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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Murdered by Words
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Responses that completely destroy the original argument in a way that leaves little to no room for reply - a targeted, well-placed response to another person, organization, or group of people.
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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.