re: How America’s Quality of Life Imploded

Check out the titles of this guy's (umair haque) articles

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Why American Collapse is Only Just Beginning (Not Ending) Six Megatrends That Will Shape the Future

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How America’s Quality of Life Imploded Or, How to Get Prosperity Backwards

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Why Americans Should Admit They’re Traumatized by Collapse Or, The Anxiety of Living in a Collapsing World

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Why Utopian Societies Like America Fall Or, If Extreme Capitalism is What Connects America’s Problems, Why Can’t Americans Figure it Out?

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Why America is the World’s Most Uniquely Cruel Society Or, How Punching Down Became a Way of Life

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Is There About to be A Great American Awakening? How Young People Might Just Reinvent a Broken Society

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Is There Any Price Americans Won’t Ask Their Kids to Pay? Or, the Dismal Future of the Average American Young Person

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Fking move dude.

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To be fair...that graph also depicts things that are impacted directly by technology and automation vs things that aren't so easily.

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That, and other than food/bev, are subject to far more regulation and intervention than the others.

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Fking move dude.

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Everyone is just trying to make America great (in some cases 'again'), through different approaches and the free exchange of ideas promotes this.

Perhaps Tom, the poor elderly Walmart worker, likes to work. You know, there is no sin in working late in life. Many of do it because we want to, not because we have to.

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Reality: Nothing prevails except gridlock and maintaining existing Dem/Rep power structures.

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Until, of course, the respective adherents to these 'parties' become dissatisfied with the status quo, radicalize, and seek the destruction of the other. This is, I think, what happens with divided informal power and party politics, unless there is someone truly in charge.

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Reality: Nothing prevails except gridlock and maintaining existing Dem/Rep power structures.

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What would "prevailing" entail? Do you feel like there's something personally holding you back?

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Its no problem

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But it is

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I understand that many people have not trained themselves to empathize and understand other perspectives

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Empathy doesn’t trump logic. I have appropriate amounts of empathy for those that deserve it. It seems you don’t

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Healthy food, healthcare, stable housing, "afford kids", that sort of basic stuff.

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Ridiculous.

30 years ago my wife and I married.
I made $7.25 and my wife made $4.35 and hour.

We now gross just under $220K a year
We have 7 Kids. 3 have finished college, one is starting college and one joined the Army.
The last 2 are in Jr High and High School.

We have provided every thing our kids need by the sweat of our brow and didn't need or depend on the Government for anything.

Anyone can do the same if they are willing to work for it.

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This guy is onto something! Ensuring basic quality of life standards for all people leads to longer lives and happier people - end goals we can all share.

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In theory. If you have a homogenous country that shares similar values and desires.

Doesn’t work if you have nearly 50% of the population wanting to do nothing and be paid for it.

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uote:
Healthy food, healthcare, stable housing, "afford kids", that sort of basic stuff.
I need to find it, but there isn’t a graph with a bunch of things in comparison to inflation over the last few decades. Every thing that had direct government support like tax breaks, direct subsidies, government backed loans, etc. grew faster than inflation while everything that didn’t, grew slower than inflation.

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The big differentiator is tradeable vs. non-tradeable goods.

All those goods that the author mentions as "basic rights" are non-tradeable normal goods.

The Euros contain costs in part because they impose some pretty strict state-enforced cost controls (i.e., QALY for the NHS, German education tracting at 13 years old, etc.) and, in part, because most of the continent is poorer than the U.S. is when adjusting for purchasing power. They don't have the marginal dollars we do to spend on things like healthcare and education.

ETA: And we do have a form of social contract, just not to the extent that guy wants. We wouldn't have free public education through high school, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without one.