Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological (or, god help us, nationalistic) flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
In Germany, it's not the social system per se but it's aoparent utter ineffectiveness. We're paying more and more every year but the state/public system seems to fail everywhere and worse so than the year before. It's like the money is completely sucked up by some unproductive black hole.
And no, it's not because of reduced taxation from rich to working class, or missing taxes on property or some other policy. These policies didn't change that much in the last decade or two. Yet throughout the last decade the state and social security systems had record income, record levels of employment and managed to run down pretty much every part of the public system from education, over healthcare to defense. The money just vanished.
I am very much convinced that Germany as a whole doesn't have an income problem, but a spending problem.
That is, in my opinion, by far the strongest argument for lower taxes. The money we (the US) do spend in education/healthcare/infrastructure is already poorly utilized, why would we want to spend more and end up like that?
To simplify it dramatically with an example, I'd rather pay $3 on the toll road and $50k for a surgery myself than pay $10 in taxes towards the road and $100k in taxes towards the healthcare system but receive both of them for "free".
I understand the advantages of a social safety net, I do. But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.
> I'd rather pay $3 on the toll road and $50k for a surgery myself than pay $10 in taxes towards the road and $100k in taxes towards the healthcare system but receive both of them for "free".
That would be a nice scenario to choose to be in.
However, the US _government_ pretty much spends more per-person than those countries with a social net [1]. So in reality, you're paying those taxes of those social countries and also getting to pay private insurance ontop of that. Although current taxes are lower than the social countries since the government's expenditures are debt financed but if the USG were to stop they'd have to raise taxes to pay it with revenue and then you'll be really wondering why you're paying the same in taxes as the EU and not getting EU benefits.
Healthcare is its own issue in the US, as I think the general populous is on average a good bit unhealthier than the average Norwegian, for example. I think it's a combination of poor health education (which also goes back to spending) and culture.
US cities were based around cars in 1990. But today, the thinnest state (Colorado) is heavier on average than the fattest state in 1990 (Mississippi, also today's national leader)
Walking is obviously better than not walking, but something other than cars is to blame for the ballooning of the American public. 75% of America is either overweight or obese right now. That alone puts you at risk for about a million health issues and diseases.
Yes, but suppose there's a "road company" you'd have to pay a toll to. Obviously they love profit margins and since they're a monopoly (they own the road) the toll would soon balloon to $20 then $35 then $100.
I think landowners should declare a value for their property, that is used for taxation, but also allows anyone to immediately buy the land from you at that price. This would allow rival road companies to quickly purchase the land necessary to build an alternative road. Such wasteful duplication would rarely happen in practice, though, because the knowledge that they do not have a guaranteed monopoly, that another company can build an alternative road if they charge exorbitant fees, will keep the charge to use the road reasonable.
>I think landowners should declare a value for their property, that is used for taxation, but also allows anyone to immediately buy the land from you at that price. This would allow rival road companies to quickly purchase the land necessary to build an alternative road.
I don't really think "Yankee Swap" is the best model for land management, my guy.
If they do that for long enough though they go out of business. There is not really an equivalent to going out of business in government, or at least the bar is much higher for it to happen (I.e. violent revolution).
> There is not really an equivalent to going out of business in government, or at least the bar is much higher for it to happen (I.e. violent revolution)
There's absolutely an equivalent, publicly elected officials lose re-election campaigns all the time.
Is a failed government policy generally stopped and corrected by an electoral change in practice? In my experience this almost never happens. Whereas if a company goes under, whatever failed action it was taking just stops happening. Not equivalent IMO.
The harder it is to create a startup in an area, the less competition you’ll have there. Things like regulation and labor protection laws have the unfortunate side effect of discouraging founders to embark in the "startup adventure".
The IRS recently got a significant amount of funding, and call times went down by a lot.
There are certainly inefficiencies out there, and we should always be trying to root them out, but sometimes if you starve an organization of funding, it doesn't perform very well. Shocker!
Well, if you understood what we already spent on healthcare you'd know that we spend more per capita than everyone and we have an entire industry whose whole existence is siphoning off their cut of profit from every little transaction.
So yeah, I'd rather have single payer healthcare, and we can just fire all of the leeches.
> The money we (the US) do spend in education/healthcare/infrastructure is already poorly utilized, why would we want to spend more and end up like that?
The whole point of a single-payer system is that you will spend less, by virtue of the government using its single-buyer negotiating power to push down prices.
And also by virtue of firing all the useless parasites and middlemen that create, consume, and shuffle the mountains of paperwork that surround US health insurance, advertising, billing, etc. Unsurprisingly, these middle-men don't look kindly upon being eliminated, and have somehow convinced half the country that if it weren't for their heroic efforts, grandma would never get a cardiac shunt, and that the world would literally end if Medicare was actually allowed to negotiate drug prices.
So, you'd have to show that since, let's say 1940, the QoL of Americans has improved as a direct result of lower taxes.
We should be able to look at things like salary, cost of living such as price of homes, education, and food all improving against inflation. So, unless you can do that, your argument for lower taxes is baseless and without merit.
> But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.
Hard-earned money that is earned because of the society supported by the taxes that person pays. Without that society, you would not be earning the same amount. No hard-earned money is earned by an individual in the US.
So because the government is perceived to be bad at stuff, we should instead redistribute (an even greater part of) the wealth to rich people, because they do a really good job bring societal good with their piles of gold?
For a fair comparison of health care costs, you would need to know how much that $50K surgery would cost the German government. US health care costs are notoriously high.
As long as we're making up numbers though, I'd rather pay $3 for surgery and $3 for road taxes and then have the state pay me $50k in unemployment while I'm recovering from surgery. The reason we have to make people miserable is because of cries about inflation if we just give poor people money but it turns out greedy white collar crimial capitalists are really the root cause.
If the last couple of years proved anything, it's that money is all made up. It doesn't mean anything, like points on HN or Reddit karma. You happen to be able to use money to trade for goods and services, but outside of that, it's a made up numbers game, like Monopoly.
There's this really bad logic that seems to govern social spending everywhere, and it states that if a program doesn't work very well, the problem is obviously inadequate funding so increase that. Over and over and over. The end result is this black hole you talk about, endlessly sucking up money.
No one stops to ask why the program or government office doesn't do it's job well, the issue is funding!
This is a misunderstanding. These people are not "delivering service". They are doing "governance and administration". And administration size on Germany is acting like a ratchet: growing sometimes, but never shrinking.
The problem isn't spending it's the effectiveness of it. The last thing that you want to do is have the government cut spending because it doesn't get rid of the corruption it just cuts the stuff that helps people.
What are you talking about? The US has one of the most progressive tax systems, and like 50% of people don't even pay income tax. The government wastes money and the medical establishment is corrupt -- but that has nothing to do with rich people living off of the poor. The poor in America are far richer than the poor in most other countries.
> The poor in America are far richer than the poor in most other countries.
You probably mean the US/Canada. 'America' includes South America for which this is not generally true.
However, replace 'America' in your sentence with any developed country and the statement is indeed generally true. And thusly of little value to this discussion.
Specifically it doesn't change the fact that the poor in the US are much poorer that the poor in most (possibly all?) developed countries. [1]
And I do not mean this solely in the sense of pure numbers as in e.g. [2]. But rather what it means to be poor.
I.e. how dignified or undignified a life do the social support systems of a country and the view of the resp. society on the poor allow you to live, should you fall in that bracket?
It's more tiresome that US citizens claim the term and do not understand the issue with it. [1]
As a European traveling to South America frequently it is very obvious to me why all my friends there take issue with this. As a European this is also not my fight but I do take sides nevertheless.
From my post getting three down votes, two of which I must assume stem from this topic at least, I dare only conclude that the sensitivity is mutual.
So probably worth understanding and showing some consideration. Beers!
America has always been a make it or break it place with most people not making it.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just pointing out that has been our schtick for hundreds of years. It's the land of opportunity, not the land of guarantee.
> It's the land of opportunity, not the land of guarantee
Absolutely.
> most people not making it
By any metric, there's at most a handful of countries where the median person is as well off as in the US. I struggle to say that most people aren't making it here; or if they really aren't, then not making it in America is better than making it in most other places.
This is really a different issue; tech salaries in parts of the US really are substantially higher, and that has fairly little to do with the differences in government policies in the areas you mentioned.
Eligiblity for Medicaid is limited, and many important groups are "optional" which essentially means "no, if Republicans control any branch of your state government".
Yes. In Texas, you need to be pregnant, have a child under age 18, blind, disabled, or over 65 to qualify, in addition to the income requirements: https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/1640%7D
I'd love to move, but getting a green card is a nightmare.
I don't want to work for 5 years trapped with one employer and facing deportation with a matter of weeks if I lose my job, on an L-1 visa (and to do that I'd still have to find a position to move to in my company).
Not true at all. In fact the poorer you are, the better health care you get - all free. It's the middle class who get crushed in America. $2000/mo insurance with $5K deductibles for a family of 4.
People are often unaware of this. I was really surprised to learn that my health insurance was completely free in WA (Apple Health/Medicaid) when I quit my job. Health insurance affordability is really U shaped as you're implying and that chasm can be hard to cross.
Average salary in SV is 115k, 22k in France. USA live off its neo-colonial digital empire, not through the exploitation of blue collars. When any digital company out there pay 30% of what they earn in tarifs on cloud, ads, servers, licenses, app revenue, patent litigation, …
So, you compare the averge of France, a cpuntey not known for high salaries, as a cpuntey to one of the highest paid regions in the world? SV =|= blue collar, the rust belt and Detroit are blue collar.
Exactly, and my wife and I spend easily tens of thousands a year out of pocket for things that would be "free" or close to free in the EU. Things like healthcare, transportation, childcare, etc. Its not uncommon for health plans have a 10k deductible per year, 20k for the family.
And yet you do not hear of normal people in the EU going bancrupt over medical expenses or not taking an ambulance because they cannot afford it. Funny, isn't it?
But you do hear a lot of them complaining in different ways about how they are oppressed. I won't even give citation apart from [1]. So nope, not funny.
Man, the French have been rioting for weeks over raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, after raising it from 60 to 62 and incurring similar riots about twelve years ago.
In comparison, when the French Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, the life expectancy was about twenty-two years shorter than it is now. One would think it's reasonable to raise the retirement age a little to fit that.
You change to median in the whole USA and median in the whole Europe then? Still the same conclusion. SV tech engineers arent rich because someone's is flipping their burgers. Someone is flipping an engineer's burger in France, in Detroit, In Tehran. So blue collar exploitation exists everywhere and cannot explain the outrageous salaries in SV.
It's the cost of living. The cost of living in the SF baybarea is 79% above the national average. A living wage is simply more here because it costs more to live here.
If all the major employers in the area cut wages down to $80k, wouldn't the cost of housing be forced down too? Who can buy a house for 2.2 million when making $80k.
And on a side note, there are many companies in the area that pay $80k and less, oil change mechanics for example. So it's not like you MUST pay that SV wages because cost of living is high.
I have a feeling it is due to high demand for those workers.
It doesn't work that way, you can't control markets from the top down. You are right, it's a supply demand thing. A company needs to hire 100 engineers with a specific skillset in x number of months, so they come here where there are enough engineers to hire in that skillset in the local talent pool, then they make offers to engineers until they get enough engineers, if they don't get enough they need to increase their offers. It's a simple market like any other. It's simple, yes the cost of living on the middle of nowhere Ohio is less, but you can't hire 100 engineers with specific skillsets and experiences, you need to move them there, or build them from students. So a person living here wouldn't accept an offer that doesn't allow them to live and thrive near their workplace. If the cost of living were less they would be more willing to overlook the compensation for other factors, but for most tech workers who are not independently wealthy because the cost of living is so high, it forces us to expect compensation that is aligned with that high cost of living.
Also, SF is already over 60% rent controlled housing, so the cost of living for over 60% of the population is already being artificially reduced beneath the market. It's also interesting to note that the income level to qualify for rent controlled/stabilized housing is 77-160k a year depending on household size.
It's astonishingly expensive to live here compared to much of the rest of the country
Thank you for posting this. This is both staggering, and also highly informative. It's clear this is crushing the US middle and lower classes.
I've seen a recent trend in churches, where they use their excess funds to buy people's medical debt out of collections and forgive it. It's the best thing I've heard in a long time.
I also have been recently battling with Blue Shield of California (but they're all bad). They were denying me my medicine, in a similar way that Cigna was proven to deny claims by ProPublica recently. I also found out that a few years ago Blue Shield of California was stripped of its non profit tax benefits because it had billions in surplus that it was just sitting on, you know, making profit. Since then they seem to be spending money to out their names on things like opera houses in SF and advertising, but not putting it to work in the community to make real impact.
I propose we create a movement that demands that insurance companies use their excess profit, etc. to buy people's medical debt and free them of it. How do we get this movement going? Blue Shield of California alone has hundreds of millions a year in surplus, that would buy out billions of dollars in medical debt for people and completely change many people's lives for the better.
> I propose we create a movement that demands that insurance companies use their excess profit, etc. to buy people's medical debt and free them of it. How do we get this movement going? Blue Shield of California alone has hundreds of millions a year in surplus, that would buy out billions of dollars in medical debt for people and completely change many people's lives for the better.
Blue Shield of California had a net loss of almost a billion dollars in 2022[0]. Should they do the reverse in that case and put their excess loss by putting more people in medical debt?
No, they should do a bunch of internal audits and clean house and go bankrupt if that's what's in the cards. Mismanagement has consequences.
As you pointed out, they are being run very poorly, while the top executives still take home million dollar salaries (1) and have been spending money on things like the Blue Shield Field Club at Oracle park.
If they do the work, I'm sure they can do right by the general public and their customers, they are currently not. They have a 1.1 star review with 800 reviews on Yelp, it's lower than the San Francisco DMV which has 1.8.
Surveys of people "considering" or "planning" to do things are notoriously inaccurate. You have to look at the number of people who actually did do the thing in question.
Your source shows ~375k to 2m non-business bankruptcies filed per year over the last twenty years, not all of which is primarily due to medical costs (but there appears to not be a definitive source of data on this), out of a population that went from 282m to 331m over the same time. So 0.1-0.7% of the population files for a personal bankruptcy every year for any reason, which is a far cry from one quarter of the country being on a brink of a medical bankruptcy.
Everyone knows healthcare costs are problematic in this country; no need to resort to hyperbole. Let's stick to the facts.
It's reality, not FUD. Emergency rooms not being able to turn you away when you have a heart attack isn't healthcare. Healthcare includes being able to go to a doctor before you get to the point of emergency for preventative care.
Healthcare should also include taking care of yourself, but somehow we've gotten to the place where only a quarter of the population is at a healthy weight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35899436.