Quote (Skinned @ 13 Feb 2020 22:04)
Would you rather live in a country with low inequality like Finland Denmark and Germany or would you rather live and a typical high inequality country like the Honduras, Mexico, Vietnam?
The United States sticks out as the only country with high inequality that has a high quality of living.
I had surgery in Germany and the late 1990s and the health care was definitely socialist. They put a 5" titanium plate with 5 screws in my neck after I broke it. I stayed at Leopoldina Krackenhaus (sp?) a few weeks, had great physical rehab and got a very reasonable out of pocket bill. That is not the experience you have under capitalism. You are very naive as to how much your nation protects its citizens from their Robber Barons. Our politicians work for them unabashedly.
For example Donald Trump is now canceling student loan forgiveness for people who go into fields requiring advanced skills but don't typically pay enough to attract skilled people because you gotta pay bgg off that masters. That is working against the American people.
- Countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Austria, Italy - they all have high levels of inequality. Not to the egregious levels seen in the U.S., but still high. They arent necessarily doing better or worse than countries like Sweden or Denmark. At least in Europe, there is - to the best of my knowledge - no clear correlation between wealth inequality and standard of living.
- Healthcare is one of the few areas where I do support a strongly regulated and redistributive approach, you can call it "socialized" if you want. Still, the healthcare system in Germany (and Denmark and the Netherlands and Austria and Australia and South Korea etc.) is not fully socialized. At least here in Germany, we still have competing insurances and privately run hospitals. The key to our system is that everyone is obligated to have insurance and that the government requires the plans to cover most basic treatment, as well as capping deductibles at a reasonable amount.
- I am aware of how much our nation protects its citizens from the "Robber Barons" in fields like healthcare, consumer protection or worker rights. We are, however, getting plundered in other fields like offshoring, a government-endorsed gig economy, depressed wages, overtaxation of the middle class, bank savings and pension funds being raped by the insane low-interest policy of the ECB, absurd immigration policies putting a strain on the labor and housing markets, getting too little international purchasing power relative to our economy's productivity because the Euro is too soft, having to pay hefty amounts into the mandatory federal pension system even though it's moribund and everyone from my generation wont even get back the gross sum we pay into it, let alone the inflation-adjusted sum, etc. pp.
As I said many times before, if you belong to the top 15-20%, the U.S. is a better place to live compared to Germany, or most of Europe really. For the bottom 80-85%, it's much better here than in the U.S.
- I havent had the time yet to dig into the recent Trump budget cuts, but I dont like the things I've heard so far.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 13 2020 03:32pm