Support structures that allow folk to get back on their feet after adversity never developed in the US, leading to what you describe as the "societal bottom (being) essentially kicked away". — Banno
A solution that I thought of many years ago goes like this: amend the U.S. Constitution to say that every congressional district must be drawn with at least one right angle. — WISDOMfromPO-MO
The myth of the self-suporting individual strikes me as a potent source for this; in a world were each man (!) looks out only for himself, any common, shared wealth is abhorrent. Support structures that allow folk to get back on their feet after adversity never developed in the US, leading to what you describe as the "societal bottom (being) essentially kicked away". — Banno
it has become a cause where it was once myth. — StreetlightX
having decimated the social state, the burden of social care simply shifts to the family, — StreetlightX
Third to China and the EU, GDP (PPP); The Marshal Plan is over, but one belt, one road has just started. The USA can do its own dirty work.
I understand the relation between state and family the other way around. The labour of women - grandmothers - in extended families was cheap and experienced. Families survived because granny looked after the kids while mum and dad worked. But families had to become more mobile in order to compete in the jobs market, so they left granny in an old people's home and went to find another job. So the burden of social care went unmet, unless by the state. Hence childcare and old people's homes and payments for stay-home carers. — Banno
The local Liberals are a leaderless rabble, reliant on a plebiscite to decide their policies. — Banno
The history of the public support arm of the US government makes for inordinately depressing reading. Not only because - despite the recent rewriting of history - the upswell against it has only been a relatively recent 'invention' - dating specifically from around the time of Reagan - but because policy initiatives like the New Deal and the Great Society reforms were trending in the exact opposite direction! That is, there was nothing inevitable about the current US malaise — StreetlightX
GDP (PPP) measures what that money can actually buy.
gross domestic product (at purchasing power parity) per capita, i.e., the purchasing power parity (PPP) value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given year, divided by the average (or mid-year) population for the same year.
Was Nixon a bad president - aside from being a crook? From what I've heard of historical accounts of his presidency, there were some good and unexpected things that came out of it. I was under the impression that he founded the EPA and started the process of rebuilding a relationship with China - in fact that as far as policy went, he was quite good on a number of fronts.We need not go back to Warren G. Harding (1920) for examples of bad presidents. We have Richard Nixon (1968), — Bitter Crank
Yes it's disgusting. I wish they'd be honest and concrete over the lawns so that the building really looks like the fortress of paranoia it has become, rather than the celebration of democracy and egalitarianism that it was designed to be, and of which the freely accessible lawns rolling over the top were such a potent symbol.with the parliament house fence being its most egregious and depressing symbol. — StreetlightX
takes into consideration the relative costs of local goods and services produced in a country valued at prices of the United States. It factors in exchange rates and the inflation rates of each country. Further, GDP at PPP reflects the purchasing power of a citizen in one country to a citizen of another. For example, a pair of shoes may cost less in one country than another, so purchasing power parity is needed for fairness in the calculation.
Families survived because granny looked after the kids while mum and dad worked. — Banno
It would be more fair if each district were drawn with at least one right and one left angle. — Pierre-Normand
What makes you think that anything "went wrong"?
We are a nation of ideas Banno and best I know, there is no manual nor map for this road less taken, that we as a collective union have chosen to walk down together. I am interested in what you can see from Australia that appears to have "gone wrong" in the USA that I am not able to see from within her borders. — ArguingWAristotleTiff
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