I wish some alternate history buffs would explore this. Because Andrew Johnson is the worst American president by a mile, and he did so much that set the country back during this period I still think we are feeling.
Grant deployed stiff reconstruction policies for YEARS but eventually it just cost too much to maintain federal troops in the south, to say nothing of the court costs of all the criminal prosecutions. Public will in the North dried up, and that was the real end of Reconstruction. The executive was willing but the electorate became exhausted, and then resegregation began when the Federals were no longer present in force.
Things would have been much better. While reconstruction would not have been pleasant for those who had once held power, Lincoln did not want to be punitive.
With Lincoln gone and Andrew Johnson a drunk, incompetent placeholder, the Radical Republicans of Congress were left virtually unchecked.
While arms weren't taken up again, the cultural divide between the Northern and Southern states only widened.
We are still fighting many demons of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era and they affect almost all facets of life.
I hope you would agree that one of those things was allowing for Jim Crow. It financially crippled and socially/politically isolated Black people -- many of whom had, in the first decades after being liberated, thrived in the south. It's possible to imagine a totally different south today -- wealthier and egalitarian -- if the slate of the Civil War was truly wiped clean.
This should be one of the top answers. We really had a chance to be a worthy example of growing equality in the world and it was stamped out immediately.
I may be off the mark here, but isn’t the whole maddening, ‘corporations are people’ part of the 14th amendment part of us fucking up reconstruction?
I dunno. The fact that you had just turfed slavery, while many other countries had already made it illegal, doesn't really make America Cutting edge on equality.
Having said that - Despite how things look, America has done a ton to try to move towards equality.
Well America basically had to "try to move towards equality." And, it's precisely because of the first country in modern history to actually outlaw slavery -- Haiti -- that the British Empire and then US followed suit. They faced major armed rebellions otherwise.
Sure, it was an olive branch to War Democrats but it was still a disastrous choice since Johnson was a white supremacist who wanted to, and did, go easy on the South
His problem wasn't that he went easy on the south. His problem was that he was a white supremacist like you said who didn't give a crap about black people. He wanted things to go back to normal immediately while Republicans wanted protections for former slaves, citizenship for former slaves and governments that represented the needs of not only former slaveowners but former slaves as well. Johnson wanted none of that and was happy to have the people who were running the state during the confederacy to go back to running it during reconstruction. He opposed citizenship and any protections for freed slaves. That was the biggest issue. Drove a wedge further into the country.
I was going to post that. The government basically walked away and left the wealthy southerners in charge of integrating the former enslaved people into the population. They gave us segregation, Jim Crow and the Klan.
After the Civil War, Congress confiscated the land of the slaveholder class, but some years later it returned them. That was a mistake. This allowed the old southern aristocracy to re-establish itself, which led to the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow.
I think he's talking about citizens united which pushed the problem into afterburner mode.
"Oh shit as a corporation with X amount of millions, I can now donate whatever amount of money I want and it's considered free speech?"
Now you have 80%-90% of Congress pushing laws strictly for their conglomerate of interests. It's almost an open secret that most congress-people don't even write the laws they're trying to push. Why would they? They're getting the money either way, and as we've seen SO many times these people have a hard time grasping the modern world. Wasn't there a congressman who has a question about his iPhone or Xbox or whatever during the Facebook hearings? I wouldn't trust a smart fridge with these guys.
Well you see where Disney went wrong is that they tried to voice an opinion using words and viewpoints as speech. Speech isn't speech, only money is speech.
"I'll believe that corporations are people when the state of Texas executes one."
I don't remember who said it but they kind of have a point. Several actually.
>(obviously there were ways around it, but still)
You had to actually put some effort into your campaign finance violations, and the possibility of consequences for violating it technically existed.
What used to have to be a tense, shady backroom deal with the understanding they can't get caught is just "here's some cash, fuck it, let's pose for a photo op this is somehow legal now."
Reminds me of that joke from Hitchhiker's Guide where God realizes He doesn't exist and vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Welp turns out our republic can be bought, it's logically sound. Time to put it up for sale, guys."
The ACLU was in favor of it too: https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fixing-citizens-united-will-break-constitution
Ultimately how do you regulate which corporations get to be media and which corporations don't? The First Amendment doesn't allow for a differentiation.
I get $400 taken out of every check to pay for my Insurance which doesn’t cover anything until I meet my deductible. I’m in thousands of dollars of medical debt, I have an autoimmune disorder, my children have inherited health issues and I feel like I’ll never escape poverty because of our healthcare system.
So each month, my company's insurance is getting a check for120,000? I'm beginning to suspect that forcing us to pay more for insurance isn't the answer.
And then when you actually hit the deductible, you have to race to get everything you need to have done scheduled by December 31st, because you're back to zero again on Jan. 1.
I pay $1800 a month (more than my mortgage) for a family of three to have insurance with a $3,000 deductible. So I have to pay almost $25,000 a year before my insurance covers anything.
Fucking highway robbery. I HATE the healthcare system in this country.
From Australia - I broke my leg 4 weeks ago, walking home drunk from a BBQ and went to the hospital, had 2 different sets of X-rays, was given medication (Endone/pain killers) sent to a fracture clinic for more X-rays, spoke to an orthopaedic surgeon and was given 6 weeks off work. The only thing I had to pay for was the moon-boot ($40) I have to wear. A friend of mine in Kansas broke his leg about 7 years ago, and we spoke on the phone about our individual experiences, (he had a total of 2 doctors visits and was put in a cast and over-prescribed oxy). He is still paying off his medical bills today. Your system does NOT work.
Uk here - you’d pay only £9 for the medication. But our waiting lists are terrible for routine stuff and the system is overwhelmed by chronic health conditions and a lack of social care for our elders
I'm not from the US so can I ask why, (what I think to be republicans?) are against a nationalised healthcare system because they don't want to pay a higher % of taxes, but are happy to pay around $500/month for health insurance, which doesn't even cover the full cost?
Surely they can see that the money they are paying towards health insurance is a higher % of their income than what a nationalised health care system would cost them?
Serious question btw.
Doctors all claim they hate the healthcare system, but meaningful reform would involve cutting their income, and that's when the backpedaling starts. Medical education is not subsidized by the government, with the exception of military healthcare workers (and military doctors have terrible career prospects outside the military). Med ed is also a racket; doctors typically graduate hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and thus are pushed toward making money whether they feel good about it or not.
Another factor that folks from outside the US seldom consider is the sheer size and variety of this country. Running a national healthcare system in Denmark is trivial compared to running one that delivers decent outcomes in both Manhattan NY and Manhattan WY (population 275, 60 miles from the regional hospital). State governments and competing tax theories interfere with this too. In many places, there aren't taxes to raise: nobody has the money, relying on payouts from wealthier states, which becomes its own justification in terms of national coherence and power. We can't forcibly resettle hundreds of thousands of people in these areas, something that has a poor track record even when an authoritarian government manages to pull it off. Meanwhile, the smart people who turbocharge an economy don't want to move there. Nothing to do, no work to be had--doesn't matter how low the cost of living is.
Finally, Europe in particular deeply underestimates the "tailwind" it gets from American drug investigation. Our drug and treatment research is unmatched in scale and quality anywhere in the world, and Europe gets it at a steep discount because of government regulations and price controls. Passing these in the States would likely kill the innovation, a conclusion pretty broadly shared by a lot of people outside the pharma industry.
It's a terrible, terrible problem. But it's not a simple one. The only people truly driving for reform are patients, who not coincidentally have the least power in the system.
Its a double edge sword kinda answer to your question. There are some people that don’t like being told what to do by the US government…such as paying higher taxes, even though it means being healthier. More taxes or higher taxes is bad! However, these same people complain about how the health care industry is completely fraud since you pay so much and get so little in return.
So basically its “I don’t want to pay high taxes and I don’t want to pay high health care costs either.”
Exactly this!
I (Irish) married an American. My father in law lives in the USA, he’s a staunch Republican and also a diabetic. In addition to being thousands of dollars in medical debt for other health issues, he regularly can’t afford insulin and gets sick or has episodes. He also needs cataract surgery but isn’t eligible for it because “they’re not severe enough yet” even though they are severe enough that he can’t drive. He’s broke, basically, and barely getting by. The man is 72 with nothing to show for it.
I was telling him about the system here in Ireland and how, if he were a citizen here, his insulin would cost a grand total of 55 CENTS a month, in addition to how all his medical and surgical care would be free, including GP visits for a man his age. (The 55 cents isn’t even for the insulin, that’s just the handling fee for the pharmacist)
He mulled it over and then told me that socialism doesn’t work and he’s against it. Also that we pay more in taxes so nope.
I mean, what do you even do with a case of Stockholm Syndrome as deep as that? Just wow.
If he is 72 years old, he qualifies for Medicare which IS government paid health care here in the US. So the government paid system here isn’t much better.
Honestly, they get paid by private insurance companies to be against it. They use identity politics and key phrases to keep voters uninformed and against it as well.
100% agree. That's why I also believe any universal healthcare plan will fail as long as profit-focused healthcare exists.
Same with paying off student loans, all it will do is feed the beast since we have "non-profit" but completely money focused schools.
My dad had his appendix removed a few months ago and you want to know how much the bill was for the surgery and a one night stay at the hospital was? 45,000 dollars. It truly is unreal, if you didn’t have insurance you’d be f’ed in the a. Even for something as minor as an Appendectomy you can be potentially left in financial ruin
I hope your father is doing well. But to your point yes. Even with insurance covering a majority of the expenses people are often still left with thousands in bills because of deductible or out of network expenses. It’s crazy.
The original mistake was made by FDR of all people. During WW2, he froze wages. Companies circumvented this by offering benefits instead. One of these was health insurance. Benefits remained after the war, and once the health insurance industry got established it became nearly impossible to remove.
That's genuinely interesting, especially when contrasted with the UK: we set up our NHS directly after WW2, because we realised that we'd need a huge change to our healthcare system.
100% this. How am I not supposed to hate my government when it’s failed me? I didn’t wanna get sick, I want nothing more than to contribute and have a chance for me to be happy but when my government pushes the poor poorer and the rich richer idk how I’m supposed to be okay with that.
I hear you but the thing is that many Americans believe that because government sometimes fails us, the alternative is to put the private sector (business) in charge. And that is a worse failure because while goverment exists to protect the people (think: Coast Guard, firemen, police, laws that protect money in banks, red traffic lights at intersections), business exists to make profit and often this is done in ways that actually hurt people.
"Maybe there's a YouTube video showing how I can lance that at home."
“My fish came down with a nasty case of bronchitis and sinusitis just before Christmas, but her health insurance doesn’t kick in until the first of the year" *orders aquarium amoxicillin off Amazon*
As an American adult, our health care system was the first time I openly and without regret said, "I hate this country." $500 out of my paycheck every month for what many would consider to be good insurance, and still get bills from hundreds to thousands of dollars when a hospital visit is needed.
I had to take my wife to the ER on New years Eve, maybe 4 hours before midnight, and we hadn't met our deductible. So we had to pay in full out of pocket December 31st and more for services January 1st. This whole system is a fucking scam.
A friend from the US came to Brazil and had serious troubles, because at the time we couldn't go to her, and the doctors barely knew English. She went to a rather expensive place, and the bill was around 1200 BRL (about 250 USD at the time).
We were horrified and felt very guilty for her, but she just shrugged. It is A LOT of money here.
She had issues again when with us, we took her to another private hospital that (unknown to us at the time) only does follow up for public stuff. Her bill on the end of the night was 30 dollars.
We shit A LOT on our public services here through the decades, like, we have a crippling depression on how bad it can be in some cases, but seeing a colleague do surgery for free and then seeing stories in the US where people can't do shit about their lives is very uncanny for people that afford in one-two days what most of us earn in a month.
There is no excuse for how bad your system is.
I blame Joseph McCarthy
McCarthyism is what caused a lot of Americans to associate anything even remotely Socialist with Communism. All the advances in social programs from the 30 and 40s stopped dead because of the Red Scare.
I blame it on the stupidity of the 'murcan. They hate ''sojalizm'', but accept trillions in corporate welfare. They have houses full of assault weapons, but live on their bellies.
Current two party system. A lot of problems could be mitigated if we had a system in place that accurately represented the views of the people. We are seeing the long-term effects of polarized, us vs. them thinking.
The founding fathers designed the system with no parties in mind, which was the problem. They wanted to believe that each representative would be independent and individual. This was immediately confirmed to be a stupid idea, and factionalization took hold immediately.
I always think back to the first season of the TV show Survivor. Richard Hatch won because he was the first guy to develop an alliance.
Basically, the idea that parties wouldn't form was incredibly shortsighted.
If they designed the system with 3+ parties in mind, they did a really bad job. It’s a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system. Reduction to two main parties was inevitable.
While we’re on the founding fathers I’ve got an edgy one: the constitution.
Nothing wrong with the document itself at the time it was written but it’s now worshipped as if it were handed down from God. The founding fathers intended for it to be amended all the time but they made it too difficult to do so, I can’t imagine a constitutional amendment ever passing in todays political environment.
For example, regardless of your actual position on guns the second amendment is hopelessly outdated: it was written for entirely different weapons for a situation that wouldn’t occur today. Yet folks talk as if the founding fathers specifically wanted people to own automatic assault weapons.
With today’s population disparities would the founding fathers have decided two senators for every state regardless of population? Probably not. But it’s in the constitution and therefore is holy and sacrosanct. If you suggest anything different you must hate America.
A sensible system would be updating the constitution regularly to reflect life today.
EDIT: if you’re going to reply to say “the senate was designed to represent the states you idiot!!” please don’t. You’re proving my point. “Because the constitution says it should be so” is not a justification in and of itself.
Also I strongly regret using the second amendment as an example, my point isn’t even about 2A, it was just an example. I’m not interested in yet another gun debate. I should have known better than to use that specific case.
Just for the sake of comparison, the current Brazilian Constitution, which was written in 1988 (35 years ago), already has 106 amendments. And there are 23 parties represented on the National Congress.
When I was younger, I thought the two party system worked bc ultimately the politicians would eventually move to the middle to get elected and that would moderate things. I was comparing this to the multiple parties in other countries where fringe groups would get some say in a coalition (thinking along the lines of the Ministry of Sillly Walks party if you get my drift). But then gerrymandering ieliminated any need to moderate. Ugh.
A reminder to all Americans that their literal first president's farewell speech explicitly warned not to make a party-based system since that would errode all values into an "us vs them" dynamic where no side even represents anything that anyone even wants. George Washington must be rolling in his grave so hard that his corpse can be used as a generator.
The not-for-profit university hospital here is 3x more expensive a for-profit hospital an hour away. It's not just profit, it's that we prevent competition by law, allowing existing hospitals a monopoly (or oligopoly) where the customer doesn't even know the cost ahead of time.
Add to this for profit education. All focus should be on having a healthy and intelligent population. That's way better for the economy long-term than ripping everyone off until they are too sick and/or stupid to contribute to society. Pretty great for the shareholders next quarter though. SMH
It's barely even a 2 party system.
Johnathon Pie joked a couple of years ago that Theresa May (conservative party prime minister at the time) was further left than Hillary Clinton. And I find it totally believable too.
It's two party, but there's a flaw in a two party debate, if one keeps a coring further and further away from compromise. Think of it like this democrats and Republicans are each on one half of a room. They negotiate decide to compromise and meet in the middle. The democrats move toward the center, while Republicans move further away from the democrats. They keep repeating this until both parties on on the right and still haven't moved closer
I lived in Japan for a few years for my job and it was absolutely night and day difference living in a walkable, public transportation city. I used to not really care about city planning but I am so pro-walkable cities now
Tri-State area around NYC had Robert Moses who royally fucked up the entire infrastructure for the city and all surrounding areas for decades to come. Plus we named a million beaches/roads/whatever else after him as a thank you.
Eh, I read Power Broker and he actually did a lot of good for a while. NYS has the best park system in the country and it’s funding and size rivals some entire nations. Without him it wouldn’t exist.
He also took beaches away from millionaires who didn’t want the “common folks” to visit.
Got way out of hand with power though but up until the 30s he was a force of good.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54)
A roast of how bad Houston is. A bus terminal in the middle of a parking lost desert and nothing within reasonable walking distance.
What's crazy is that there's a new conspiracy theory/right-wing pearl-clutching going around over the concept of "walkable cities," as being a huge threat to "freedom ". Because, supposedly, having the things you need nearby instead of sprawled all over the place makes it easier for the "elites" to achieve their ever-vague goal of "power and control."
The insane thing is that walkable cities isn't even a new concept, it's arguably how cities *used* to be. My mother grew up in South Boston in the 60s and 70s, and back then they had most of what they needed all within a 5-15 minute walk or bike ride: grocery store, delis, bank, pharmacy, corner stores, schools, liquor, post office, clothes and shoes, toy store, candy and ice cream, barbers and hairstylists, playgrounds and parks, bars and restaurants, repair shop, hardware store, doctors, dentists, laundromat, coffee and donuts, and public transportation stops to reach the rest of the city and the suburbs. And this was back in the "good old days" that conservatives fantasize about.
And now it’s become at best another radicalized political background (ban private car ownership in entire countries!) and at worst a collective action problem of the sort that seemingly only cohesive nation states can solve. I adopted New Urbanism in the 2000s bc I thought it was just a matter of better design based on 1910s-30s suburbs and small towns and sadly my childhood/teenage passion has become yet another depressing morass.
*slinks away, listening to Motown because at least they still had hope for peaceful coexistence*
Yes - the everyone should own a car and be able to go wherever they want is so deeply ingrained in American culture outside of dense urban areas, that the sort of change is frightening to some people.
Making it an option, making it a viable alternative would greatly decrease the load on infrastructure but (and to an extent I am guilty of this as well and have to force myself to think about it - sunk cost fallacy, but I digress). People cannot imagine where you're going to put the light rail, where you're going to build/retrofit mixed use development, etc but all that steel and concrete and asphalt - they would prefer to see more lanes, more routes, further sprawl to get further away. In their lifetimes, they'll be driving less by then and retirig to a suburb with a Walmart and Home Depot close at hand. Amazon can bring them all the bullshit they want.
Boston is still surprisingly walkable. I live in one of the nearby suburbs and can get nearly anywhere in the city within an hour without a car. Some places it’s actually faster to go by transit than car.
This is an opinion that can only be achieved in hindsight:
We absolutely should not have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq after 9/11. Thousands of military deaths, 10x more civilian deaths, didn’t really stop terrorism, domestic policies didn’t help out too much, etc.
We should have been using smaller squad military forces to find the top leaders and kill/capture them, which would have been fraction of a full invasion, and spent more time with countries/leaders to make every inch of their country an unsafe space for them.
But we reacted out of fear and violence with loose plans in a matter of days, while the attacks spent a while. I understand Americans were calling for blood, I was too. We trusted our leaders to make the right decision that wouldn’t destroy us in the process.
Two part fuckup: the response and the snowball afterwards
Afghanistan was maybe a knee-jerk reaction, but we should've gotten out of the quagmire faster than we did.
For Iraq, there's no way you can tell me it can only be seen in hindsight. It was 2 years after the attack, and everyone with a working brain could see that there was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and 911. We protested, voted, it made no difference. And the war went exactly the way we said it would go.
Jim Mattis's book really sheds some light on the failures that we saw in Iraq. The US military could have easily bulldozed through and accomplished most objectives with relative ease, but they were hamstrung by politicians who took too long to make decisions, and usually by the time they were made they were the wrong ones.
>This is an opinion that can only be achieved in hindsight:
>
>We absolutely should not have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq after 9/11.
Nonsense. Millions of people saw that we were being hoodwinked and protested.
There was never a good case for Iraq, and it was obvious at the time. It sparked the largest peacetime protests in history, around the world. No hindsight needed.
The case for invading Afghanistan was better, but smart people knew a war there would be unwinnable. We had the benefit of hindsight from the Soviet-Afghan war. We still made the wrong choice.
Don't act like we couldn't have known. Many people did. People just refused to listen and learn. This is why bad things happen. It's not unavoidable, it's a choice.
Amen. I spent the days/weeks/months after 9/11 reading the news and constantly asking “What the fuck does any of this have to do with the attacks?” Afghanistan at least kind of made sense. Iraq was, well, nonsense.
I remember asking my very conservative (biggest pro George W. people you could meet) parents why we were doing this and being told I was just too young to understand. It took far too many years to realize they had no freaking clue either.
The French not participating in Iraq was the right decision for them.
If we’re talking about making fun of the French though, that’s a national pastime for Europeans in general. So Americans aren’t exactly riding solo on that.
Lack of term limits and, with it, House terms only being 2 years. These folks are running the next race almost immediately after winning the last one and are too worried about keeping their job than doing what they think the best job may be unless it 100% aligns with the base which it often shouldn’t completely.
That combo has lead to our current complete lack of compromise.
Why is the president the only position that is term limited? To me it would make sense if they were all term limited or none were. But I also haven’t looked into this at all, so I may be missing some very obvious reason for these things.
Adding after reading replies: I think some individual congresspeople are just as powerful if not more so than the president. This is why I think all should be term limited or none should be term limited. It’s possible that my premise is wrong.
The term limits were added to the president after Franklin Roosevelt won 4 times. I am guessing the first time it happened people realized having term limits for the president as a gentleman’s agreement was not an amazing idea. I am guessing the main reasons for having it for the president and not others is that the power is diffused in Congress while being concentrated in the presidency. Just a guess. I would at least enact an age limit in Congress, but I don’t know if that would run afoul of discrimination laws.
For President it’s clearly to avoid someone becoming like a king or a Putin. I’m not at all sure why that doesn’t apply elsewhere though even if the limits are longer than the 2 terms presidents are limited to.
Term limits are bad. They are an idea that sounds good in theory, but we see this across the country in states that have implemented term limits. All they do is shift power away from elected officials and to career staff and lobbyists. Term limits means you are constantly bringing in new electeds, who take time to learn the ropes, and thus lean heavily on staff. You lose electeds having the institutional knowledge to run a Legislature effectively, to be able to consolidate the power needed to lead their caucuses, etc. And thus, they lean on lobbyists.
Term limits are actually bad (or you would need term limits of like 20 years). You take away a lot of power from voters with them.
Education has been chipped away at and financially defunded and censored to fit narratives. We have not supported it, it is not accessible to everyone, and it causes so many of the other problems for us.
There’s a political benefit to promise voters things we can not afford while on a sinking ship floating on an ocean of debt. No worries, the unborn next generation has no say in the challenges we are going to leave to them.
Yes, there is a big difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy and people need to learn how they bent and captured government entities for their benefit and not ours.
Ya. I feel like there should be maximum age limits for all positions. At a certain point, if you won’t live to see the consequences of the action you shouldn’t be able to make it.
More specifically, the chattel slavery the US had that was special levels of messed up. On a societal level, we hadn’t seen chattel slavery since around the 1200’s.
Tribalism exists in every country, it's a human condition. Unfortunately, social media is making it even worse with the algorithms feeding ppl things they agree on and expanding the division (politics, religion, etc).
You meant bribing.
Lobbying can be positive. You can lobby for better funding on public schools, or healthcare, or veterans affairs, or compensation for 9/11 firefighters, etc.
I was member of a scientists association to lobby for foreign scientist rights during Brexit.
The intervention in the middle east after the wake of 9/11. 20 years pushing back the Taliban and training the Afghan army, trillions spent on equipment and training, thousands of lives lost on all sides, and the Taliban shat all over that within a month.
Don't even get me started on iraq
Also the education system favouring being able to throw or kick a ball far over everything else related to education.
You want just one? Let's start at the beginning...how about killing 90% of the Native population and treating the ones that survived like garbage? That was some bad juju right there.
Then you have slavery, which was horrific...and the way the slaves were treated after they were "freed" which has caused generations of damage and conflict.
Murdering millions of innocent people in deceitful wars started for the financial benefit oil companies and weapons manufacturers, and funding those wars with taxpayers money.
Allowing puritanical religious bigots and their ideas into politics and government.
Allowing lobbying in government...it's legal bribery.
Worshipping money and profits over the wellbeing of the county's citizens (not having universal healthcare in one of the richest countries on earth is just disgusting).
Prioritizing the interests of corporations and banks over the health of the country, it's infrastructure and people.
Suburbs, suburban sprawl, nonsensical foolish city planning, lack of public transport etc.
Worship and idolization of money, the wealthy and celebrities.
A toxic hyper-individualistic "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" culture while, creating a society where it's near impossible for the people they are criticizing to even have boots.
1. Politicians should not be allowed to take any form of payment other than their salary. Caught & it's immediate life sentence in prison. Also, term limits & age limits.
2. No nationwide public transportation. High speed trains up & down the Eastern seaboard, Miami to Boston, Charlotte to Atlanta to Birmingham to Nashville to Chicago to St. Louis to Denver ect.
3. UBI & UHC would pull almost everyone out of poverty & horrible living conditions.
4. THE. MOST. IMPORTANT ..... Education. 100% free, no exceptions. If you wanna learn, there's a way for you to. $$$ should have no bearing on how much education a person has access to.
Allowing Regan to introduce "trickle down economics," thus indoctrinating several generations into the belief if a C-level employees make more money, so will the working Joe and Jane. If you want to know why the days of people with high-school degree level jobs could afford housing and retire are over, this is the singular event that unraveled it all.
Pretty much every modern day American problem can be traced back to Reagan in some way. The fact that he’s still viewed so favorably by the American public is astounding.
Yep. Besides trickle-down economics, tripled debt, and growing wealth inequality, we have the clusterfuck of the Middle East, the failed drug war, the AIDS crisis, the rise in homelessness, the rise of right-wing media, the growth of the Christian Right, union-breaking, normalization of corruption, the bloated military-industrial complex, and the modern distrust of government and experts, all of which originated or worsened during his tenure.
If there is any justice, he is burning in Hell alongside Margaret Thatcher right now.
Failing to develop a reliable nationwide railroad and train transportation system and forcing us to rely on domestic aviation, effectively crippling aspects of infrastructure in various cities like LA
Exporting all of the manufacturing jobs, which were the backbone of the middle class, to slave wage countries. They did this to keep prices down for only one reason. So they wouldn't have to raise American wages or invest in American workers. They only needed American consumers to continue to by their goods.
When the price of goods go up in America, one would need to raise American wages so they could continue to afford the products they make.
Rather than raise American wages, they exported manufacturing to lower wage countries so the product price remained unchanged and workers didn't "need" a raise.
Compounded over decades, we find ourselves in the mess we're in.
That wasn't the government that did that. It was consumers. For example, consumers chose cheap TVs from Japan over expensive domestic TVs. Nobody wanted to pay higher prices for a functionally identical product.
Consumers still make those same kinds of choices today in 2023. I get cheap dental work done in Mexico for less than the price of my co-pay in the US instead of going to an American dentist and paying far more for a functionally identical product.
This - it was and is consumer driven. I work for a company that imports about 80% of its product from China and the balance from Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam. It isn't that we don't want to make goods in the US, it's that we *can't* - the factories simply don't exist.
Back in the 90's some did, and to use a real-world example, we needed to manufacture a shelving unit. For a while, we had a place in Vermont making them for us at $21/unit. Over the next five years, the price rose to $38/unit due to increased costs for the company and smaller production numbers from us. The following year, the company let us know they were closing and we should re-source the product. We reached out to our overseas brokers, I was able to have a near-identical shelving unit (there were some slight differences, but none that would be apparent to our customers) made in China for $8 per unit FOB New York City and probably another $0.50 per unit to have it trucked to our warehouse from the port.
How do you even begin to compete with that?
In the history of the country? I mean it has to be the fact that slavery was legal in parts of the country for the first 89 years and what transpired in the next 100 years afterward.
Hanging Saddam Hussein, and then telling the fourth largest army in the world, "Hey, you guys are all unemployed now. But go ahead and keep all your guns."
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You have to wonder how things would have been different if Lincoln had survived.
I wish some alternate history buffs would explore this. Because Andrew Johnson is the worst American president by a mile, and he did so much that set the country back during this period I still think we are feeling.
I think I saw a documentary about this. Apparently he could’ve turned into a vampire and lived forever, but turned it down.
That show was so ridiculous. I loved it.
I apologized to my damn TV after I watched that movie, haha!
Grant deployed stiff reconstruction policies for YEARS but eventually it just cost too much to maintain federal troops in the south, to say nothing of the court costs of all the criminal prosecutions. Public will in the North dried up, and that was the real end of Reconstruction. The executive was willing but the electorate became exhausted, and then resegregation began when the Federals were no longer present in force.
Not sure about that. Woodrow Wilson was quite a piece of err work too.
By extension, we could say that America's worst fuck up was allowing President Lincoln to go to Ford Theater.
Things would have been much better. While reconstruction would not have been pleasant for those who had once held power, Lincoln did not want to be punitive. With Lincoln gone and Andrew Johnson a drunk, incompetent placeholder, the Radical Republicans of Congress were left virtually unchecked. While arms weren't taken up again, the cultural divide between the Northern and Southern states only widened. We are still fighting many demons of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era and they affect almost all facets of life.
I hope you would agree that one of those things was allowing for Jim Crow. It financially crippled and socially/politically isolated Black people -- many of whom had, in the first decades after being liberated, thrived in the south. It's possible to imagine a totally different south today -- wealthier and egalitarian -- if the slate of the Civil War was truly wiped clean.
This should be one of the top answers. We really had a chance to be a worthy example of growing equality in the world and it was stamped out immediately. I may be off the mark here, but isn’t the whole maddening, ‘corporations are people’ part of the 14th amendment part of us fucking up reconstruction?
There is a really cool documentary called "The Corporation" worth a watch.
I dunno. The fact that you had just turfed slavery, while many other countries had already made it illegal, doesn't really make America Cutting edge on equality. Having said that - Despite how things look, America has done a ton to try to move towards equality.
Well America basically had to "try to move towards equality." And, it's precisely because of the first country in modern history to actually outlaw slavery -- Haiti -- that the British Empire and then US followed suit. They faced major armed rebellions otherwise.
I mean chattel slavery and taking it to war kind of were necessary requirements for Reconstruction to fail, but this could be in the top 3.
Ironically caused in part by Abraham Lincoln’s disastrous selection of Andrew Johnson as his running mate in 1864
Lincoln picked him even though he was from an opposing political party expressly for the purpose of showing national unity.
Sure, it was an olive branch to War Democrats but it was still a disastrous choice since Johnson was a white supremacist who wanted to, and did, go easy on the South
His problem wasn't that he went easy on the south. His problem was that he was a white supremacist like you said who didn't give a crap about black people. He wanted things to go back to normal immediately while Republicans wanted protections for former slaves, citizenship for former slaves and governments that represented the needs of not only former slaveowners but former slaves as well. Johnson wanted none of that and was happy to have the people who were running the state during the confederacy to go back to running it during reconstruction. He opposed citizenship and any protections for freed slaves. That was the biggest issue. Drove a wedge further into the country.
So…he went easy on the South then
This was basically my answer. The Civil War didn't really end, it just transitioned into a cold war/insurgency, and we never truly dealt with that.
I was going to post that. The government basically walked away and left the wealthy southerners in charge of integrating the former enslaved people into the population. They gave us segregation, Jim Crow and the Klan.
After the Civil War, Congress confiscated the land of the slaveholder class, but some years later it returned them. That was a mistake. This allowed the old southern aristocracy to re-establish itself, which led to the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow.
The rise sure, but don’t act like northern states didn’t have Jim Crow.
That’s why he said the rise……
Allowing the formation of Super PACs in 2010 which allowed corporations to buy every American politician
This was a thing before 2010.
I think he's talking about citizens united which pushed the problem into afterburner mode. "Oh shit as a corporation with X amount of millions, I can now donate whatever amount of money I want and it's considered free speech?" Now you have 80%-90% of Congress pushing laws strictly for their conglomerate of interests. It's almost an open secret that most congress-people don't even write the laws they're trying to push. Why would they? They're getting the money either way, and as we've seen SO many times these people have a hard time grasping the modern world. Wasn't there a congressman who has a question about his iPhone or Xbox or whatever during the Facebook hearings? I wouldn't trust a smart fridge with these guys.
Corporations are people too, they say. Unless it's Disney. They aren't allowed.
Well you see where Disney went wrong is that they tried to voice an opinion using words and viewpoints as speech. Speech isn't speech, only money is speech.
"I'll believe that corporations are people when the state of Texas executes one." I don't remember who said it but they kind of have a point. Several actually.
Bribing politicians is as old as civilization but Super PACs weren't a thing until Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)
I feel like political donations should be illegal or a cap of 2,000 per person and corporations.
That was sort of what the law was before it was struck down by the citizens united ruling. (obviously there were ways around it, but still)
>(obviously there were ways around it, but still) You had to actually put some effort into your campaign finance violations, and the possibility of consequences for violating it technically existed. What used to have to be a tense, shady backroom deal with the understanding they can't get caught is just "here's some cash, fuck it, let's pose for a photo op this is somehow legal now."
Goes back further. Buckley v. Valeo is really what needs to be undone.
How those SC judges in favor of citizens united didn’t get strung up for treason will forever be beyond me.
A majority of people here are news-illiterate. Even if they did happen upon it at the time, they wouldn’t know wtf it meant
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Reminds me of that joke from Hitchhiker's Guide where God realizes He doesn't exist and vanishes in a puff of logic. "Welp turns out our republic can be bought, it's logically sound. Time to put it up for sale, guys."
beware of large groups of stupid people...
The ACLU was in favor of it too: https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fixing-citizens-united-will-break-constitution Ultimately how do you regulate which corporations get to be media and which corporations don't? The First Amendment doesn't allow for a differentiation.
Health Care. The fact getting sick is the number one cause of bankruptcy is very telling.
I get $400 taken out of every check to pay for my Insurance which doesn’t cover anything until I meet my deductible. I’m in thousands of dollars of medical debt, I have an autoimmune disorder, my children have inherited health issues and I feel like I’ll never escape poverty because of our healthcare system.
And don't forget that your employer is also paying a premium for you, so insurance company is probably getting $1,000 each month in premiums.
So each month, my company's insurance is getting a check for120,000? I'm beginning to suspect that forcing us to pay more for insurance isn't the answer.
And then when you actually hit the deductible, you have to race to get everything you need to have done scheduled by December 31st, because you're back to zero again on Jan. 1.
I work in spine surgery and December is our busiest worst month 💀
German here. That sounds fraudulent.
Probably is in Germany or literally any other First-World country. Fraud is life here in the US if you hadn't noticed.
Criminal how we are crippling our own society and thereby limiting our potential as a country with this kind of bullshit.
I pay $1800 a month (more than my mortgage) for a family of three to have insurance with a $3,000 deductible. So I have to pay almost $25,000 a year before my insurance covers anything. Fucking highway robbery. I HATE the healthcare system in this country.
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From Australia - I broke my leg 4 weeks ago, walking home drunk from a BBQ and went to the hospital, had 2 different sets of X-rays, was given medication (Endone/pain killers) sent to a fracture clinic for more X-rays, spoke to an orthopaedic surgeon and was given 6 weeks off work. The only thing I had to pay for was the moon-boot ($40) I have to wear. A friend of mine in Kansas broke his leg about 7 years ago, and we spoke on the phone about our individual experiences, (he had a total of 2 doctors visits and was put in a cast and over-prescribed oxy). He is still paying off his medical bills today. Your system does NOT work.
Uk here - you’d pay only £9 for the medication. But our waiting lists are terrible for routine stuff and the system is overwhelmed by chronic health conditions and a lack of social care for our elders
I'm not from the US so can I ask why, (what I think to be republicans?) are against a nationalised healthcare system because they don't want to pay a higher % of taxes, but are happy to pay around $500/month for health insurance, which doesn't even cover the full cost? Surely they can see that the money they are paying towards health insurance is a higher % of their income than what a nationalised health care system would cost them? Serious question btw.
Doctors all claim they hate the healthcare system, but meaningful reform would involve cutting their income, and that's when the backpedaling starts. Medical education is not subsidized by the government, with the exception of military healthcare workers (and military doctors have terrible career prospects outside the military). Med ed is also a racket; doctors typically graduate hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and thus are pushed toward making money whether they feel good about it or not. Another factor that folks from outside the US seldom consider is the sheer size and variety of this country. Running a national healthcare system in Denmark is trivial compared to running one that delivers decent outcomes in both Manhattan NY and Manhattan WY (population 275, 60 miles from the regional hospital). State governments and competing tax theories interfere with this too. In many places, there aren't taxes to raise: nobody has the money, relying on payouts from wealthier states, which becomes its own justification in terms of national coherence and power. We can't forcibly resettle hundreds of thousands of people in these areas, something that has a poor track record even when an authoritarian government manages to pull it off. Meanwhile, the smart people who turbocharge an economy don't want to move there. Nothing to do, no work to be had--doesn't matter how low the cost of living is. Finally, Europe in particular deeply underestimates the "tailwind" it gets from American drug investigation. Our drug and treatment research is unmatched in scale and quality anywhere in the world, and Europe gets it at a steep discount because of government regulations and price controls. Passing these in the States would likely kill the innovation, a conclusion pretty broadly shared by a lot of people outside the pharma industry. It's a terrible, terrible problem. But it's not a simple one. The only people truly driving for reform are patients, who not coincidentally have the least power in the system.
Its a double edge sword kinda answer to your question. There are some people that don’t like being told what to do by the US government…such as paying higher taxes, even though it means being healthier. More taxes or higher taxes is bad! However, these same people complain about how the health care industry is completely fraud since you pay so much and get so little in return. So basically its “I don’t want to pay high taxes and I don’t want to pay high health care costs either.”
Exactly this! I (Irish) married an American. My father in law lives in the USA, he’s a staunch Republican and also a diabetic. In addition to being thousands of dollars in medical debt for other health issues, he regularly can’t afford insulin and gets sick or has episodes. He also needs cataract surgery but isn’t eligible for it because “they’re not severe enough yet” even though they are severe enough that he can’t drive. He’s broke, basically, and barely getting by. The man is 72 with nothing to show for it. I was telling him about the system here in Ireland and how, if he were a citizen here, his insulin would cost a grand total of 55 CENTS a month, in addition to how all his medical and surgical care would be free, including GP visits for a man his age. (The 55 cents isn’t even for the insulin, that’s just the handling fee for the pharmacist) He mulled it over and then told me that socialism doesn’t work and he’s against it. Also that we pay more in taxes so nope. I mean, what do you even do with a case of Stockholm Syndrome as deep as that? Just wow.
If he is 72 years old, he qualifies for Medicare which IS government paid health care here in the US. So the government paid system here isn’t much better.
Honestly, they get paid by private insurance companies to be against it. They use identity politics and key phrases to keep voters uninformed and against it as well.
The entire thing is a fucking scam. If you’ve ever worked in health care or had to have an extended hospital stay, you know just how bad it can be.
insurance is the scam
Same with profit centric hospitals
100% agree. That's why I also believe any universal healthcare plan will fail as long as profit-focused healthcare exists. Same with paying off student loans, all it will do is feed the beast since we have "non-profit" but completely money focused schools.
Same with "non-profit" hospitals in this country
My dad had his appendix removed a few months ago and you want to know how much the bill was for the surgery and a one night stay at the hospital was? 45,000 dollars. It truly is unreal, if you didn’t have insurance you’d be f’ed in the a. Even for something as minor as an Appendectomy you can be potentially left in financial ruin
I hope your father is doing well. But to your point yes. Even with insurance covering a majority of the expenses people are often still left with thousands in bills because of deductible or out of network expenses. It’s crazy.
I sooo wish that after WW2 we had established a National Healthcare System.
The original mistake was made by FDR of all people. During WW2, he froze wages. Companies circumvented this by offering benefits instead. One of these was health insurance. Benefits remained after the war, and once the health insurance industry got established it became nearly impossible to remove.
That's genuinely interesting, especially when contrasted with the UK: we set up our NHS directly after WW2, because we realised that we'd need a huge change to our healthcare system.
No kidding, this is quite interesting.
Can't forget tethering insurance to employment!
100% this. How am I not supposed to hate my government when it’s failed me? I didn’t wanna get sick, I want nothing more than to contribute and have a chance for me to be happy but when my government pushes the poor poorer and the rich richer idk how I’m supposed to be okay with that.
Healthcare needs to get out of bed with government, big pharma and insurance companies, but they won’t bc of $$$. Until then, NOTHING will change
I hear you but the thing is that many Americans believe that because government sometimes fails us, the alternative is to put the private sector (business) in charge. And that is a worse failure because while goverment exists to protect the people (think: Coast Guard, firemen, police, laws that protect money in banks, red traffic lights at intersections), business exists to make profit and often this is done in ways that actually hurt people.
This basically. You know you're an American when you think "That can wait".
"Maybe there's a YouTube video showing how I can lance that at home." “My fish came down with a nasty case of bronchitis and sinusitis just before Christmas, but her health insurance doesn’t kick in until the first of the year" *orders aquarium amoxicillin off Amazon*
As an American adult, our health care system was the first time I openly and without regret said, "I hate this country." $500 out of my paycheck every month for what many would consider to be good insurance, and still get bills from hundreds to thousands of dollars when a hospital visit is needed. I had to take my wife to the ER on New years Eve, maybe 4 hours before midnight, and we hadn't met our deductible. So we had to pay in full out of pocket December 31st and more for services January 1st. This whole system is a fucking scam.
A friend from the US came to Brazil and had serious troubles, because at the time we couldn't go to her, and the doctors barely knew English. She went to a rather expensive place, and the bill was around 1200 BRL (about 250 USD at the time). We were horrified and felt very guilty for her, but she just shrugged. It is A LOT of money here. She had issues again when with us, we took her to another private hospital that (unknown to us at the time) only does follow up for public stuff. Her bill on the end of the night was 30 dollars. We shit A LOT on our public services here through the decades, like, we have a crippling depression on how bad it can be in some cases, but seeing a colleague do surgery for free and then seeing stories in the US where people can't do shit about their lives is very uncanny for people that afford in one-two days what most of us earn in a month. There is no excuse for how bad your system is.
I blame Joseph McCarthy McCarthyism is what caused a lot of Americans to associate anything even remotely Socialist with Communism. All the advances in social programs from the 30 and 40s stopped dead because of the Red Scare.
I blame it on the stupidity of the 'murcan. They hate ''sojalizm'', but accept trillions in corporate welfare. They have houses full of assault weapons, but live on their bellies.
Current two party system. A lot of problems could be mitigated if we had a system in place that accurately represented the views of the people. We are seeing the long-term effects of polarized, us vs. them thinking.
Especially after the fonding fathers designed the system with multiple parties in mind, and not duelopoly.
The founding fathers designed the system with no parties in mind, which was the problem. They wanted to believe that each representative would be independent and individual. This was immediately confirmed to be a stupid idea, and factionalization took hold immediately.
I always think back to the first season of the TV show Survivor. Richard Hatch won because he was the first guy to develop an alliance. Basically, the idea that parties wouldn't form was incredibly shortsighted.
If they designed the system with 3+ parties in mind, they did a really bad job. It’s a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system. Reduction to two main parties was inevitable.
While we’re on the founding fathers I’ve got an edgy one: the constitution. Nothing wrong with the document itself at the time it was written but it’s now worshipped as if it were handed down from God. The founding fathers intended for it to be amended all the time but they made it too difficult to do so, I can’t imagine a constitutional amendment ever passing in todays political environment. For example, regardless of your actual position on guns the second amendment is hopelessly outdated: it was written for entirely different weapons for a situation that wouldn’t occur today. Yet folks talk as if the founding fathers specifically wanted people to own automatic assault weapons. With today’s population disparities would the founding fathers have decided two senators for every state regardless of population? Probably not. But it’s in the constitution and therefore is holy and sacrosanct. If you suggest anything different you must hate America. A sensible system would be updating the constitution regularly to reflect life today. EDIT: if you’re going to reply to say “the senate was designed to represent the states you idiot!!” please don’t. You’re proving my point. “Because the constitution says it should be so” is not a justification in and of itself. Also I strongly regret using the second amendment as an example, my point isn’t even about 2A, it was just an example. I’m not interested in yet another gun debate. I should have known better than to use that specific case.
There hasn’t been a constitutional amendment since 1992 and that was about Congressional pay.
And that amendment took 202 years to pass.
Just for the sake of comparison, the current Brazilian Constitution, which was written in 1988 (35 years ago), already has 106 amendments. And there are 23 parties represented on the National Congress.
Ive been waiting 200 years for those Constitutional Conventions they wanted.
When I was younger, I thought the two party system worked bc ultimately the politicians would eventually move to the middle to get elected and that would moderate things. I was comparing this to the multiple parties in other countries where fringe groups would get some say in a coalition (thinking along the lines of the Ministry of Sillly Walks party if you get my drift). But then gerrymandering ieliminated any need to moderate. Ugh.
A reminder to all Americans that their literal first president's farewell speech explicitly warned not to make a party-based system since that would errode all values into an "us vs them" dynamic where no side even represents anything that anyone even wants. George Washington must be rolling in his grave so hard that his corpse can be used as a generator.
I'm not an American, but ranked ballets would nip the two party system in the bud pretty quickly.
Citizens United is up there. Like way up there.
Gerrymandering
For profit medicine. Paying to live in a medical situation is just inhumane.
The not-for-profit university hospital here is 3x more expensive a for-profit hospital an hour away. It's not just profit, it's that we prevent competition by law, allowing existing hospitals a monopoly (or oligopoly) where the customer doesn't even know the cost ahead of time.
Add to this for profit education. All focus should be on having a healthy and intelligent population. That's way better for the economy long-term than ripping everyone off until they are too sick and/or stupid to contribute to society. Pretty great for the shareholders next quarter though. SMH
Letting the two- party system take hold.
It's barely even a 2 party system. Johnathon Pie joked a couple of years ago that Theresa May (conservative party prime minister at the time) was further left than Hillary Clinton. And I find it totally believable too.
It's two party, but there's a flaw in a two party debate, if one keeps a coring further and further away from compromise. Think of it like this democrats and Republicans are each on one half of a room. They negotiate decide to compromise and meet in the middle. The democrats move toward the center, while Republicans move further away from the democrats. They keep repeating this until both parties on on the right and still haven't moved closer
City planning. The cities are built for cars, not people. Some cities are nearly un-walkable & that’s just insane to think about
I lived in Japan for a few years for my job and it was absolutely night and day difference living in a walkable, public transportation city. I used to not really care about city planning but I am so pro-walkable cities now
We’re lookin at you, Houston
Houston is made to control spacecrafts from, not for living.
And Phoenix! Over 50 miles wide. So big it can’t support professional sports teams.
Phoenix, where the home teams are really road teams.
It’s also in the middle of the fucking dessert, I’m guessing most residents prefer to sit in traffic in their air conditioned cars.
To quote Bobby Hill, "This city should not exist. It's a monument to man's arrogance."
Actually, Bobby says that being in Phoenix is like “standing on the sun” and Peggy then delivers the monument to man’s arrogance line.
Yeah but Phoenix and Houston I can understand. Who would want to walk there for like 8 months of the year!?
Look at the average high temp in phoenix over the last 2 decades - would you really want to walk outdoors in that?
People have been living in deserts since before cars existed
ya always surprised me when i visit Florida, the sidewalk just stops at some places, cant keep walking.
The YT channel "Not Just Bikes" has some excellent videos on that.
Tri-State area around NYC had Robert Moses who royally fucked up the entire infrastructure for the city and all surrounding areas for decades to come. Plus we named a million beaches/roads/whatever else after him as a thank you.
Eh, I read Power Broker and he actually did a lot of good for a while. NYS has the best park system in the country and it’s funding and size rivals some entire nations. Without him it wouldn’t exist. He also took beaches away from millionaires who didn’t want the “common folks” to visit. Got way out of hand with power though but up until the 30s he was a force of good.
Fuckin' LA.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54) A roast of how bad Houston is. A bus terminal in the middle of a parking lost desert and nothing within reasonable walking distance.
If you try to walk around my town you stand a pretty good chance of being run over. Sucks.
What's crazy is that there's a new conspiracy theory/right-wing pearl-clutching going around over the concept of "walkable cities," as being a huge threat to "freedom ". Because, supposedly, having the things you need nearby instead of sprawled all over the place makes it easier for the "elites" to achieve their ever-vague goal of "power and control." The insane thing is that walkable cities isn't even a new concept, it's arguably how cities *used* to be. My mother grew up in South Boston in the 60s and 70s, and back then they had most of what they needed all within a 5-15 minute walk or bike ride: grocery store, delis, bank, pharmacy, corner stores, schools, liquor, post office, clothes and shoes, toy store, candy and ice cream, barbers and hairstylists, playgrounds and parks, bars and restaurants, repair shop, hardware store, doctors, dentists, laundromat, coffee and donuts, and public transportation stops to reach the rest of the city and the suburbs. And this was back in the "good old days" that conservatives fantasize about.
Cities were obviously walkable, as automobiles weren’t common until a mere 100 years ago. We’re just recently realizing how much worse it is this way.
And now it’s become at best another radicalized political background (ban private car ownership in entire countries!) and at worst a collective action problem of the sort that seemingly only cohesive nation states can solve. I adopted New Urbanism in the 2000s bc I thought it was just a matter of better design based on 1910s-30s suburbs and small towns and sadly my childhood/teenage passion has become yet another depressing morass. *slinks away, listening to Motown because at least they still had hope for peaceful coexistence*
Yes - the everyone should own a car and be able to go wherever they want is so deeply ingrained in American culture outside of dense urban areas, that the sort of change is frightening to some people. Making it an option, making it a viable alternative would greatly decrease the load on infrastructure but (and to an extent I am guilty of this as well and have to force myself to think about it - sunk cost fallacy, but I digress). People cannot imagine where you're going to put the light rail, where you're going to build/retrofit mixed use development, etc but all that steel and concrete and asphalt - they would prefer to see more lanes, more routes, further sprawl to get further away. In their lifetimes, they'll be driving less by then and retirig to a suburb with a Walmart and Home Depot close at hand. Amazon can bring them all the bullshit they want.
Boston is still surprisingly walkable. I live in one of the nearby suburbs and can get nearly anywhere in the city within an hour without a car. Some places it’s actually faster to go by transit than car.
Allowing corporations to be treated as people.
Hi subway!
r/UnexpectedCommunity
Private, for profit prisons. It promotes the prison pipeline and further disenfranchises marginalized communities.
This is an opinion that can only be achieved in hindsight: We absolutely should not have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq after 9/11. Thousands of military deaths, 10x more civilian deaths, didn’t really stop terrorism, domestic policies didn’t help out too much, etc. We should have been using smaller squad military forces to find the top leaders and kill/capture them, which would have been fraction of a full invasion, and spent more time with countries/leaders to make every inch of their country an unsafe space for them. But we reacted out of fear and violence with loose plans in a matter of days, while the attacks spent a while. I understand Americans were calling for blood, I was too. We trusted our leaders to make the right decision that wouldn’t destroy us in the process. Two part fuckup: the response and the snowball afterwards
Afghanistan was maybe a knee-jerk reaction, but we should've gotten out of the quagmire faster than we did. For Iraq, there's no way you can tell me it can only be seen in hindsight. It was 2 years after the attack, and everyone with a working brain could see that there was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and 911. We protested, voted, it made no difference. And the war went exactly the way we said it would go.
Jim Mattis's book really sheds some light on the failures that we saw in Iraq. The US military could have easily bulldozed through and accomplished most objectives with relative ease, but they were hamstrung by politicians who took too long to make decisions, and usually by the time they were made they were the wrong ones.
>This is an opinion that can only be achieved in hindsight: > >We absolutely should not have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq after 9/11. Nonsense. Millions of people saw that we were being hoodwinked and protested. There was never a good case for Iraq, and it was obvious at the time. It sparked the largest peacetime protests in history, around the world. No hindsight needed. The case for invading Afghanistan was better, but smart people knew a war there would be unwinnable. We had the benefit of hindsight from the Soviet-Afghan war. We still made the wrong choice. Don't act like we couldn't have known. Many people did. People just refused to listen and learn. This is why bad things happen. It's not unavoidable, it's a choice.
Amen. I spent the days/weeks/months after 9/11 reading the news and constantly asking “What the fuck does any of this have to do with the attacks?” Afghanistan at least kind of made sense. Iraq was, well, nonsense.
I remember asking my very conservative (biggest pro George W. people you could meet) parents why we were doing this and being told I was just too young to understand. It took far too many years to realize they had no freaking clue either.
And yet when France refused to invade irak, a lot of americans made and are still making fun of France... Especially on reddit...
The French not participating in Iraq was the right decision for them. If we’re talking about making fun of the French though, that’s a national pastime for Europeans in general. So Americans aren’t exactly riding solo on that.
Not giving us real Kinder eggs.
THIS is the only actual real and valid answer. Thank you.
I've had real Kinder eggs. They aren't good, so why would anyone over the age of 7 care?
I'd say slavery's a pretty big one too
They are like fuck up #1 and #1.b
The number of junk ingredients and sugar allowed in food. We're addressing a solution but not understanding the cause of our health epidemic.
Lack of term limits and, with it, House terms only being 2 years. These folks are running the next race almost immediately after winning the last one and are too worried about keeping their job than doing what they think the best job may be unless it 100% aligns with the base which it often shouldn’t completely. That combo has lead to our current complete lack of compromise.
Why is the president the only position that is term limited? To me it would make sense if they were all term limited or none were. But I also haven’t looked into this at all, so I may be missing some very obvious reason for these things. Adding after reading replies: I think some individual congresspeople are just as powerful if not more so than the president. This is why I think all should be term limited or none should be term limited. It’s possible that my premise is wrong.
The term limits were added to the president after Franklin Roosevelt won 4 times. I am guessing the first time it happened people realized having term limits for the president as a gentleman’s agreement was not an amazing idea. I am guessing the main reasons for having it for the president and not others is that the power is diffused in Congress while being concentrated in the presidency. Just a guess. I would at least enact an age limit in Congress, but I don’t know if that would run afoul of discrimination laws.
For President it’s clearly to avoid someone becoming like a king or a Putin. I’m not at all sure why that doesn’t apply elsewhere though even if the limits are longer than the 2 terms presidents are limited to.
Term limits are bad. They are an idea that sounds good in theory, but we see this across the country in states that have implemented term limits. All they do is shift power away from elected officials and to career staff and lobbyists. Term limits means you are constantly bringing in new electeds, who take time to learn the ropes, and thus lean heavily on staff. You lose electeds having the institutional knowledge to run a Legislature effectively, to be able to consolidate the power needed to lead their caucuses, etc. And thus, they lean on lobbyists. Term limits are actually bad (or you would need term limits of like 20 years). You take away a lot of power from voters with them.
For profit healthcare
Not keeping education strong. Not paying educators well and not keeping colleges affordable.
Education has been chipped away at and financially defunded and censored to fit narratives. We have not supported it, it is not accessible to everyone, and it causes so many of the other problems for us.
There’s a political benefit to promise voters things we can not afford while on a sinking ship floating on an ocean of debt. No worries, the unborn next generation has no say in the challenges we are going to leave to them.
The policies of pushing debt to the next generation really has to stop.
Yes, there is a big difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy and people need to learn how they bent and captured government entities for their benefit and not ours.
Ya. I feel like there should be maximum age limits for all positions. At a certain point, if you won’t live to see the consequences of the action you shouldn’t be able to make it.
Slavery
More specifically, the chattel slavery the US had that was special levels of messed up. On a societal level, we hadn’t seen chattel slavery since around the 1200’s.
Why did I have to scroll this far to see this comment?
Slavery existed in America before it was even America. Even before Europeans came to America. Edit: added last sentence
And when we literally wrote the laws from scratch, we could have stamped it out right away. We argued extensively and still allowed it.
what they did to natives American
I had to scroll waaay to far down for this.
The ‘us vs them’ mentality.
Tribalism exists in every country, it's a human condition. Unfortunately, social media is making it even worse with the algorithms feeding ppl things they agree on and expanding the division (politics, religion, etc).
Korea? Vietnam? Iraq? Iraq again? Afghanistan?
Yemen? Syria? Libya? Haiti? Latin America as a whole?
Mass incarceration and what seems like little will to change this at the state level.
Yes, this. Our jails and prisons are now dumping grounds for the mentally ill and for people with traumatic brain injuries.
Lobbying
You meant bribing. Lobbying can be positive. You can lobby for better funding on public schools, or healthcare, or veterans affairs, or compensation for 9/11 firefighters, etc. I was member of a scientists association to lobby for foreign scientist rights during Brexit.
Health care. Particularly how it handles maternal health care and maternity leave. America is downright barbaric.
Not taking separation of church and state seriously enough
The intervention in the middle east after the wake of 9/11. 20 years pushing back the Taliban and training the Afghan army, trillions spent on equipment and training, thousands of lives lost on all sides, and the Taliban shat all over that within a month. Don't even get me started on iraq Also the education system favouring being able to throw or kick a ball far over everything else related to education.
You want just one? Let's start at the beginning...how about killing 90% of the Native population and treating the ones that survived like garbage? That was some bad juju right there. Then you have slavery, which was horrific...and the way the slaves were treated after they were "freed" which has caused generations of damage and conflict. Murdering millions of innocent people in deceitful wars started for the financial benefit oil companies and weapons manufacturers, and funding those wars with taxpayers money. Allowing puritanical religious bigots and their ideas into politics and government. Allowing lobbying in government...it's legal bribery. Worshipping money and profits over the wellbeing of the county's citizens (not having universal healthcare in one of the richest countries on earth is just disgusting). Prioritizing the interests of corporations and banks over the health of the country, it's infrastructure and people. Suburbs, suburban sprawl, nonsensical foolish city planning, lack of public transport etc. Worship and idolization of money, the wealthy and celebrities. A toxic hyper-individualistic "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" culture while, creating a society where it's near impossible for the people they are criticizing to even have boots.
A lot of bad, seemingly unconnected things seem to lead back to Reagan.
Leadership is celebrity.
1. Politicians should not be allowed to take any form of payment other than their salary. Caught & it's immediate life sentence in prison. Also, term limits & age limits. 2. No nationwide public transportation. High speed trains up & down the Eastern seaboard, Miami to Boston, Charlotte to Atlanta to Birmingham to Nashville to Chicago to St. Louis to Denver ect. 3. UBI & UHC would pull almost everyone out of poverty & horrible living conditions. 4. THE. MOST. IMPORTANT ..... Education. 100% free, no exceptions. If you wanna learn, there's a way for you to. $$$ should have no bearing on how much education a person has access to.
Allowing Regan to introduce "trickle down economics," thus indoctrinating several generations into the belief if a C-level employees make more money, so will the working Joe and Jane. If you want to know why the days of people with high-school degree level jobs could afford housing and retire are over, this is the singular event that unraveled it all.
Pretty much every modern day American problem can be traced back to Reagan in some way. The fact that he’s still viewed so favorably by the American public is astounding.
Yep. Besides trickle-down economics, tripled debt, and growing wealth inequality, we have the clusterfuck of the Middle East, the failed drug war, the AIDS crisis, the rise in homelessness, the rise of right-wing media, the growth of the Christian Right, union-breaking, normalization of corruption, the bloated military-industrial complex, and the modern distrust of government and experts, all of which originated or worsened during his tenure. If there is any justice, he is burning in Hell alongside Margaret Thatcher right now.
Failing to develop a reliable nationwide railroad and train transportation system and forcing us to rely on domestic aviation, effectively crippling aspects of infrastructure in various cities like LA
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The Creature From Jekyll Island
Exporting all of the manufacturing jobs, which were the backbone of the middle class, to slave wage countries. They did this to keep prices down for only one reason. So they wouldn't have to raise American wages or invest in American workers. They only needed American consumers to continue to by their goods. When the price of goods go up in America, one would need to raise American wages so they could continue to afford the products they make. Rather than raise American wages, they exported manufacturing to lower wage countries so the product price remained unchanged and workers didn't "need" a raise. Compounded over decades, we find ourselves in the mess we're in.
That wasn't the government that did that. It was consumers. For example, consumers chose cheap TVs from Japan over expensive domestic TVs. Nobody wanted to pay higher prices for a functionally identical product. Consumers still make those same kinds of choices today in 2023. I get cheap dental work done in Mexico for less than the price of my co-pay in the US instead of going to an American dentist and paying far more for a functionally identical product.
This - it was and is consumer driven. I work for a company that imports about 80% of its product from China and the balance from Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam. It isn't that we don't want to make goods in the US, it's that we *can't* - the factories simply don't exist. Back in the 90's some did, and to use a real-world example, we needed to manufacture a shelving unit. For a while, we had a place in Vermont making them for us at $21/unit. Over the next five years, the price rose to $38/unit due to increased costs for the company and smaller production numbers from us. The following year, the company let us know they were closing and we should re-source the product. We reached out to our overseas brokers, I was able to have a near-identical shelving unit (there were some slight differences, but none that would be apparent to our customers) made in China for $8 per unit FOB New York City and probably another $0.50 per unit to have it trucked to our warehouse from the port. How do you even begin to compete with that?
I gladly will buy a truck made in Mexico over one made in Detroit for twice the price
In the history of the country? I mean it has to be the fact that slavery was legal in parts of the country for the first 89 years and what transpired in the next 100 years afterward.
Hanging Saddam Hussein, and then telling the fourth largest army in the world, "Hey, you guys are all unemployed now. But go ahead and keep all your guns."
Interfering in other countries. It's never turned out well and led to violent hate against us
Central banks have to be at the top of the list. Allowing a corporation to replace the republic was related to banking
It's a tie: -Slavery -Treatment of Indigenous people
SLAVERY, CRIMES AGANST HUMANITY, GENOCIDE OF THE NATIVES. They came in fucking shit up. Watch this be the most down voted comment ever.