Scot Dutchy wrote: ↑Tue Jun 05, 2018 2:31 pm
The US is a mess. Stop cherry picking. You dont have data so you cant compare. It is all guestimations. Your inequality is worse than Mexico. You dont have universal health care. Those who can afford it have some form of insurance but 30% dont. You dont have social services. You have prisons which take care of your social problems where you lock up over 1% of your population(which is another guestimate as it could be many more) . You have an infrastructure that is falling down (built any highspeed trains recently). You have a gun problem that is completely out of control. You have massive environmental problems.
You keep on comparing the poor in the USA with third world countries when a) you dont have clue how many poor there are and b) what their income is. As pErv said you have to register as unemployed but that is true of every aspect of American life; you just dont know.
I'm not cherrypicking. Please, as with the court case issue, tell me what I'm leaving out. Cherrypicking is when I choose favorable information to the exclusion of other available information. I haven't done that at all here. I've merely correctly shown that there is good data on unemployment and other matters in the US, and that the registering for unemployment benefits is not how the BLS calculates unemployment. That's true. That's not cherrypicking. Tero was wrong. You are wrong.
It's not just guesstimates. I've already shown that. The US has data of the same quality and character as Europe. There is nothing more "guesstimate" about it than in Europe. You are ignorant of the data that is out there. You've been shown it via links, but you still make the false claim that the US has no data.
Whoever referenced registering for unemployment is wrong - that's not how the unemployment numbers are calculated. I proved that point. You're wrong. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that you are dead wrong.
And, I don't just compare the US to third world countries. The poor in the US live better than the poor in most of Europe. You don't like to include places like Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, eastern Europe, as part of Europe, but it is. You like to think that the "Europe" and "the World" is 7 or 8 tiny, sheltered western European countries are the benchmark that the rest of the world needs to emulate. Your myopia is obvious, Dutchy.
Massive environmental problems? That's absurd. The US is among the cleanest countries in the world. Our air and water are cleaner than it was 40 years ago, and we're reducing carbon emissions at a rate equal to Europe as a whole. You simply don't know what the US is like.
No, we haven't built high speed rails much recently, because that's not the future. I mean, California is building one, but like all high speed rail systems, they're not self-sufficient, and they have to be funded by loads of taxpayer money. The US doesn't need them. The future is self-driving vehicles on the already excellent highway systems. You can keep your trains.
The gun and prison issues are fair points. We, as with every other country in the world, have problems to solve. I certainly haven't and never would argue that we don't have problems. You, on the other hand, have this supremacist view of your country, and you ignore the defects, pretend they don't exist, and walk around thinking that the world would be just great if everyone did it the Dutch way.
We don't have social services? That's absurd. Federal and state welfare programs include cash assistance, healthcare and medical provisions, food assistance, housing subsidies, energy and utilities subsidies, education and childcare assistance, and subsidies and assistance for other basic services.
among affluent nations, the U.S. has the third highest level of per capita government social welfare spending. This is striking, given that government spending in the U.S. is more tightly targeted to benefit the poor and elderly.
When private-sector contributions to retirement, health care, and education are added to the count, social welfare spending in the U.S. dwarfs that of other nations. In fact, social welfare spending per capita in the U.S. rises to nearly twice the European average.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2015/09/19/ ... n-nations/
For those who believe the absolute size of the US welfare state is small, the data presented … [in the book] are shocking and constitute a wake up call. Once health and education benefits are counted, real per capita social welfare in the United States is larger than in almost all other countries!
Only one nation (Norway) spends more per person than the U.S. spends.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2015/09/19/ ... n-nations/“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
If you had, say one trillionaire, and not many billionaires, then that would be a skew on the numbers. But when you don't have many outliers, then that's not a skew.
