[swiley]

There’s a lot of fear here that giving people something for free means that the people receiving it will abuse it. People who want free education are viewed as “entitled.”

The US is really weird about children, they’re the most important thing in most peoples minds but as soon as they turn 18 they’re dangerous and entitled.

[ebikelaw]

The underlying reason is racism. White people dislike the idea of a social system that benefits everybody, because that would include the blacks. This is even true of desperately poor white people, who are very numerous, but would rather deny a social program to black people even if that means they also cannot benefit from it.

Many of the countries we think of as quite successful and wealthy and educated and having many social programs are also shockingly homogeneous, so it’s hard to know if, say, Finland would be exactly as nice if they had more different races there. But we can say for certain that racism is holding America back.

[endymi0n]

Just for the record, Norway is just about on par with the US if you count foreign born population, and Germany is even slightly above:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...