- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
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To someone from Europe like me, the US very much feels like a dystopian hellhole whenever I read stories like these. How can a government hate its people so much?
To somebody trapped in the U.S., it feels like a dystopian hellhole from in here as well.
I was just feeling this yesterday, picking through the damaged can/box section of our super market, walking down the street and seeing how alienated and alone we are and how normalized that is, being sent two hours of paperwork that is the exact same questions I spent two hours on the phone answering in spring as I try to access our public safety nets.
The feeling in the U.S. of A. is like living on a well polished turd that no one wants to admit still smells like a turd. At least, not in public.
It is a viscous loop where the ppl are told to hate their gov so they elect Republicans who want to dismantle it. The Republicans do and then gov sucks so ppl hate it more.
Rinse and repeat.
And this isn’t even a theoretical or metaphoric description.
We have candidates now already laying out plans for massive workforce reduction in the already overworked, short staffed federal government, which will make them even less productive, which will prompt these people to point out that lowered productivity as evidence for why they should take even more resources away.
They’re literally pushing to eliminate jobs, not create jobs, and to bring unemployment to veterans (who are a big demographic in the federal workforce).
The same people who set up public education to be measured on standardized testing, in which your students falling short on their test scores means your funding gets cut, not increased.
Most people here are brain dead idiots that don’t know that a politician’s job is to create policy. They think it’s a team sport and if you cheer louder for your guy, they’ll punch the other guy in the nuts. This is why we don’t have nice things like attractive cities, public transportation that actually works, or actual culture.
Like all corrupt governments in the world, they care about making money and not paying taxes. They don’t care about other people.
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Only shitty if you don’t have money. If your are in the top half it’s fantastic.
Half??
Top half of the median salary is 95k a year. Nearly all of them will have decent health care. They’d be making less than in Europe in many cases and that includes cost of healthcare.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t improve, especially for low earners, but much of this country is very well off compared to our European counterparts.
Where are you getting that number? BLS shows median male income per week at ~1200 which is not 95k a year
much of this country is very well off compared to our European counterparts.
I may be wrong, but you don’t sounds like you’ve spent much time in Europe.
I spent many months in Europe. From Spain to Kosovo and pretty much every where in-between
As if any of that matters at all in the least bit because your complaint is just a massive strawman but I’ve been all over including the pesky countries you all like to forget even comparing quality of life in the States.
Not a straw man. Personal experience. I’ve spent most of my life in Europe, in several different countries. And spent more than a decade in the US.
I can comfortably say that most Europeans, especially those in the middle and on the lower end of the income scale live vastly more comfortable lives than most Americans with similar incomes without having to worry about medical bankruptcy and crushing student debt. Not to mention having the time off to travel and parental leave to form families without all the financial stress Americans experience.
Top 20% maybe
I’d agree to have a conversation on the details. It’s nuanced. But the median salary in us is 90k. That’s enough to live comfortably compared to most of the world.
Median salary in the US according to the BLS is slightly over $50k
Dear God this is saddening to read. What just system saddles people with a debt they have no choice but to take on in order to hopefully get a decent enough education to repay the loan, but then fails to account for situations where the borrower’s income is not sufficient to be able to afford more than the minimum payments? All the while applying compounding interest on the principal to make sure it’ll never be repaid?
And to make it truly evil, makes it so that they can garnish both your wages and pension in case of a default?
Seriously, student loans and medical debt should both be interest free and prorated to the person’s income in terms of minimum payments. It’s ridiculous to force people into a life of debt slavery just for the shot at a decent education or the right to be healthy.
It’s ridiculous to force people into a life of debt slavery just for the shot at a decent education or the right to be healthy.
You have been banned from c/Conservative.
Please don’t tell me that exists.
I take that as a badge of honour.
In my opinion health care should be free. But I am just European
College should be free too. An educated populace improves the economy, as does a healthy one.
But an educated populace could ask questions…
Wr forgive you 😭
My theory: not only your points, but also, it’s Because it will one day affect inheritance… when a parent dies and has this debt, their assets will cover it, the medical debt and credit debt… with school loans on top of the pay back, the inheritance amount will be way lower, keeping the cycle of people staying poor and desperate… to keep low income people, low income…
parents from the 70-90s who bought houses also had school debt and when they die, and leave the house, their assets will first go to their medical debt, school loans, and other debts they had. Why? To keep the cycle of low income people which no chance of owning a home, desperate, poor and in a perpetual cycle.
Man, that’s even more depressing. I will never understand why (mostly conservative) governments try to keep people down like this. I thought the human experiment was about lifting people up out of poverty and misery, not invent arbitrary systems that keep them there. What does society stand to gain from creating effectively a class of outcasts at the bottom of the social ladder?
Cheap labor to further enrich the upper class.
If they are merely surviving then they wont have the resources to fight it.
But at some point the upper class depends on more than just cheap labor. You need educated people to innovate, you need a well-paid middle class to support a consumption economy. If everyone is uneducated and destitute the whole house of cards upon which the upper class is able to exist will collapse.
I just don’t understand how the concept of “a rising tide lifts all boats” is so lost on some policy makers.
The issue is youre trying to address this with care and empathy and logic.
Youll never understand if you dont think like a sociopath, people can be replaced, it’s about having more, future be damned we need to maximize the now, and if people die then they die.
But at some point
The above statement is what they don’t understand. They don’t see more than three months ahead. All of the “eventually” is in a fantasy land that they won’t reach called “next quarter”.
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Hah. My partner’s Student loans are coming back this month. They’ll owe almost 500 dollars on an income driven plan that will (hopefully) pay it off in 2038 with PSLF. Or we can get it down to 300 dollars a month, and not pay it off until 2058.
This generation is truly fucked. We should burn some shit.
I have one question for americans, where does the college money go?
Is it to improve the colleges? Do college professors are paid extra well? To the college owners?
There’s a lot of really over paid administrators and they spend money on a lot of avnifg bullshit. Basically because the government stopped funding colleges directly and offers loans, the colleges just spend money to our compete each other and become “prestigious”. They’re all “non-profit” so they spend the money somehow and just increase their budgets constantly. If there’s any extra they build a new football stadium…
Without anyone to be accountable to, they just increase tuition, which people pay because there’s always loans. Then they always find something to spend the money on. Theres administrators making millions.
