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  • Something from the Other side of the pond

    America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane
    A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media.

    December 26, 2010 |

    As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

    The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

    The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

    Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:



    Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred."



    The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

    Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)

    Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out

    Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.

    In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.

    In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story:



    American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx.





    It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.



    For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.



    Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.

    Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac

    A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized.



    This appears to be a picture of two mothers collecting food boxes from the charity Feed the Children.

    Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?
    Maybe we are crazy for not wanting to support people that don't want to earn their own way.

  • #2
    Originally posted by mstng86 View Post
    Maybe we are crazy for not wanting to support people that don't want to earn their own way.
    Hitler and the Germans let their poor die and rot in the streets. Then pull their gold teeth out, and stack the corpses' in mass graves. That's only been 65 years ago. Those who live in glass houses...

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Vertnut View Post
      Hitler and the Germans let their poor die and rot in the streets. Then pull their gold teeth out, and stack the corpses' in mass graves. That's only been 65 years ago. Those who live in glass houses...

      Are you saying the Germans need to shut the fuck up? Gasp

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      • #4
        Originally posted by mstng86 View Post
        Are you saying the Germans need to shut the fuck up? Gasp
        In this case, yes.

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        • #5
          The PIIGS are the perfect example of why the European Union remains irrelevant.

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          • #6
            I just find it interesting that an american has a real opinion on how things really are here......all the way from his home in Germany.

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            • #7
              That and our government is meant to be small with limited powers. If our founders wanted to follow Europe, they'd have granted it more power
              I wear a Fez. Fez-es are cool

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Forever_frost View Post
                That and our government is meant to be small with limited powers. If our founders wanted to follow Europe, they'd have granted it more power
                There's a reason they left Europe.

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                • #9
                  There's also a reason that the countries in the EU are falling apart. Something about unsustainable spending such as low cost education (it's a right you know!), medical insurance for all people (medical which sucks BTW - the rich come to America for their treatments), & early retirement with great income after retirement for all citizens. Seems they can't afford all the shit they promised their people or something like that...Riots are happening more and more often over there, but the US is the country that sucks ass. Riiiight
                  sigpic

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                  • #10
                    I see that he forgot to mention the tax rates in those socialist paradises that he is talking about. He also forgot to mention their unemployment rates thanks to their never-ending benefits.

                    If this asshole thinks Germany is so fantastic then he should just stay there.
                    Originally posted by racrguy
                    What's your beef with NPR, because their listeners are typically more informed than others?
                    Originally posted by racrguy
                    Voting is a constitutional right, overthrowing the government isn't.

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Broncojohnny View Post
                      I see that he forgot to mention the tax rates in those socialist paradises that he is talking about. He also forgot to mention their unemployment rates thanks to their never-ending benefits.

                      If this asshole thinks Germany is so fantastic then he should just stay there.
                      Yup. Just another socialist moron trying to push the socialist agenda by pointing out Capitalism's flaws while conveniently omitting the flaws attached to his 'eutopian' society.

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by sc281 View Post
                        Yup. Just another socialist moron trying to push the socialist agenda by pointing out Capitalism's flaws while conveniently omitting the flaws attached to his 'eutopian' society.
                        Those people make me sick. And when it all went to hell, and the country was ruined, and everyone was poor, they'd want to stay rich.

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                        • #13
                          Can you imagine how many people we would have on the tit if unemployment never ran out? I'd probably see 3 other cars during my 40 minute drive to work...

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