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Comment by animal_spirits | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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