[netflixandkill]

America has problems with drinking, opioids, meth, prescription abuse, vaping bizarre things, health care, mental health, domestic violence, domestic terrorism and violent crime, school shootings and suicides because America has a misery problem.

A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that anymore, that had replaced well being with consumption and personal growth with work and public goods with privatized profits.

There is a pretty international audience here that can probably relate to seeing the difference between cases like the hard drinking work culture in many east Asian nations or the near constant casual drinking of much of Europe with the abject despair visible in the poorer parts of the US.

Naturally people have been crying for a social welfare system for basically the last 140 years with occasional fits and starts but mostly characterized by a complete failure to crib off the results of developed nations across the world that simply don't have constant ongoing crises about everything.

[throwaway0a5e]

Was that supposed to be a backhanded way to call some large chunks of Europe "undeveloped" or did you just forget about Eastern Europe and all the economically less stable countries on the Mediteranean?

Alcoholism, poor mental health care, domestic violence, suicide, etc. etc. are all alive and well on the other side of the pond too. Just not in the "scandanavia plus rich parts of western Europe" parts that HN likes to idolize.

[kbenson]

I'm not sure I understand your interpretation. I read it as mainly "the things people point out as problems are really just symptoms of a country in misery because all the things providing a stable base for people have been systematically removed or destroyed".

> a complete failure to crib off the results of developed nations across the world that simply don't have constant ongoing crises about everything.

And this I took to mean "there exist countries of a similar level to the United States that don't quite have this problem. Look at what they did and steal what works." I'm not sure how that implies anything about some countries being undeveloped.

[netflixandkill]

That's a bizarre way to read two independent sentences. I don't know if any given eastern European nations counts as developed in your terms, but pretty much all of them with similar HDI or whatever other metric to the United States have their own problems, but not to anything like the degree seen in the US.