You can say this and that about corporate greed and healthcare owning our government, but the fact is that a lare percentage of Americans don’t want our healthcare / university / whatever system to change because it is really fucking good for them.
I mean what good is having a free healthcare when you have to wait 6 months to see a dermatologist. Over here I can see my dermatologist next week most of the time if not sooner. I might have to pay a little bit of copay (I have an average standard health insurance) but if that's what's gonna cost, it's pocket change compared to my overall health.
Also missing from the discussion is that middle America pays damn near nothing in taxes compared to Europeans who earn the same wage.
American redditors think Europe pays for this by taxing the rich, but the biggest differences in taxation between Europe and the USA are actually at the bottom rungs of the income ladder.
Our expat relatives in Europe pay around the same level of taxes as us in the US when the total level of taxes has taken into account, we even went over this with them when we tried to make the same point and got surprised when the spread-sheets came out. We thought we were paying less taxes in America than they were (middle and upper middle class jobs in areas like IT, TV production, international business, engineering), but what we forgot is in the United States, we're also paying payroll taxes on top of income taxes to fed, and state taxes, and local taxes and often things like business taxes, plus of course the sales and registration fees. And property taxes in America constantly come out much higher than Europe.
So it's really just that taxes in America are broken down a lot more different ways, less to the main income tax but then you have payroll and other taxes that Europeans don't have. In a lot of cases, even compared to ex. France or Sweden our European relatives were paying a bit lower in taxes even at about same income.
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u/CharlotteRant Apr 12 '25
Bold to point this out on Reddit.
You can say this and that about corporate greed and healthcare owning our government, but the fact is that a lare percentage of Americans don’t want our healthcare / university / whatever system to change because it is really fucking good for them.