this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Murdered by Words
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Living in Belgium, I'm happy with the social security that's available here and the chances for a good education, etc. But I'm confused as to why this all isn't available for everyone in the USA. The USA is a world leader in so many domains so I would assume that this would benefit its inhabitants first.
The USA is first and foremost a global leader in making money for corporations. That's really all it is, not much more.
Edit: That person who posted the long comment about how America is "totally fine" for "most people" is pretty dumb for it. Oh they don't have a single clue...
The US has a gigantic health insurance industry worth trillions, employs over 4 million people, and manages ~25% of the US economy.
Our limitless freedom belongs to the corporations, not the people.
Someone else has already said it's because of Capitalism, and to a point that's true. The other major reason is because of the economics of scale.
Belgium has a population of 11 million, the US has a population of 331 million.
Belgium has an area of 30,000 km^2, the State of Virginia alone has an area of 110,000 km^2. The metropolitan service area (basically the city and surrounding bedroom communities) of Washington DC is 14,000 km^2 or nearly half the size of all of Belgium.
In 2022 Belgium had ~196,000 immigrants while the US had ~45 million.
Coming back to the question; on Education the 2022 census said that 91.1% had at least finished Highschool and 48.4% had finished at least an Associates degree (or higher). https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html
On Social Security 69.8 million people received social security benefits in 2020 (retired, disabled, or other special circumstances).
On Healthcare the US is behind the times in comparison with much of the world, our healthcare is typically tied to employment (your job likely provides your health insurance). While this is the case our taxes are typically lower than most of the countries that are compared to the US, basically instead of paying taxes to get free healthcare we pay for healthcare directly. Even then people can still get access to the ACA (Obamacare), Medicare, or Medicaid. According to the 2022 census 92.1% of the US is insured, though I couldn't find a good statistic on what percentage are under insured (as in they have insurance but really need more). I did find some less than stellar statistics (so take these with a grain of salt) but on average Europeans spend 12.5% of their income on healthcare in the form of taxes while the median (yeah I know it's not the same as average but it was a different source) American spends 11.6% of their income on healthcare in the form of healthcare premiums and deductibles.
In summary the US generally does have pretty good living conditions for the vast majority of people. The problem is that if 10% of the population falls through the social welfare cracks in the US, that's 3x the population of Belgium.
EDIT: I wanted to quickly add, the US gets a lot of flak for being involved in foreign wars, politics, and spending too much on military spending. A lot of people think we should instead pull back that spending and instead fix things in the US. I agree with this sentiment, we do over spend on the military, but the US has also given more money to supporting Ukraine than the next 9 countries combined. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
Thanks for the effort you put in this response. Is it a good summary when I say that Belgium in population and area can be compared with a metropolitan area of any major city in the USA? And best should be compared as such?
I'm very much surprised with the migration figures being as high as you mention. Europe is surrounded with countries in war in Eastern-Europe, Middle-East and Africa. And many of our migrants are refugees.
All the migration towards USA is mainly from south of the USA, correct? There's no war going on over there, so do these migrants also poor living conditions and are mostly fortune seekers? Or are their lives in danger from the government in these countries?
It kinda depends, the US is very diverse in it's city layout. NYC metro area is 34,400 km^2 with 23 million people. Nashville is 19,000 km^2 with 2 million population.
My point was more that it's hard to make Federal government comparisons between small European countries and the US. A topic like healthcare or education varies greatly municipality to municipality and state to state. A city like Washington DC or NYC might be a better comparison to Belgium, but Butte Montana isn't. If you're trying to compare the US average to the Belgium average you have to average Butte in with NYC.
A good example might be infrastructure. People commonly say that the US shouldn't do XYZ and instead invest in our poor/old infrastructure, but it's hard to do since we have so much more to cover. There's definitely mismanagement throughout, but a big portion of it is also just providing for more people in a larger area.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
From what I can tell, only around 25% of immigrants are from Mexico. A lot of people view the US as a desirable place to live despite what some people say.
https://i.gifer.com/jVp.gif
Mexico, Central and South America have issues like anywhere else. From my understanding some parts of Mexico are somewhat dangerous due to the drug cartels, but other areas are exceptionally safe. The economies have a large divide in income, the median income of Tijuana is $16.6k annually while the median income of Chula Vista California is $35k annually; they are 21 kilometers apart if not for the border.
People love to bring up our vast expanses of land in these infrastructure comparisons, but that wasn't an insurmountable problem when we wanted transcontinental railroad, telegraph, telephone, etc...
It's worth noting that those were all massive handouts to private corporations. Some of the beneficiaries of those handouts are still on top of their industries today.
I think we can agree that there is a significant difference in building the railroad or telegraph/gram lines the first time and maintaining it in perpetuity. Also, it's a lot easier to build and maintain something when it isn't actively being used and depended on by people. Also, the government doesn't own infrastructure like railroads, power lines, or telephone lines in most cases. The Federal government paid to have it built the first time, but continued maintenance was supposed to fall on other entities which the government allowed to have a limited monopoly.
Building the railroad the first time so a regulated private monopoly can maintain it is a whole lot different from continually funding and enticing a private company to do best management practices. I'll totally agree that we shouldn't have let these monopolies exist in the first place, they should have been publicly run utilities, but that's in the past and we can't really change that now.
Do you have a source for the claim Europeans spend more than people in the US per capita on healthcare?
Every source I've ever read the US has twice per capital spending and worse health outcomes in many areas.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/07/how-does-the-us-healthcare-system-compare-to-other-countries
I didn't say it was more? I said that a less than stellar source said that the average percentage of a European's income that goes to taxes for healthcare was roughly the same as the median percentage of an American's income.
Per Capita would be total expenditure divided by number of people. I'm saying (US) average healthcare costs/average income vs (Europe) amount of taxes for healthcare/average income.
I used this Quora page (https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-their-income-do-Europeans-for-various-countries-spend-on-the-cost-of-health-care-versus-Americans-Assume-average-cases-Which-is-a-better-deal) for the answers about European healthcare. It's not an ideal source, but it's kind of a pain to get the specific answer I'm asking for.
I used this source (https://www.statista.com/statistics/631987/percent-of-income-spent-on-health-plan-by-us-employees/) for a the Percentage of median income spent on premium contribution and deductibles in the US. Again, not a stellar source, but close enough to show it's not stupidly different for most people.
I made this post at 3 am on my phone, if you have feedback on these articles or better sources I'd be curious to see them.
USSR population was 293M in 1991(right before collapse), USA population was 253M in 1991.
Every time I hear something like "but Netherlands is about the size of Ryazanskaya Oblast" I reply "then why the fuck Ryazanskaya Oblast is not better than Netherlands? And 26 other regions that smaller than it are not".
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, it almost sounds like you replied to the wrong post and meant to reply to someone else?
Added more context
I guess I'm still missing what point you're trying to make. What I think you're trying to say is that the USSR was the same size of the US in 1991, but this region is the size of the Netherlands so it should have been comparable to the Netherlands.
I'm going to continue assuming this is what you were meaning. I honestly don't know enough about the internal government system of the USSR in the early 90's or much about this region. Taking a look at the statistics it appears that Ryazan Oblast has an area of 39,605 km^2, but a population of only ~1 million. The Netherlands has an area of ~41,000 km^2, but has a population of ~17.5 million. Next, the average annual salary of the region in 2019 (the highest in at least 5 years) was ~31k (RUB) and the highest exchange rate in the last 5 years was approximately 1 RUB: 0.018 Euro.
So in summary, the size is about the same as the Netherlands, but has 5.7% of the population of the Netherlands and the people in the Netherlands make ~23x more money at their jobs even when considering the highest salaries Ryazan Oblast had in the last 5 years and the highest exchange rate the RUB had in the last 5 years.
My example was looking at similar sized, similar population, and similar income groups; by that comparison regions of the US can be compared to Belgium. On the other hand, the only thing in common between Ryazan Oblast and the Netherlands is their size so it's not a good comparison. Why doesn't Ryazan Oblast have more people or make more money so that they can be compared to the Netherlands I don't know, but it looks like these conditions have been this way since at least the late 1980's?
I was trying to say that being big country does not prevent one from having universal healthcare, decent social security and a lot of other social benefits.
Probably real median 1/50 of one in Netherlands. Anyway, this was from an argument about size.
If you want Netherlands compared to something with similar polulation, density and budget, Moscow(which as saying goes is not Russia) is a good choice. Aaaand it's still shit compared to Netherlands. Or Netherlands can be compared to city that was built by dutch long time ago - Saint Petersburg. Shit too. Small polulation? SPb+LenOblast is even worse.
To be fair most of cities excluding ones with insane budgets(Moscow and SPb) have worse public transport that they had 40 years ago. Probably public transport in Ryazan of 1980-1990 was comparable to public transport in Amsterdam of 1980-1990.
For this I'll refer to another comment I made
Decisions such as universal healthcare and national public transportation are Federal decisions and so it's hard to make a comparison between something like the Netherlands and Moscow.
I don't know much about these regions so all I can do it point to the statistics.
Moscow Metro Area
-Average Salary: ~1,100,000 RUB/year = ~24,000 Euro/year
-Area: ~48,000 km^2
-Population: ~21.7 million
Saint Petersburg Metro Area
-Average Salary: ~1,3700,000 RUB/year = ~24,000 Euro/year
-Area: ~11,000 km^2
-Population: ~6.2 million
I don't know enough about how the internal workings of the Russia Federal government works to speak authoritatively. What I can say is that even with similar size and population the citizens of the Netherlands make nearly double the income of the most wealth places in Russia.
In other examples I compared the percentage of income that goes to funding healthcare in the US vs Belgium (~10-15%) either in the form of taxes or direct payments. Looking at this site (https://www.internationalinsurance.com/health/systems/russia.php) only the employer makes a tax contribution on behalf of the employee and it equates to ~2-3% of the employee's salary. All of Russia spent ~88.2 billion Euros on Helathcare in 2020 while the Netherlands spent ~107 billion in 2022.
For the same reasons why it's hard to compare Belgium to the US it's hard to compare the Netherlands to Russia.