[tomrod]

So the solution is to spend less money but pay people more, and shoulder the rest on taxpayers?

This probably won't work very long since the population isn't as triangular as it used to be (to my understanding this is what happened to Japan).

I get the justified call to fix things for people that require these services. The US can barely afford to school its children, purchase its homes, or enact reasonable public health measures without bankrupting people.

As a society the US is unwilling to consider euthanasia, decriminalization of most nonviolent drugs, effective gun control, and funding infrastructure. The plight of the elderly is on par with the plight of the transient. Policy is actively hostile for them.

[dragonwriter]

> The US can barely afford to school its children, purchase its homes, or enact reasonable public health measures without bankrupting people.

No, it can easily afford all that. It chooses not to because the US (that is, the majority of political power in the country) prefers to impose the pain of the imminent risk and frequent reality of bankruptcy on the working class.

[Lammy]

Not only that, but the United States' shift in mindset toward disinvestment came about during the civil rights era. Not hard to read between the lines in e.g. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf :/

"The time has come to ask what level of population growth is good for the United States. There was a period when rapid growth made better sense as we sought to settle a continent and build a modern industrial Nation."

"[A] fundamental question about the Nation's future: Do we wish to continue to invest even more of our resources and those of much of the rest of the world in meeting demands for more services, more classrooms, more hospitals, and more housing as population continues to grow?"

"We have all heard about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say that it is a problem of crisis proportions that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills."

My favorite part is "Some say"[who?]

[whatshisface]

I think the Club of Rome were the first major international policy group to take resource finitude seriously. Although I read a bit of their final report, and their projections were ridiculous and we've already blown well past them with no trouble at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

[ako]

Not sure i agree with no trouble at all. It is done at great cost to the environment, and to ourselves.

[BoHerfVIJrEsq]

They're still on that neo-Malthusian thing hot and heavy, though. They have a Twitter account and it seems clear they consider themselves vindicated.

[soperj]

>The US can barely afford to school its children

You're the richest nation on earth. You can afford it, the people who control the purse strings choose to use it on other shit that benefits themselves.

[abeppu]

Well, we also seem really bad at managing education. There has been a huge increase in the number of non-teaching staff (i.e. administration) in schools. At the same time that we wring our hands over class sizes, a growing proportion on dollars spent ostensibly on education go to stuff that doesn't happen in the classroom. We can "barely afford" stuff when we let a whole industry of nonessential stuff graft itself onto the thing we actually care about.

[peteradio]

> You're the richest nation on earth*

*On paper

[maxerickson]

The material abundance here is obvious, it's not just on paper.

[jachee]

How else does one track “richest” anything? On paper is what matters when counting wealth.

That said, the gap between capability and actuality of spending that your parent comment is lamenting is the gap for that on-paper wealth not being used for real-world-improving actions, and instead being used to increase the on-paper wealth of a tiny minority of wealth-holders.

[ErikVandeWater]

Humor me, by what measure is the US the richest nation on earth, or even close? Anything per capita will be dominated by Monaco/other tax havens. Anything on a gross level will be dominated by China.

[burkaman]

By net wealth (assets - liabilities). Here's a Wikipedia list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...) based on the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report (https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/g...). You're right that it's not even close, the US is almost twice as rich as China in the #2 spot.

[ErikVandeWater]

Add in underfunded liabilities and lets see what it shows us. Of course if a country doesn't require all liabilities to be counted it's going to show up at the top of the list.

[kube-system]

By the most simple definition of the term: total wealth.

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

[dataflow]

Well if you have to pick something, the US has the highest GDP in the world.

[triceratops]

There are large countries (India, China). There are rich countries (Germany, Japan, the UK). The US is the only large, rich country.

[FunnyLookinHat]

> The US can barely afford to school its children

Ironically, I was just listening to this today: "Why Does the Richest Country in the World Have So Many Poor Kids? (Ep. 475) " [1]

There really isn't any excuse - it's all a product of our politics and culture, or vice versa... I'm not sure.

1) https://freakonomics.com/podcast/child-poverty/

[xyzzyz]

> The US can barely afford to school its children

FWIW, US has one of the highest spend on education in the world. Among OECD countries, it is only behind Luxembourg, Norway, and Austria, and only barely so. If the educational outcomes in US are below expectations, it’s not because we spend too little, but rather because we’re not getting our money’s worth.

[germinalphrase]

Funding and educational attention are bumpy metrics. Putting Mississippi and Massachusetts in the same bucket doesn’t lend itself to fair comparisons.

[xyzzyz]

Spending and educational outcomes are very loosely correlated in the US. Vermont is spending roughly as much as Mississippi, but it has vastly better educational outcomes. Baltimore spends more per student than the two combined, but its educational outcomes are abysmal.

[nradov]

Much of what Baltimore spends on "education" is really social services by another name. That's not necessarily a bad thing because children in bad situations really do need food, healthcare, counseling, etc in order to be able to learn effectively. But bundling all of those ancillary services into the education budget makes it hard to tell whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth.

[xyzzyz]

Apparently, the food, healthcare, and counseling, as administered by Baltimore schools, are not very helpful in education, given the abysmal outcomes they produce.

[edmundsauto]

Those outcomes are not reasonable goals, given the profound challenges these students face. The programs are probably inefficient (many of these services are), but your statement forgets that the bar is too high for kids suffering from abuse, starvation, homelessness, etc.

It could be a lot worse without this support.

[titanomachy]

> US is unwilling to support euthanasia

I don’t know about the rest of the US, but Washington and Oregon have allowed physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill for years.

[gowld]

Parent was referring to physician-mandated homicide.

[tomrod]

No, and I'm not sure how you arrived at that.

I was referencing policies like those in WA, OR, and Europe where people can choose to end their life.

[User23]

Choosing to end one’s own life doesn’t require government policy. Human life is plenty fragile. Anyone that actually wants to die has plenty of reliable options and they will be beyond the reach of secular law afterwards.

From that it follows that euthanasia laws are actually about allowing next of kin or whoever has medical power of attorney to lawfully order the principal’s killing. In the best case this is executing the principal’s express wishes, but in most cases it’s not.

Edit: I’m curious, does anyone actually believe they need the government’s permission to commit suicide? It’s so preposterous a proposition that I’m literally baffled.

[lazyasciiart]

Some people are not physically capable of suicide. Some people are technically physical capable but under constant medical care that means they would effectively need collusion from others. Some people believe they shouldn't have to die alone and want the choice to have their family or others around them without leaving their family exposed to criminal charges. Some people simply believe they should have access to reliable, comfortable and painless deaths with the assistance of a professional.

Most people who attempt suicide fail. Some of this is due to sheer chance (surviving a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge), some of it is failure to understand the means they choose, some of it is due to sheer psychological inability, like people who faint at the sight of blood.

Are you less baffled now?

[TomVDB]

Try committing suicide while surrounded by family without risking those present to be charged with murder.

[paulryanrogers]

Were they?

If I wanted a chip to help me commit suicide once I'm no longer mentally fit then is that legal?

[tehwebguy]

We print money for bombs & bailouts because there is a valuable enough carrot for our policy makers.

Maybe we can think of a carrot (or better yet a stick) that would stop those things and start printing money for things like education, healthcare, end of life care.

[kshacker]

You discussed everything except the profit motive of the owners to bleed every bit of penny from their "earnings"