Oh no, god forbid we try to drag ourselves into the 21st century, and get somewhere close to what every other modern democracy has offered for decades.
You say that, but I get the feeling we've been here before. Pretty much every time there is an ambitious and expensive spending bill after a couple of years it turns out that the 21st century is still ahead. Eg, Obamacare would probably have been described as dragging the US into the 21st century and getting somewhere close to what every other modern democracy has offered for decades. And yet it turned out not to, the rhetoric is still that US healthcare is pretty bad.
There needs to be some scepticism about what these bills actually achieve rather than what people would like them to attempt to achieve. And when trillions are involved there is going to be massive corruption in the political process.
>Eg, Obamacare would probably have been described as dragging the US into the 21st century and getting somewhere close to what every other modern democracy has offered for decades.
Uhm, no. Obamacare is basically a Republican brainchild, mostly conceptualized by the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s. I wouldn't describe it as dragging the US into the 21st century... more like dragging it barely into the 20th century.
>And yet it turned out not to, the rhetoric is still that US healthcare is pretty bad.
US Healthcare is pretty good. But also extremely expensive at the same time, with lots of people unable to afford it, even when they have health insurance thanks to huge co-payments. You keep hearing the stories of severely injured people screaming they do NOT want to go to the hospital because they cannot afford it, and of other people who are brought to the ER, then amass huge debt in a short time that bankrupts them, and then they end up dying very prematurely anyway because the actual life-saving treatment or surgery is something they couldn't afford before, and certainly cannot afford after seeing the initial ER bill.
Waiting a few months at worst for a hip replacement surgery in Germany seems fine compared to waiting for hip replacement surgery forever and never actually getting it in the US because you cannot afford it even though you worked two jobs your entire life. All the while the US spends 17% of their GDP on health care, bout 5% points more than most other western nations.
That's the state of affairs after Obamacare. And yet, Obamacare still made things better than before for a lot of people.
> There needs to be some scepticism about what these bills actually achieve rather than what people would like them to attempt to achieve.
That's not how it works. If you want the bill to seem like a wise decision, you name it something like WISE or SMART. If you want to make it seem like it would work, put the word "effective" somewhere in there. If polling indicates widespread support for universal programs, make sure to stick the word "universal" in there.
Everything's marketing, we can just market ourselves to death. Most of US politics is the mastery of baby boomer tone anyway: that bland assertive 80s speech pattern that makes boomers think you're a wise steward and a moderate, nuanced hand. For that matter, part of it is to repeat the words "complex" and "nuanced" a lot, especially when referring to "challenges" and "responses."
If a car is barreling towards you, taking a small step towards safety is wasting the time you could have spent jumping out of the way.
Not only do you end up just as dead as you would be if you had done nothing at all, but you've wasted the effort of making a decision and moving; effort you could have spent on more pleasant thoughts if you had just decided to die from the outset.
Even worse, a moderate decision is harder to make than a firm one. Instead of just doing what could be effective, you have to figure out what could be effective, and cut it in half. By the time you've finished your calculations, you won't even have time to make the useless step.
A democracy does not work the same as a human brain trying to prevent an accident. It works with compromises and majorities. Therefore my point still stands.
I'm sure many of these things are worthwhile, but a climate change is a big enough problem by itself. If you try to do everything at once, you're likely fail them all.
I see Austria, Belgium, UK, Germany, Denmark, Italy accepting more immigrants per capita than the US.
In many of those countries, the "huge welfare states" have prerequisites ( for instance you can't just come in as an economic migrant and ask for unemployment benefits).
Furthermore, i thought the US was the richest country - it certainly has by far the most expensive military. But the flying spaghetti monster forbid money goes to other people.
Actually they do, just in combination with other ways of granting citizenship. To pick Italy off your list, if a child is born in Italy and it’s parents are unknown or unable to transfer their citizenship(stateless, unknown citizenship etc) the child becomes an Italian citizen. Most modern first world states provide pretty solid protections for children born on their soil.
We’ll presumably all those children born to immigrants in the US who are automatically citizens aren’t added to the “immigrant numbers” like they are in Europe?
1. The key term is "per capita than the US". When we are talking about physical resources and climate change, per capita doesn't make much sense. If the US imports a million people, the US needs physical resources for a million people. Having more people already in the US doesn't automatically materialize raw physical resources.
2. You talk about per capita then switch to US having the most expensive military. Why not use per capita for costs? US is not the highest. Israel and UAE come before. It makes more sense to use per capita figures for cost.
3. The US is also above Iceland, Polan, Spain, Ireland,
Finland, Israel, Japan, etc. Why leave that out? This kind of bad faith discussion is really boring.
4. "the difference between the number of persons entering and leaving a country during the year, per 1,000 persons (based on midyear population)" It doesn't distinguish between permanent and non-permanent visitors. Also, it doesn't say whether illegal immigration is counted.
5. "In many of those countries, the "huge welfare states" have prerequisites ( for instance you can't just come in as an economic migrant and ask for unemployment benefits)."
Thanks for making my point! The US has few such restrictions.
And of course my original comment is flagged because we can't have free discussion going against the party line.
> But the flying spaghetti monster forbid money goes to other people
I am not going to respond to a ill-informed jab at religion.
The downvotes are likely because you’ve made an outlandish claim that is unlikely to hold up to investigation - that America admits more immigrants than the population of some democracies that criticise it.
It looks like somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people each year step to the next stage of their path to naturalisation in the US, this is probably the most reasonable way to count migrants. https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/special-reports/l...
That would give a total of around 500,000 migrants a year, the population of the smallest G8 country (Canada) is around 38 million.
The only way to get close to Canada’s population is to take the all-time estimated immigrant population (around 45 million, or 13.7% of population).
The closest you can get with the present-tense “admits” rather than “over 60 years has admitted” is to take all I-94 entries, which are explicitly non-immigrant entries, include tourists and office-visit visas, and would not be part of any welfare state.
There is no need to invent a perpetual motion machine to support people who are (broadly) supporting themselves (if through a legal migration route) or whose total size accounting for deaths and those who leave by choice is stable (if through an unauthorised route).
You are right, I’ve read a quarter’s numbers as the numbers for the year in the naturalisation source. Multiply my estimates for lawful naturalisation by 4 and get to between 400,000 and 800,000 (backed up by 2017-2019 data https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigra... ). That’s still a long way short of the population of Canada (and you have overshot by a bit).
Congratulations, you've proved that someone somewhere has written a book that argues for open borders.
There's also a book called "Nobody Died at Sandy Hook", which argues that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax staged by the Obama administration as a pretext to take everybody's guns away. People can write and publish books about anything.
> get somewhere close to what every other modern democracy has offered for decades.
Yes, just come closer to the clusterfuck the rest of us have. In every country most people say “healthcare in this country is a mess”, and yet, my best experiences with healthcare have been in the US.
