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Comment by d_burfoot | Hacker News Reader

Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway.

It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

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I think many Americans do not realize how much is spent on debt interest payments, which are a tidy source of income for rich people.

I don’t think Americans would enjoy the alternative of defaulting on that debt, or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place

But yeah, having to pay your debts do suck

But they didn’t scream when that debt ballooned very recently.

Debt payments and defense budget increases add up.

> or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place

I'm pretty sure most of us would enjoy a different timeline where we didn't sink over $1 trillion in the Iraq war or another $2 trillion on the F-35, where we didn't mindlessly increase the military budget every cycle, where Republican administrations didn't cut taxes on the wealthy every time they won the presidency in the last half century, or where the TSA and DHS weren't created.

> I think many Americans do not realize how much is spent on debt interest payments, which are a tidy source of income for rich people.

Not to mention insurance companies and pension funds, plus local, state, and foreign governments

Is the amount proportional to the per capita income of the respective countries?

If you do tax revenue as % of GDP, you get the US falling at about 25%, with the OECD average sitting around 35%.

> It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.

Why, in your view, doesn't the same thing happen to them?

Simply put the people in those countries who spend the money care about the people who gave them the money.

They view themselves as stewards of these resources and genuinely want to spend them optimally to ensure the best return for everyone in society including future generations.

That isn't the case in America and will never be the case.

America is a failed state.

I would not put this on America being a failed state. Rather the more 'successful' European countries are far more homogenous in demographics than America ever will be. In Denmark, nearly everyone has the same cultural background and similar values, and are striving for a relatively unified vision/goal for the country. In America, there is such an overwhelming diversity in values and cultures, and added animosity between different groups of people that there is more infighting over government&private resources and less efficient use of them.

> Rather the more 'successful' European countries are far more homogenous in demographics than America ever will be. In Denmark, nearly everyone has the same cultural background and similar values, and are striving for a relatively unified vision/goal for the country.

Can you explain this reasoning without implying American political leaders (or perhaps broader society) are racist?

As a counterpoint France, Germany, Canada and Australia are far from homogeneous, but offer far stronger social safety nets than the US. IIRC, 1 in 4 Australians were born elsewhere.

Downvote all you want, but y'all still haven't explicitly named the linkage between demographic diversity and American tax policy vis-a-vis threadbare social safety. Instead of asking the reader to fill in the gaps, I challenge anyone who believes it to explain the mechanism linking the diversity prior/stimulus to the tax policy result, and why it only happens in America.

In a place as diverse as America, democracy starts to resemble a racial headcount. Elections start to hinge on explicit appeals to particular ethnicities or sub groups. Political parties are very loud about this and they don’t try to hide it at all. I thought it was clear why this only happens in America (the aforementioned diversity).

what does this have to do with tax policy?

If some groups are disproportionately benefited by certain social spending while a different group is disproportionately impacted by the associated taxes to fund said spending, you get a divergence in the ability to burden share across groups (this is the case in the United States). As a result of this, spending is funded by debt.

America is broadly racist, that's exactly my point!

So the root problem isn't the amount of "diversity", but racism.

Sure. But it is brought to the surface due to diversity. I imagine many European nations are close to if not equal in their racism but are not brought face to face with it because their cultures are not quite as diverse.

> But it is brought to the surface due to diversity.

If Americans continue to believe that racism is inherent in them (and everyone else, including Europe), then I see no hope[1] for achieving any kind of reform that benefits the majority with regards to social safety nets.

> I imagine many European nations are close to if not equal in their racism but are not brought face to face with it because their cultures are not quite as diverse.

This smells like a variation of the just-world fallacy; European countries harbor some fervent animus towards the Romani, but not enough to cut their nose to spite their face as Americans do.

1. My lack of hope is somewhat tempered because America has proved that it can overcome some bigotry from the past: lots of formerly targeted groups are now having a much better time in the present: the Chinese, Irish, Greeks, Italians, Japanese and Jewish people. So, things can change.

> Can you explain this reasoning without implying American political leaders (or perhaps broader society) are racist?

Why would we need to do that?

Is it really on just the political leaders and not the society at large that supports them?

One need not go that far back in history to learn that codified in the legal system was the concept of separate but equal, red lining,, etc. Lynchings were often ignored and thus a public spectacle.

Today you still see the public discourse about women’s rights (e.g potentially jail for abortion in certain states…regardless of the reason), debates on mass migrations/immigration (e.g. little sympathy for legal citizens being deported or killed by ICE, etc).

Public agreement on these issues is a prerequisite to social safety nets.

American history is plagued with examples such as these that have contributed to the culture of rugged individualism.

Perhaps the closest period where some semblance of social safety net wins were achieved were in the FDR years (eg social security), and that was mainly through labor unions / working class pressure.

Do those counterpoint countries have similar histories? and were their social safety nets not from the side of labor vs capital?

You think that Europe is more homogeneous than the USA? First time I my life I hear that argument.

Individual European nations are, not Europe as a whole entity.

>It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit.

This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.

That's like increasing your going out budget at the same time as moderating your excessive drinking.

The more money that's up for grabs, the higher the incentives for fraud and general abuse.

I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain. Instead it's always the promise that just [X] more billion from [billionaire] and we could solve homelessness

>I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain.

Are you simply calling the entire government a "welfare state" or do you believe that something like military spending is off the table for making more efficient? Because people very obviously would complain about shifting military spending to social programs and military spending is almost certainly the biggest differentiator in spending between us and those "'social democracies' such as Finland, France and Canada" that OP was talking about.

Military spending has been trending downwards the entire time I’ve been alive. All that’s happened is increased spending elsewhere and even more debt. With very little apparent improvement to those social services spending outcomes. Usually the the opposite.

I might agree with cutting military spending if it’s an actual measurable impact to my finances. But I sure wouldn’t be for reallocating it to the black hole that is other federal spending. Fix the outcomes first. We already spend more on healthcare than most of those social democracies. Show me similar outcomes per dollar spent and then we can have a conversation about increasing it. Until then, it’s just more money funneled to the fraud and grift machine. Not that the military isn’t that too, but the difference to me is once you get the population “hooked” on such budgets you can never reduce it. The military is at least able to be reduced as shown in the past 30 years. Everything else is growing faster than those reductions.

I would also be generally for cutting military budget if it was 100% reallocated to reducing the debt. But that’s almost impossible since money is fungible.

TLDR; we’ve already tried reallocating and utterly failed at showing any reasonable outcomes.

Maybe we should approach this from the opposite angle. If it isn't military spending, what do you think the differentiator is between the US and those "social democracies" that OP mentioned? Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?

> Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?

I'm not who you asked (and I think the levels of military spending in the US are a huge problem) but IMO Americans are not inherently more corrupt than the French but they are currently much more tolerant of corruption than the French.

It is hard to imagine the level of corruption currently being openly flaunted by parts of the USA government happening in France without the country burning down.

Whether or not this tolerance is inherent or is the result of both learned helplessness and real disempowerment through the US government having already failed the average citizen for so long is up for debate.

Of course you should make military spending more efficient. But again, to avoid partisan bickering, you should shift spending in the category. Don't cut waste in department A and allocate to department B. Maybe shift from buying fewer jets and more drones. It doesn't have to be political, it's not a money problem. Government takes more than enough money.

Again, percentage of government money that goes to social programs is less relative to military, but only as a percentage. Look at things like spending on public healthcare (Medicare / Medicaid) or public education, America spends as much as social democracies in absolute terms. Just relative terms its less because we're a wealthy country and produce a lot of wealth that we tax. It's not a money problem

> But again, to avoid partisan bickering, you should shift spending in the category... It doesn't have to be political, it's not a money problem.

We can't really have this conversation from the mindset that the status quo is inherently apolitical. The US spends more than those "social democracies" on the military in both absolute and relative terms. Since total spending is the same, that means we also spend less on social programs in relative terms. These are all political choices and refusing to revisit a previous political choice is an active political choice.

This is in part because those countries have been historically reliant on the US for their national defense…

Military spending is not the driver of the debt, social and welfare spending is. And yes, it is off the table.

> When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year

Which is why these calculators should tell people who pay less than $32K that they are getting supported by the 5% who pay most of the taxes...

we should also break it down by state and determine distribution of electoral college votes based on it

> they are getting supported by the 5% who pay most of the taxes

The same 5% who in many cases run massively profitable companies that pay their workers on the bottom so much less than a living wage that they are forced into tax-funded social safety net programs like SNAP to survive.

That 5% can cry me a river about their tax burden.

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