[rayiner]

We’re conservative because we’re rich and comfortable. We have the highest disposable income in the OECD: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/teaser/14773.jpeg. The median household income of a married couple with kids is $95,000. And the taxes are extremely low in that bracket. Our unemployment rate in the midst of Trump’s botched handling of COVID is less than what France’s unemployment rate is in a normal year.

Even when you hear complaints about things like healthcare, the debates are more about universal coverage than the quality or affordability of care itself. Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their own healthcare: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar.... (And, Americans being preternaturally optimistic, just assign less value to the security of a safety net in the case they lose their job, etc.)

Americans live in houses far larger than the average European: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ei5f4/com.... We have more TVs, more cars, etc.

It’s easy to assume that Americans are just ignorant and irrational. But Americans know that Europe has a bunch of services we don’t, and they pay much higher taxes in return. Democrats make that comparison all the time. People are aware of it. But the fact is that the current system works pretty well for your typical voter. A flatter society with more social services would be better for a lot of people. However, your average suburban married couple would take a significant hit to their standard of living if they lived in France instead.

[EdwardDiego]

> We’re conservative because we’re rich and comfortable.

Some of you are.

You're only surpassed by Romania, Costa Rica, and South Africa in this chart: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm

Romania, Italy, South Africa in this one: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-gap.htm#indicator-c...

Doing better in this one, in that now you're behind Bulgaria, Turkey, Chile, Costa Rica and South Africa. https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm#indic...

I'm assuming that disposable household income per capita doesn't quite capture the severely unequal distributions of disposable household income.

> Americans live in houses far larger than the average European: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ei5f4/com.... We have more TVs, more cars, etc.

That's a cultural difference, not at all indicative of anything - European cities are typically built for denser living - far fewer McMansions, far more well built, sound proofed apartments with ample public transport networks, to the extent that one can work and live in a city without owning a car. Although there are a bunch of bicycles.

In fact, very few of my German colleagues own cars because they have no reason to, as they all live in major cities. If they need a car for a holiday, they rent one.

> Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their own healthcare

Which is exactly the point I was making, I mean, the country with one of the lowest passport holding rates doesn't really have much to compare their health system to.

[zajio1am]

The OECD poverty line is defined as a half of median income, so it is problematic to compare that between countries with much differenent income levels. People on poverty line in rich countries still have higher income (even after PPP adjustment) than median-income people in poor countries.

[SamReidHughes]

Yeah, by plain math, making the working class richer will make your poverty rankings worse.

[rayiner]

I’m not really disagreeing with what you’re saying. My point is that people are voting in their own interest. If you’re employed, 30+, married married, and in the top 60% of the income distribution, then in terms of quantifiable income and consumption metrics you’re probably better off than you’d be in say France. And these are the people who vote.

As to housing patterns, I’m sure it’s a combination of preference, availability, and affordability. I know Germans from suburbs in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and they drive everywhere and enjoy the convenience. These are the same preferences of folks in the US.

As to health care: for people who have decent insurance, you’d be surprised by how nice American healthcare is. When my son had chronic ear infections, in sometimes went down to the pediatricians office multiple times a day. It’s not free at the point of use, but it’s cheap enough where it might as well be. It’s not obviously something that needs fixing.

Again, it’s not like the American left hasn’t been making the pitch for socialized medicine for decades now. At this point Americans probably have an overly rosy picture of European healthcare. They don’t know that French national healthcare has 20% coinsurance, or that many European countries still have insurance companies. It’s just that most voters either have insurance from their employer, and it actually tends to be pretty good, or they have Medicare, which also tends to be pretty good. The fact that some people don’t have that doesn’t motivate the average voter very much, and they don’t want to pay more taxes. Americans don’t have the same sense of solidarity Europeans have, and are much more individualistic.

[jahaja]

> My point is that people are voting in their own interest.

Even if that would be true, The elephant in the room here is the abysmal participating rate of US elections and general voter suppression. There's no way the Republican party would ever win a fair, easy-to-vote, EU-style, election.

> Americans don’t have the same sense of solidarity Europeans have, and are much more individualistic.

But universal healthcare has been popular in polls throughout the population for a long time, even though I assume that in a class based society like the US it must feel regressive, as upper middle-class and up, to be threatened by having to wait in the same queue as the poor for healthcare.

[rayiner]

> Even if that would be true, The elephant in the room here is the abysmal participating rate of US elections and general voter suppression.

Voter “suppression” insofar as it exists works at the margins: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/19/suppression-issues-....

> Voter suppression issues rank low among reasons nonvoters stay home

I’ve never voted in a Presidential election, and I’m not going to vote in this one. I can walk to my nearest polling place. It just won’t change the outcome in my state and I really don’t care that much.

> There's no way the Republican party would ever win a fair, easy-to-vote, EU-style, election.

What is an “easy-to-vote, EU-style election?” The voting system in Georgia isn’t that different from say France. There is automatic registration when you get a driver’s license (which nearly everyone has). France doesn’t even have mail in voting: https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1975/11/13/pour-redu...

> But universal healthcare has been popular in polls throughout the population for a long time, even though I assume that in a class based society like the US it must feel regressive, as upper middle-class and up, to be threatened by having to wait in the same queue as the poor for healthcare.

It’s popular conceptually until it comes time to make actual trade-offs. Biden won the Democratic nomination because his competitors’ single-payer proposals eliminated private insurance, something most people didn’t like. After Obama passed the ACA along party lines, voters handed Democrats a huge loss in the midterms, giving Republicans control of Congress for the rest of Obama’s term.

[jahaja]

> Voter “suppression” insofar as it exists works at the margins

So gerrymandering, 55% voter turnout, long queues, voting on a working day, having felons not being eligible, the electoral college system etc. isn't indicative of voter suppression?

> I’ve never voted in a Presidential election,

What's the point of your personal anecdote?

> What is an “easy-to-vote, EU-style election?”

That's a single state? Why did Trump say that the Republican party would never be elected again? [0] It's not exactly a secret. France had 77% voter turnout.

> It’s popular conceptually until it comes time to make actual trade-offs

What trade-offs? Skipping a foreign war?

> Biden won the Democratic nomination because his competitors’ single-payer proposals eliminated private insurance

You're always writing in authoritatively simplistic causal language. "X caused Y", when there's no such obviously direct relationship.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...

[lostlogin]

Your “cultural difference” point is a good one.

More cars and more house and things many want, and I find it baffling. My measure is that I want to vacuum the house from one power point, and not worry what happens to the car.

[NicoJuicy]

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

Fyi, an interesting statistic is that Eg. Houses in Belgium are more expensive to buy and way cheaper to rent.

[zajio1am]

> European cities are typically built for denser living - far fewer McMansions, far more well built, sound proofed apartment

Well, here (Prague) you can have small flat in city for the same price as full-sized house with garden in suburbs (villages around Prague), so it is mostly question of preferences.

[Fnoord]

Do all of these cars and TVs make you happy? Rhetorical question; if they did you wouldn't need more more more.

A minority is rich and comfortable. This elite uses propaganda rhetoric such as polarisation by a platform such as Fox News to manipulate people into a political candidate which, ultimately, does not serve in their benefit but in the benefit of the elite majority.

Then there's the other party who are only marginally better. The poor get to pick the best option of two terrible options, and they could have achieved so much more in their life with just a minor bit of compassion from said elite. If greed is one of the seven sins, none of these elites are the devout Christians they claim to be.

I normally don't speak out about this; thanks for the inspirational post.

[rayiner]

Again, it’s easy to tell yourself that Americans are just irrational, harder to reconcile that with the facts. It’s not just a minority that’s richer and more comfortable: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...

A middle income household in the US has $15,000-25,000 more per year in disposable income than a middle income household in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, or the UK (comprising 70% of the EU population).

You can say that some of that goes to employee-paid premiums and things like that, which are excluded from the OECD analysis. But for households with employer-paid health insurance (which is the vast majority of middle income households), the typical out of pocket costs for those things is a fraction of the income differential: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2019-05...

The median spending on premiums and out of pocket costs in the US is $3,700. And note that European countries also have out of pocket expenses of $500-1,000: https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/OECD-Focus-on-Out....

So at the end of the day, a middle income American household with employer-paid health insurance has $12,000-22,000 more in their pocket each year. (You could adjust for other social services, but those tend to be a drop in the bucket by comparison. For example, the average student, of the minority of Americans that graduates college, is $30,000. Thats a one-time debt, compared to a lifetime of earning thousands of dollars more.)

Fox News manipulating people into “voting against their interests” is mostly a myth. The poorest people do in fact vote Democrat. If you look at profiles of Trump voters, they tend to be non-college-educated people who are doing well in places with low cost of living. In my county, the guys that own a little contracting or construction company vote for Trump. This is entirely in their interest. They would not be personally better off paying a lot more taxes to get marginally more benefits. I spent several weeks in East Texas last year. This is Trump country. It’s also quite prosperous. The men work in the oil industry and the women work in healthcare. They have big trucks and big houses and shiny new stores and restaurants.

[Fnoord]

Irrational is a stretch from being manipulated by propaganda. Definitely not my choice of word.

I only checked your first link, and after processing that I called it. The data is from ~1991 and 2010. The link says Western Europe. I consider the Scandinavian countries Northern Europe, and the Mediterranean Southern Europe. Southern Europe and Eastern Europe (all ex Iron Curtain) are poorer than Northern Europe, Ireland, United Kingdom, Belgium (left out -- why), Austria (idem), Switzerland (idem), Sweden (idem), Finland (idem) (though last two are also Northern Europe and Scandinavia).

Then I scrolled to the bottom and saw this linked [1]. The title being: In Western European countries studied, up to eight-in-ten adults live in middle-income households; U.S. has among the highest lower- and upper-income shares and guess what the USA's middle class is 75% the size of the mentioned non-Southern European countries.

Now, I happen to know also that apart from Southern Europe all of the mentioned countries have adequate healthcare while in the USA (before Obamacare, which the two statistic metrics are about) that isn't the case.

My conclusion is indeed that the middle class in the USA is marginalized. Though not yet as severe as in a fascist country it might be heading that way.

I would like to comment on one more thing:

> This is entirely in their interest.

No, it is not, only in their short term myopic vision. A long-term interest is that you invest in your fellow civilians. It is also selfish, because you expect something in return. But it is what I call intelligent selfishness as its long-term. Much like VC, the USA is focussed on short-term gains.

Now, surely the American people must live a happy and free life, right? Not quite. If we look at the above statistics and the data from Democracy Index, Reporters Without Borders about the freedom in all of the countries we are discussing then the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Tge Netherlands, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ireland (ie. entire Western Europe) are far ahead in terms of freedom than the self-proclaimed Land Of The Free.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...

PS: As for your Fox News rebuttal see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819418

[sunshinerag]

2 cars and 3 TVs seem to be enough. Who said more more more?

[oblio]

Yeah, but what everybody is pointing out is that your poor are faring worse than poor people in other developed country. And the paradox of that thing is that's happening despite you being:

> rich and comfortable

That's what baffles everyone. The American social contract seems to be "if 80% of the population can be 20-30% richer than the rest of the world, let's throw the 20% at the bottom under the rhetorical bus".

And I should point out that these days those 20% at the bottom are about 70 million (!) people. Plus I imagine that the poverty rate will only go up, not down, considering how US politics are looking.

[tzs]

Too bad that poll on healthcare didn't break it down by whether or not you pay for it yourself.

I was quite pleased with my costs when I got it through my employer and so didn't actually see the cost of insurance. I'd indirectly see it when every few years my employer would change providers, and then I'd have to worry about whether or not my doctor was in the new provider's network.

Co-workers who wanted to add spouses to their plan did have to pay for it themselves on some of the plans, and they grumbled about the cost.

Now that I buy insurance myself on my state's health insurance exchange, cost is one of my top complaints.