I envy these European countries, who can manage to do things collectively that make sense to do collectively.
Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."
Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."
Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture.
As the nations grow in size you generally end up splitting into states that have more localized incentives and/or you have a more brutal central apparatus like in the large states of China/Russia.
But this is. This is about attitudes, not size.
And even culturally, population size determines attitudes. How do Europeans feel about Brussels? Can you imagine the commission building an EU-wide bunker system?
Not really, it's per capita, not per area. There's nothing physical about America that would prevent it from requiring developers to add a shelter to every housing unit or in every housing development, like Switzerland does. Likewise, there's nothing physical preventing America from building and maintaining public shelters in denser urban areas.
The article also mentioned Sweden has public bunker capacity in urban but not rural areas. There's not physical reason American could not do something like that.
You could imagine this being accomplished at a city-wide level out of city budgets and local taxes, but again this just reinforces the point that size is a problem.
Sweden's population is more concentrated in cities than the US's population. In the US, rural voters have a dramatically outsized influence over the senate.
It's kind of amazing - friends of mine consider private school (which cost as much as a college education when I was young) to be a must-have. Imagine paying 20-40k a year for your kid's high school, or sometimes grade school! And these are very successful people who went to public school themselves. One is a college flunk-out.
My wife and I don't have kids, so I guess I don't get it. I suspect it's not just about education, but also classism, trying to ensure the kids end up in the right socio-economic class when they grow up.
Maybe at the very elite end, but I don't think that applies generally. No one's going to Catholic School (IIRC, the biggest single type of private school in the US) because of "who you grow up knowing," for instance.
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but at least in my local area those two things overlap nigh-identically.
In many other countries it’s rather crumbling infrastructure and massive public spending and bureaucracy with little to show for.
And a lot of these "collectivist" things in Europe are being proven to have been underwritten by the US defense budget, and now that that's no longer the case, uncomfortable conversations are starting to occur on the eastern side of the pond.
And that a lot of the scoffing online about how Europe is somehow more "enlightened" than the US by having more generous social safety nets is at least partially due to said social safety nets being able to be paid for because the US is guaranteeing military support in the event of a crisis.
Now, under Trump (whether or not you agree), there are going to have to be some hard choices in European capitals on how to fund a military deterrent to Russia if the US policy is "maybe we will, maybe we won't." Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed.
Or a Trumpist government may decide to provide no support at all, given how they have treated "the law of the land" so far.
Downvotes are supposedly for culling irrelevant comments, not to express dislike, or am I confusing things?
Funny enough, when talking about European problems I've often found that downvotes happen in the (US) morning (when the Euros are still awake) and upvotes happen in the (US) evening
Most US military spending was on things other then Europe. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, non have anything to do with Europe.
Lots of military spending was needed even if the US had been by itself. And the US made lots of money selling military equipment to Europe.
Depending on what nations you compare it to, the difference during the cold war was a few % of GDP. Not enough to explain all the difference in social and other state programs. As the difference in spending is often 15-20%pt or more.
So the real difference is clearly willingness for taxation and social programs. And of course nations like Finland and Sweden were never part of NATO.
European countries had cheap higher education and healthcare in 1989 as well, even with higher military spending (and higher than USA has today, which is roughly 3.37%). Estonia and Poland both spend more than the US, and they both manage cheap higher education and public healthcare. This indicates that it's also a choice of priorities, where European countries seem more willing to increase taxes for these kind of services.
Personally I think it has something with the sense of belonging, where Europeans belong to a country, most of them with less than 30 million people. Americans are one in 350 million, so it makes sense to me that it's harder to feel 'part' of the same tribe as the other 350 million people.
But you are right that Europe will have to face some hard choices, both because we get less support from the US, and because Russia is more aggressive than before. Personally I am quite convinced that in 5-10 years most European countries will still have cheap higher education and healthcare, but maybe higher taxes.
1) wide dislike of any sort of social support mechanism (no public healthcare, poor support for the elderly / infirm / etc)
2) long history of anti-socialism and major fear of anything more radical, "reds under the bed" etc etc
3) little funding going towards big public infrastructure projects - I had a link to a well researched article - but can't now find it - talking about how US roads, powergrid, etc, is all crumbling away because nothing has been invested in significantly for decades
4) things like private prisons, all with profit-making as motive rather than anything wider such as societal good being considered
As a lefty, this all makes me chuckle - the idea that anyone could be foolish enough to think they can do anything alone without a huge lifelong support network just seems ridiculous. Even the most "self-made" founder who "came from nothing" has had to lean heavily on buses, trains, schools, universities, medical aid, electricity, their families, friends, the internet...
As someone once said, no man is an island - or I guess "it takes a village to raise a child" - so paying it forwards or backwards in taxes is a no-brainer if you think about it rationally.
Here endeth the socialist lesson.
I find that the places where there are insane HOAs are just as insane in the houses that aren't under HOAs.
HOAs do that, yes, but that's not why they are so pervasive in the US, even in non-condominium style developments, and intrusive in their government of what goes on in non-common areas.
Around here you have Zillow reporting "HOA dues: $25/yr" and similar.
Pretty sure that's what Zillow does anywhere where there are HOA dues, sure.
Switzerland is surrounded by belligerents who have historically been at war with each other. France vs Italy. Italy versus Austria and Germany against everyone.
Your take ignores the history of accomplishment in the US. The founding, the constitution, settling the continent , building great cities, industrialization, defeating Nazis, building the Interstate highway system, landing on the moon and placing satellites in space, creating world changing technology to name but a few.
No. I did some research around the start of the Ukraine war. IIRC, the US Civil Defense program was always half-ass and has been pretty much non-existent for my entire lifetime.
I think the last chance we had for a politician that was somewhat visionary was with the first Obama term but he was too entrenched in the politics to actually drive any real change, with all that bipartisanship bullshit. Now they will just continue to invest in driving a wedge between the population to prevent them from noticing they're in a class war.
America is a country of immigrants. Apart from the brutally oppressed indigenous population, everyone is from somewhere else. Hence the Americans' obsession with heritage (the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Black Americans, etc.), and even grouping as blocs based on their ancestry - it is because they don't see themselves as being an American nation?
[*] This can be a problem in its own right, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians by Serbians, the players in the Balkan war each wanted "their" people on "their" side of the border, and murdered or displaced others to make it so. Also, to be fair, a number of European countries no longer collect nationality/ethnicity, including the Swiss, possibly because they don't want such maps to exist for any future nationalists to make use of.