too tall or too short, you can't vote if you're too young, you can't ride horses if you're too heavy and you can't give blood if you're too light.
Race, sex and sexuality are essential and immutable. In the west people seem to be converging on it not being okay to discriminate based on essential immutable characteristics. I agree with this and I see race, sex, sexuality as far more intimately tied to the essence of a human being than their age, height, weight or list of illnesses.
If you disagree with these distinctions and groupings, that's fine. But then I don't think there's much of a point in us continuing as it'll simply take too long, heh.
So, having read all of the above, my first objection to myself is "So I think we should be okay with taking a person's right to vote based on their height? It falls in the same category as age.". To that objection I'd say no, we should not. Note that in all the above examples of discrimination the basis for the discrimination is that the discriminated group can't do the activity safely/competently. We're usually not okay with baseless discrimination. You can't disallow disabled people from buying your cake, you can't disallow short people from eating at your restaurant and you can't disallow young people from operating a camera. These would all be baseless and the characteristics being discriminated don't relate to the actions in any meaningful way.
In this same sense, young people can't vote safely/competently and voting is important enough for us to desire safe/competent voting. A young persons brain simply is not developed enough to be able to reason in some ways an adult can. A young person is also far too attached to their parents. The parents will have such a huge amount of influence that giving children the right to vote is the same as giving their parent another vote.
Now, this leads to another conclusion which I'm not entirely comfortable with. If we're okay with not giving a person the right to vote based on age-caused lack of reasoning ability, shouldn't we also be taking away the ability to vote from adults who are deemed to have the reasoning ability of someone below the age of majority? I'm not sure to be honest. I suppose we're just legislating for the average though and the average person above the age of majority has a greater reasoning ability than the average person below the age of majority. So even people well below the average, below even the young people average, are treated as though they're average.
This says nothing about what the age of majority should be, mind you. 18? 12? 45? Who knows. But I find it reasonable that a age limit should exist and that it has enough basis to still call it a democracy.
Thank you for attending my TED talk :)
If so, your definition just doesn't seem realistic or useful.
Defining "democracy" would take us two the rest of our lives but we'd never arrive at losing while ahead by 2.1% in a popular vote as the conclusion.