Woah imagine living in third world country , north korea , or a war torn county . Spoiled brats always acting like they got it worse not saying the usa doesn’t suck or anything but it isn’t at all the worst place not by a long shot
I live in a third world country and I have a crappy stressful job but unlike an american, my garbage wage can afford me an apartment to rent, pay the bills, eat well and save something or use it for entertainment. Unlike the American situation, since they can’t afford to pay their mortgages, student loans, credit card debts, predatory corporations, insane house costs, disgustingly expensive medical bills and other bullshit living expenses. The American dream is dead and, crime and murder rates aside, third world countries allow people to have a less miserable life, in case you were not aware of how bad the situation was there.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t close their eyes and goes “America great!” every time
It is a shithole of a country, with barely any democracy, cops that are more likely to murder you than help, and debt incurring healthcare. There are barely any worker rights, wealth isn’t distributed at all, housing is a mess. The US has a homeless problem in every large city, a mental health crisis, and an opioid epidemic.
US is a shithole, whether you like it or not, it’s a fact.
Gotta agree with you bud. America certainly should change for the better, but this post is some privelaged ass shit. All these people downvoting should talk to someone who escaped cuba or who has friends and family who died on the west bank last month.
Concentrated in the hands of very few. Over half of the population has negative wealth.
more developed
I’ll give you that one, though not everyone sees any benefit of it.
better to live in
Again, far from everyone. There’s areas with barely a dirt road and no access to clean water, there’s neighborhoods that look like 1990s Sarajevo right next to ultra-rich neighborhoods and women and minorities are discriminated against and abused more than most other Western countries.
O let us love our occupations, Bless the squire and his relations, Live upon our daily rations, And always know our proper stations. The Chimes, Second Quarter (1844)
I’m not arguing every country in those areas. My point is the joke doesn’t make sense as there’s large populations who believe this to be true.
25℅ of my workmates are first or second generation USAians. They earn less here than they would in the US. By your logic, Australia is better place to live than the US.
It’s hard to sum up because it’s hard to describe. Life in the U.S. on the surface is one of material abundance, congruent with our status as a wealthy nation. But that image is a serious headfuck because of how easily it can all be taken away from an individual: Even a relatively minor illness can plunge you into bankruptcy. You’re totally dependent on a car to get just about anywhere. You need it to keep a job, but you could lose it to an expensive mechanical failure at any time. Or, you could get crashed into on the road through no fault of your own, and get plunged into medical debt, lose your car, and your job in an instant. There is no safety net for this. The police aren’t there to protect you. In fact, they could come bursting through your door and kill you at any moment, maybe because they read the address on a warrant wrong, or somebody they want used to live there. Or, they could just take your assets by civil forfeiture because they feel like it. Police take more assets from citizens each year than nominal criminals do. Employers steal more yet through wage theft. Nobody will help you when that happens. People live with the threat of homelessness ever looming in the background, and if the system beats you into it, there’s little societal help. Quite the opposite, many places in the U.S. are actively working to make homelessness a criminal offense, or even subject to summary execution in some places. Even when welfare programs exist, they’re explicitly designed to be humiliating and hard to access.
To use an analogy, lots of people in the world live only a few steps up the prosperity staircase, and Americans are way high above them. However, we’re not on a staircase, we can’t just back down a few steps to a lower standard of living; it’s been cut off. There’s a certain minimum wealth standard enforced by law, custom, and environment. We’re perched on the edge of a cliff, with the constant threat of being forced over the edge.
Even the people in the U.S. slightly further up don’t understand the psychological trauma of this precarious existence, because their backs aren’t up against the precipice. That’s how the U.S. is such a paradox: It’s a shit hole country for so many people, who live with constant fear and anxiety, but so many other Americans can’t see it because they’re just a little bit higher up in prosperity, so they do have room to step back down a little.
(But even then, the upper classes put in insanely long hours at work and spend large amounts of money to secure a wealthy future for their children, for fear that they might fall out of the upper class. I think that’s pretty telling about what it’s like to be working class in the U.S. that it frightens them so badly.)
The part that gets left out of the border-crisis discourse is that millions, in turn, are sneaking back across the border, out of the United States. That’s why the media calls them “migrants” instead of “immigrants.” The net in-migration rate is fairly small, and in many years it’s negative, meaning more undocumented migrants leave than the number that arrive.
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