[tonyedgecombe]

>Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?

That depends whether you consider an American job more valuable than a Chinese one. America has the wealth to provide a safety net, it's not the fault of globalism that it doesn't.

[adventured]

> America has the wealth to provide a safety net, it's not the fault of globalism that it doesn't.

The US has an enormous safety net. What are you referring to? On total net social spending, the US ranks just below France at the very top in the OECD, with 30% of all economic output directed at that. For comparison, Sweden and the UK are at 24%. For strictly public-based social spending, the US is ranked with New Zealand and just below the UK, and ahead of Canada and Australia.

On strictly public social welfare spending as a share of the economy, the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, Iceland, Netherlands, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland.

At the rate US public social welfare spending is increasing, it'll surpass the UK and Japan in the coming decade.

Most of the total governmental budget in the US (local, state, federal) goes to its various social programs whether entitlements or traditional welfare state spending. For one increasingly large example, the huge entitlement programs in the US involve very large welfare funds transfers to prop up the social safety nets.

Just the taxpayer funded healthcare systems for free healthcare services (mostly for the poor and disabled) in the US cost $700-$800 billion now when all levels of spending are accounted for.

$7.6 trillion in total government spending. Roughly 3/4 of that is social program spending directed at various safety nets.

The US increased its Federal budget by 9% most recently. That's something like a $330-$350 billion increase in one year, at just the Federal level. The vast majority of that is social safety net spending increases.

While most developed nations are aggressively restraining their welfare states at this point due to cost, the US continues to expand its welfare state (thus the permanent near trillion dollar budget deficits that are looming, of which ~20% is excessive military spending and ~10% is recent tax cuts (some of which resets), the rest, roughly 70%, is to fund social programs).

The myth that the US doesn't have any social safety net really needs to die given the trillions of dollars the US spends every year on it.

[LarryDarrell]

You can scream that the US spends trillions on safety nets until you are blue in the face (Or until they line us up against the wall). In reality, unless you make less than $17500 or are older than 65, you don't really feel any of it. When Americans travel or talk to Europeans they learn that our health care, college, worker protections and consumer protections are absolute shit in comparison. This leads to wanting to change the system to work for us... Not focusing on how much we already spend. If anything, the fact that we spend so much on social programs per capita is great news, because a lot of the money is already there.