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Meanwhile we can’t figure out how to provide a basic level of housing and healthcare to everyone.
by SoftTalker 1y ago
Meanwhile we can’t figure out how to provide a basic level of housing and healthcare to everyone.
- badpun 1y agoThe US can't, but humanity as a whole can. Finland has both, for example.
- onraglanroad 1y agoThose things have been figured out, you're just choosing not to implement them (you generally, not you specifically).
- ekianjo 1y agoProvide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
- nolroz 1y agoActually tax the rich?
- dmitrygr 1y agoInsane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoSpend the money on things of actual value rather than distributing it equally among a group of people who will inevitably just spend it on an iPhone?
- paulcole 1y agoYou can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once. It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
- missedthecue 1y agoWe're capable of taking the money but not of investing it into useful projects. Inherent system flaw.
- Skgqie1 1y agoBillionaires generally do not have a knaxj for value creation. What they do generally have is an egregious amount of greed and a total lack of empathy which enables an incredible amount of exploitation.
- stackbutterflow 1y agoThen the former billionaires won't have the ability to influence society to pass laws that favours them. We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
- ianbutler 1y ago> We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone. I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set. Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you. By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest. I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
- conception 1y agoMaybe but society was more egalitarian when we did so maybe we start there.
- majormajor 1y agoEveryone in the US misses the 50s, marginal tax rates were crazy high. "Oh, but people had lots of deductions and not many people actually paid the top rates" - yeah, that's exactly the point, it encouraged money to be spread around more. And a whole lot of people prospered, while government revenue was less lopsidedly concentrated too. Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
- oceanplexian 1y agoWe have 4-5x the normalized GDP per capita compared to the 1950s. The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
- jamiek88 1y ago[flagged]
- ekianjo 1y agoEven if you took all the money from the "rich" the goverment would shut down as usual the next year because the debt they create is way more than the private money available out there.
- blurbleblurble 1y agohttps://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fy-2023-fed-budget-pie-chart.jpg https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fy-2023-fed-bu...
- ashdksnndck 1y agoDefense is only 13% of federal spending: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going: https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and-international-context https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and... Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point. Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
- roamerz 1y ago>> poor value for money across a variety of sectors Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician. $10k.
- ipaddr 1y agoWhat's the pressure in the system keeping the price down? Many could supply a treadmill and ekg machine for a few hundred.
- theossuary 1y agoIf you include things directly related to, but not classified as defense spending, like veterans benefits, VA, and the cost of foreign bases; the military is about ~20% of the total US budget. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/BUDGET-2025-PER-6-1-1.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/BUDG...
- layoric 1y agoAnd who is on the other side of that debt? And how did it get there?
- MattGaiser 1y agoAmerica spends a greater percentage of government money on healthcare than many systems with universal healthcare. Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs and Military medical spending are about 7% of GDP. Add another 1-3% and you would be ahead of almost everyone. And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP. Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
- erentz 1y agoTaxing the land and removing zoning limits on it is the big hurdle.
- jibal 1y agoThat is not how macroeconomics works.
- ekianjo 1y agoWhat does that even mean? Care to elaborate?
- jimnotgym 1y agoDebt to who? If every country is in debt who is the creditor? Mars? But you actually said every major country is in debt, so do all the major countries owe money to um...minor countries? Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but the government? In which case it must owe money to entities like people and corporations. The government has powers to take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is issued by the government in the first place, you could consider a token of government debt is actually a token meant to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the government you receive interest, or in other words a discount off your future tax. All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no reason for it to not be able to pay for things. In fact you might argue that government debt takes money out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means the government can spend more without causing inflation. If a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it then you create gdp growth. Magic. Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoWe've figured that out, but certain members of society decided that extracting wealth through protectionist zoning/building code behavior is much, much more lucrative.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agothat just moves the figuring out one step to the right. knowing how something will work but not knowing how to get it implemented means the problem is not completely figured out yet.
- SoftTalker 1y agoExactly. We haven't figured out how to solve the problem, because we still have the problem. Maybe it's unsolvable, and it's just a limitation in our ability to live together in large numbers. Or maybe we need to redirect our spending on (among other things) frightfully expensive experimental medicine and spend the money on things that are a lot cheaper and will help a lot more people.
- MobiusHorizons 1y agoReally? I think I can agree that the zoning isn't helping, but claiming we have figured it out seems like bold claim. Where _is_ it working? My impression is that housing costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages not only in North America, but also in the UK and EU, which don't have the same kinds of zoning laws.
- andrewmutz 1y agoIt’s working in Japan
- sadeshmukh 1y agoI wouldn't believe most in the US would live in Japanese style housing at all.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- abbycurtis33 1y agoTough problem when laziness and low IQ both correlate to high reproduction.
- d6e 1y agoHousing can be affordable or an investment. It can't be both
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- conception 1y agoThis should be an easy choice and yet…
- irjustin 1y agoAt a system level - in Singapore it is. HDB (public) for affordable, private for everything else. 75+% of housing is part of the HDB system.
- xdfgh1112 1y agoHas no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?
- skinnymuch 1y agoThe west doesn’t have real democracy either. For the gay stuff, like the west?
- bmacho 1y agoIn 2001 Texas court prosecuted Lawrence for having gay sex in his home (supreme court decided against it 2 years later).
- irjustin 1y ago> Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham. But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support. So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.
- guidedlight 1y agoThe US can’t. This has long been solved in other countries, to varying degrees.
- p1dda 1y ago[flagged]
- dzhiurgis 1y agoClassic whataboutism.
- bawolff 1y agoIn star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are only a year late. And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible) [For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024, which eventually lead to people learning from their mistakes and a utopia society. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots ]
- russfink 1y agoSo we’re getting close in the US government is putting certain types of poor people in internment camps.
- winternewt 1y agoI think we already ticked that box
- ekaryotic 1y agothe school to prison pipeline is talked about a lot.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago"Close"? It seems many Americans still live in a fantasy. Unless y'all start looking into your history, you're bound to repeat it.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :). But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came this close to accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on the date. -- [0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past several important world events that originally happened in Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep with the overall premise of being imagined future of real humanity. IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a while. [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
- lurking_swe 1y agooh we can “figure it out” trivially. There’s no technology or actual resources preventing that from happening. But the status quo benefits many parties… alas, “people” problems are harder than technical ones. Most humans can be remarkably greedy, and also stupid in large groups.
- Vosporos 1y agoSure we can, how do you think our governments have managed to avoid it so artfully all this time?
- gniv 1y agoWe're slowly starting to realize that societal problems are as hard as (or even harder than) technological problems. At least we seem to have figured out how to, um, steer large populations quickly, now we need to use that to effect positive change.