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No shit, what American thinks either are true?
America, fuck yeah!
Has been a joke for like 30 years now
You haven’t met much of the rural population, have you?
Literally the opposite…
Where are you see conservatives talking about how great America has been under Bidnen?
Like, you put zero thinking into your comment, just like you assume the people you’re “dunking on” do.
You’re a different side of the same coin, that’s never meant opposites, you’re th same thing.
Just neither sid bis smart enough to figure it out, and both think only the other side is dumb
Believe me there’s no shortage of people who know that were not the shining city on the hill, unfortunately we’re drowned out by pandering patriotic country music and gunfire from mass shootings.
Yeah, most of us in the U.S. don’t think this way. This is just republicans, and they aren’t really here on Lemmy.
Gasoline prices are heavily subsidized in the US, the gas price you complain about is cheap compared to other countries.
The commodity price for gasoline right now looks to be about 2 USD per gallon. Retail gasoline in the USA is at least a dollar more due to taxes and markup.
Subsidies may play a role as well, but the taxes in some countries are extreme by American standards. My take on it is that a fuel tax is effectively neutral if it brings in enough revenue to pay for the road system.
The fuel tax isn’t enough to cover the damage to the environment and quality of life, though. That’s why taxes are that high in many other places. Same way cigarettes are taxed to help discourage use and to help cover the increased healthcare costs it puts on everyone
Fuel, and other car-related taxes (sometimes based on horsepower or engine displacement) in most countries in Europe were much higher than in the USA long before there was widespread concern about the environmental impact of cars.
Which is why I said “environment and quality of life” - they don’t want their cities dominated by cars (making life dangerous for pedestrians) and for cars to become a requirement for living. So taxes are added to discourage (not eliminate) driving and car ownership
But also, the mess of smog from exhaust and other impacts beyond climate change have been known since the first automobiles. Concerns about the ‘environment’ is more than greenhouse gasses.
Roads aren’t the only societal cost of cars.
Any price lower than that required to compensate for all the negative externalities of both driving and using fossil fuels to do it still counts as subsidized.
A failure to set an excise tax on a product or service that offsets its externalities is not a subsidy. A lower tax rate than a competing product is arguably a subsidy.
I’m not aware of any modern societies that make a credible attempt to adjust the price of all or most goods and services to include their externalities. That sounds like a good idea in theory, but very difficult to implement in practice.
What state do you live in that the road system is funded adequately? I never hear someone comment positively about the general state of road conditions.
Florida, with the tourist money and gas taxes all our roads and highways are solid. The great weather year round means they can maintain and build roads all the time non stop.
Adequately is a difficult determination.
Is it adequate if there are state maintained dirt roads? In some states, the state or county chooses not to pave all of their roads.
Is it adequately funded if they have potholes? Due to weather conditions, some states are notorious for potholes.
Is it adequately funded if the road gets washed out or carried away by flooding? California gets mudslides that take out sections of roads, other states get sinkholes or hurricanes/tornados destroying their roads
How long can one of these issues plague a road before we consider them underfunded?
My opinion is that the US has too many roads. Most roads are maintained by county or municipalities, and are funded through infinite growth model.
When a developer creates a new subdivision, they pave the roads. Once done, they usually relinquish these roads to the county/city who are responsible for maintaining the roads.
Typically maintenance is low until they require replacing. The cities and counties don’t save money or plan well for replacing these roads and rely on new tax revenue to fund replacing them.
It builds a slowly ballooning road maintenance cost that someone will have to pay. I believe someone made a video about this very fact. I don’t have the link handy
The fuel tax in other countries primarily exists to make people use less fuel in order to save the world from global warming.
Your population is essentially being farmed by corporations.
Nothing new to that. In 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the US Supreme Court declared that companies are people too. With the same rights — under the 14th amendment.
But without the responsabilities I bet.
And the option to be thrown in jail.
Whether or not they’re subject to the death penalty seems to still be undecided in the court of popular opinion.
The court has spoken : only the rights.
We can’t understand how millions can vote for a senile, convicted sexual predator as president…
Dude half of us don’t understand it either.
It’s amazing what decades of defunding education will do when you mix it with a healthy dose of conservative talk show TV and social media algorithms.
I dunno, i understand it pretty well. Lack of education, lead paint/gasoline, nationalism, fascism, racism, sexism, economic disparity, lack of healthcare to deal with neural degeneracy common in trump supporters, and finally lower borth rates among the more educated. America is a shithole, and has been for the past 40 years at least. Until we finally grow a spine and start “adjusting”, things are going to continue getting worse until were all dead and the olligarchs own everything. Then theyll move on to fucking the rest of the world (harder than they already are)
Was with you to the last bit. What does it mean to “grow a spine and start ‘adjusting’”? Why is “adjusting” in quotes?
I wonder how differently the last US election would have played out if Murdoch had died before campaign season
Going to have a big party when he finally goes and joins Reagan in hell
Not very. His shitty propaganda machine is running itself by now.
Less than half apparently…
I guess it’s much less than half.
About 1/7 are less than voting age. Another 1/7 or so voted for the oompa loompa, and another 1/7 voted against. So actually, about half of the population just doesn’t vote because they’re a different type of idiot.
I do hate it here, for what it’s worth.
Hah! Let’s make a list of the countries where leadership of that ilk has never existed. (We’ll just ignore that most of them did not allow elections.) Won’t take much paper.
Most “third world” or “developing” countries aren’t that bad, and there are places in the US far worse than the median developing country.
Also most people in most places do not want to go to the US, even to visit much less immigrate. It’s generally either the worst of a particular society or those specifically harmed by the US previously and feel their chances are better off with the abuser instead of in the abused country. It’s not a wanted destination.
Everyone i’ve known who wanted to go to the US was interested in making easy money by scamming people. That’s the type who admire the US.
Affordable healthcare
Public transit
Civilian oversight
Prisoner rehabilitation
Universal income
Free education
Separation of religion and state
Wealth taxes
Law enforcement accountability
Environmental regulations…
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Separation of religion and state
I cringe every time their president or other politicians are talking about god. It’s unbelievable how backward the US are in this regard.
International rankings of the US are abysmal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_United_States
The U.S. is an oligarchy.
Luigi knows
We obviously know this.
No, no, we know that one.
The level of nonsensical nationalist propaganda in the US is maybe only second to North Korea’s.
You made me think of my buddy from the states visiting me in Toronto 2010-ish laughing at the Canadian flags they sometimes saw flying from people’s houses and other buildings. I asked her what struck her so funny about them and she blanked for a second. She said, “It’s just weird seeing so many flags that aren’t American… Like, this is a country too… um.” We had a brilliant talk about flag-waving patriots for a bit, but seeing that glitch was really interesting and I’ve never forgotten it.
That said, I had plenty of teachers growing up and know tonnes of educators now who’d totally be into forcing students to salute the Canadian flag and pledge allegiance to their God & Country every morning. The only thing stopping them is legislation preventing it, not national identity.
If there’s one thing the US is great at, it’s exporting the most stupid stuff they can come up with. At the moment, unfortunately, it seems to be politics.
Yeah kids reciting the pledge of allegiance is honestly psychotic.
USA could be, but isn’t the greatest country in the world.
I’m definitely ready to hear this, have heard it, know it, and hope it changes. Under our current political system it never will. We’re just an oligarchy in a trench coat at this point.
As an American, I’m not convinced we can be anything close to the greatest country. We are incapable of solving massive problems that should be abundantly obvious. And it’s not just the government, it’s also a huge number of dumb civilians that don’t want to educate themselves on how our own systems are failing.
Despite his severe back problems, Luigi mangione is the only one of you who has a backbone.
That’s on education. We are plenty violent it’s just hard to know where to put it.
Ummm… Follow the money?
Donald Trump is the new US President, and you’re responsible.
The USA is neither the best country nor the worst country. It’s just one of the countries.
From all the comments, this is one of them
c
ountriesnor the worst country.
Sorry, but even anti-America types seem to believe in American exceptionalism anymore. It’s just that instead of believing we’re some shining city on the hill, they believe we’re The Great Satan™.
the American was not ready to hear what he heard
A while ago I watched a live stream of CSPAN (I think?) where the House failed to form a government for several consecutive days. The way the entire process started with a prayer, and the many references to religion throughout, is just as disturbing as the personality cult around Stalin. That whole gang is fucked in the head.
You wasted your chance as a hyper-power. The Soviet Union had fallen and the world was essentially yours but you did nothing with it. Now India and China are rising powers and you are going back to being a regular super-power.
I mean…what did you want us to do? Invade Europe?
As an American, I can think of a few things we shouldn’t have done. The whole debacle in Iraq comes to mind. A few trillion dollars pissed away. Thousands of American lives lost. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead. All for Iraq just to end up a puppet state of Iran. We’ve also destabilized the international system, particularly the trade system, that we built up in the first place. We’ve repeatedly violated our own trade agreements so many times it’s not even funny anymore. How could we have used this unique historical opportunity for the betterment of the world? Here’s one idea.
In an ideal world, the US would have used its hyperpower status to truly advance democracy around the world. We would have taken this opportunity to once and for all finally drive the last nail in the coffin of global authoritarianism and dictatorship. In our timeline, we looked past the CCP’s human rights abuses and let China into the global trade system. We did this because our corporations got greedy and wanted to make bank in the Chinese market. We gave in to their greed at the expense of global human rights and our own long term national security. Now we’ve turned the government of China (which has morphed into some horrible amalgamation of communism and fascism) into the most capable manufacturing power on the planet. It didn’t have to be this way. We could have told China, and everyone else. “Democracy first, then trade. We’re only interested in trading with and enriching fellow free nations.”
After the Cold War ended, the US was ascendant. The economic power of us and our allies was unmatched. The US, Europe, and allies dominated the world economically and militarily. Imagine in a different timeline if we had used that power to peacefully advance democracy worldwide. Imagine if after the Cold War, the US international policy became:
“We allied with dictatorships when necessary during the Cold War to contain the USSR. That is no longer needed. From now on, we’re happy to open up markets and trade with anyone, as long as they are a liberal democracy. You want to join the global economy and get rich? Give your people freedom. Petty dictatorships can remain poor and undeveloped, thus limiting the amount of damage they can cause outside their borders. We’ll give food and medical supplies to nations in crisis, even those ruled by dictators. But full economic integration will only be done with fellow democracies. We will not trade with tyrants.”
That is the kind of visionary approach that a hyperpower like the US could have taken to really make the world better. You don’t need to invade countries to have an influence on them. And this really does represent a lost opportunity. The time immediately after the fall of the USSR was the moment when the free and democratic countries were at the absolute peak of their economic power. But since we allowed China into the WTO and opened up trade with them, we have created an industrial juggernaut that is ruled by an absolute dictatorship.
At the end of the Cold War, the democracies could have banded together and used their utter dominance of the global economy to push for further democratization around the world. There just wasn’t anyone else to trade with for many advanced consumer and industrial goods. But now? That kind of strategy wouldn’t work. If all the democracies tomorrow insisted on trading only with other democracies, the various dictatorships around the world can now just keep trading with China.
TL:DR: After the fall of the USSR, democracy as a global force was at the absolute historic peak of its power, both economically and militarily. If the US and allies had really brought their full economic and cultural power to bear, they could have attempted a last final push to ensure democracy reigned everywhere. Even without invading anyone, we could have used that immense economic power to at least attempt to throw down the last of the dictators and to bring democracy to every man, woman, and child on the planet. Instead, we tried to line our own pockets and ended up creating a monster by turning communist China into the workshop of the world.
The USA could also have stopped China manipulating their currency exchange rates. This is artificially making their exports cheaper and boosting their economy. Simultaneously this is exporting their economic imbalances to the global economy and destablising other countries, typically manifesting as manufacturing declining and ‘service’ based sectors becoming more prominent than they should be.
Yes, there were a whole series of things that could have been done. But looking back, it seems obvious now that helping China to get rich was a poor decision. A wealthy and more industrialized country is simply a far more serious geopolitical threat than a poorer one. I’m glad that the Chinese population have been able to pull themselves up out of poverty. But in terms of our own national security and the security of democratic countries everywhere, enriching such a brutal dictatorship was a terrible mistake. Without its economic explosion, China wouldn’t today be on the brink of potentially invading Taiwan, and they wouldn’t be serving as the main economic backer for Russia’s war in Ukraine. In our world, wealth is power, and power is wealth. And by trading with the CCP, we magnified their power many fold.
Its sad that I am old and cynical enough to think your entire TLDR paragraph is targically absurd. Of course we’d never do those things. I used to think such things could happen.
Why would the U.S. have started trying to expand democracy after the Cold War? They were willing to support anti-Democratic coups in Iran, Syria, Brazil, Iraq, Bolivia, and probably dozens of others I’m forgetting. America was promoting capitalism during the Cold War, not democracy.
Sure. You’re correct, but irrelevant. That’s why I said “in an ideal world.” In an ideal world, what kind of actions could the US have taken immediately after the Cold War to make the world better for everyone? Obviously the Cold War was more about advancing capitalism than advancing democracy. Hence us forming alliances with dictators, as I mentioned. But in an ideal world, with capitalism triumphant around the globe, the US would have at least used its hyperpower status to push hard for democracy globally.
Maybe France…
They tried, even had some monopoly bills printed.
Edit, because it’s apparently not a very well known story.
American capitalists needs other countries to get rich too so we can sell them shit. If those countries stayed rural and backwards who would buy our wares.
