Quote from: Local Trouble on Apr 01, 2020, 05:06:45 AM
I wonder how the non-Americans here perceive all of this.
Meanwhile in Ja-Land:
Think one of the more important aspects of a high tax country/police state is the change in perspective (perception, assessment and appreciation) when it comes to higher education/career paths and it's localization in society as a whole. For example the study of medicine over here is free like every other study (except for some minor costs for administrative fees etc) so that you don't have to grow up on a yacht to be able to afford it and you certainly don't come out of it with ten thousands of dollars in dept. Of course on the flip side even your first pay check gets cut in half (like everyone elses on this payment level) but it's still pretty high compared to other professions and you know that a good chunk of it is reused to enable others who are just as capable as you were to get the same opportunities.
(We still have some sort of private sector within the medicinal sphere: no player of Bayern Munich enters a regular hospital with his cruciate rupture. There are specialists that get funded with this surplus and so are the more expensive machines; of which proportionately we seem to have more than most other countries in the world except maybe the scandinavians so the system seems to work here.)
Of course other parts of the country are severely underfinanced. Trump (and others before him) has a point when he points his finger at our military budget. Over the past decades we lived comfortably under the wing of the superpower that was and still is the USA. Putin today would cut through Europe like a hot knife through butter (as we did in WW2) although it's obviously uncertain he actually would do so. But he could easily expand his influence if NATO dissolves: and
that he certainly would. The thing is: every chancellor who would actually try to change this wouldn't be chancellor for long. The vast majority of the population is pacifistic nowadays and i think considering our past this isn't the worst possible developement. There are certain dynamics in Europe that prevent us from a military buildup anyway and it's not like we're doing nothing (especially not if you add the non-military realm to the equation).
Yea well i dunno... one last thing: Germany is about 80 millions now: the argument that such a more socialized NHS wouldn't be applicable to a 300+ country
in the digital age is complete BS in my eyes and reeks of pretextual argument. There are obviously other forces at work here that prevent the US from going down the same path.
