Been seeing a lot about how the government passes shitty laws, lot of mass shootings and expensive asf health care. I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot. Are all states is America bad ?
America is a decent place if you put your blinders on and worry about yourself… and don’t get sick. In America, you get sick and you go bankrupt. Some places in the world you get sick and you die. 🤷♂️ People in the US are pissed off because the problems we have are obvious, easy to fix, and the people in charge make blatantly shitty decisions because they stand to profit off of them. Unchecked capitalism has corrupted every branch of the government. And since the leaders are the ones that have to regulate it and they profit off of it, they won’t change it. The elections are actually lies. And there are people that try to say we are an elite, premier example of democracy and the best country in the world. We are not that. The upper half of this country is broken and it’s squeezing the middle and lower class until we pop, for profit.
The decision making people in this country are selfish twats. They would be voted out but gerrymandering and electoral colleges (that they control) prevent the people from actually making the decision. Our elections are a farce.
But if you don’t pay attention to those things and you decide to just keep your head down, work, pay rent, consume like they want you too, it’s OK. Keep your head out of the news or you just get pissed off and ashamed.
8’d say it’s only bad by the standards of the first world. Not counting foreign policy here, mind you.
tl;dr It used to be a hell of a lot better.
Jeez… What did happen? The Nixon Shock / Bretton Woods?
Nixon knocked over a few support pillars and then Regan came in with a wrecking ball and finished the job
As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:
I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.
The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that’s true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world’s gold reserves (today it’s a little over 25%).
The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries’). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn’t sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.
This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping “New Economic Policy” on August 15, 1971, stating:
““We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.””
To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.
So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US “temporarily” suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn’t mean: it wasn’t the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn’t really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn’t the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.
It also really doesn’t have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn’t really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.
Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).
" I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"
I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists’ opinions on intelligent design.
Hey, thanks for the post. Interesting. I didn’t even realize that the website was anti-going off the gold standard. I just really focused on the increasing wealth inequality and that bummed me out.
They explain exactly what the site was created for, though the post was not present 10 months ago. I’m not sure if I know enough about economics to understand whether they believe what Kochevnik81 was guessing they believe, that the getting off the good standard was bad for the economy.
https://wtf1971.com/2023/03/21/reader-qa-why-did-you-create-wtfhappendin1971/
What drove you to create the site? What has been the most surprising outcome?
The inspiration for creating the website was born out of pragmatism. That is to say, the data was collected with the a priori assumption that abandoning the Bretton Woods agreement lent an unprecedented and unaccountable agency to nation states (particularly the United States thanks to the US dollar’s position as a global reserve currency) in their ability to expand money and credit.
The Austrian position upon which our a priori assumptions are based is as follows:
- That expansion of money and credit sends artificial signals to the market which breed malinvestment leading to an ultimate deflationary credit & money contraction when the malinvestment liquidates(Austrian business cycle theory).
- Nation States (and particularly the United States) have an unfair advantage over capital markets in their ability to unilaterally capture seigniorage through the issue of new currency while simultaneously debasing the real value of their debt and liabilities as the nominal supply of money increases.
- Point 2 leads to a top down redistribution of productive capital accumulated by private industry to the public sector which is often redirected to frivolous and/or unprofitable ventures.
The pragmatic usefulness of the website (for me personally) was merely having the data all in one place where I could simply refer a person to the data to quickly and easily demonstrate the many downstream effects of fiscal and monetary expansion (as based on the Austrian positions I outlined above).
The idea to turn it into a meme rather than a financial blog (or something of that kind) was born out of a desire to foster a reaction of socratic self discovery in the viewer. It is far more important to me that the viewer walk away with the right question rather than with what I believe is the right answer…What the F*** happened in 1971?
I have never had just pure data make me sad so quickly.
When I was a teenager, yes. Visited England and their idea of a “bad neighborhood” confused me, my city at home was rough. Their rough areas were just normal places, not scary at all.
But crime dropped here, like everywhere. It is nicer now, despite the two steps backwards we have taken lately.
We do still have violent people, we do still have a prison-industrial complex, armed police, homeless people and way too many guns, but even here in Florida my trans kid is accepted at school, my older kids got a good education (though the last did not make it out before the attack on education) and most people are nice to each other. Inside the cities it’s nice enough, feels modern and city like. Lots of jobs, easy to find a job here.
Health care? Yes, it’s shit here compared to a lot of places. If you are rich you can get really good care (and pay a lot for it), if not you just try to stay healthy and hope you don’t need anything expensive. Insurance, if you have it, does cover preventative care visits and usually stuff like blood pressure meds or antibiotics are cheap, vaccines too, and birth control usually covered as well. But any actual sickness or bad injury can bankrupt you.
I do think it’s a land of opportunity, but the odds are not great, if that makes sense? Certainly one can ‘make it’ here - think of Bill Clinton becoming president - I don’t think that kind of social mobility is everywhere, it’s a little less sticky here, more rising and falling going on than most places.
(though the last did not make it out before the attack on education)
I didn’t get that, what do you mean?
it’s a little less sticky here, more rising and falling going on than most places
How easy is it to go from working minimum wage to a well paying job if you can’t afford education to acquire a specialization?
Also say you go bankrupt and homeless because of some bad luck with your health leading to astronomical hospital bills. Is it even possible to recover from that and get back to an average life quality when covered with debt?
My first set of kids got a great K-12 education here, in stark contrast to what I experienced. But sadly, one is still in high school and the state is attacking freedom of speech, teachers are leaving, the classes are getting dumbed down.
I did go from cashier to good office job but pell grant covered my college. Bright Futures is covering my kids college. No, we don’t do a great job of supporting kids through school, it took effort. There are still union trade jobs that pay well too though, even here.
Medical system I make no apology for. It’s awful.
I moved from America to a developing country, and what pisses me off the most is how the false images of what America is influences countries like this. people here with a little bit of money and very little sense will idealize what they think is the American lifestyle. they want to drive SUVs even though the roads here are narrow and they get stuck constantly and cause traffic jams. they buy weird luxury items they can’t afford. they treat people in the blue collar working class like moral inferiors. it’s ironic as fuck for a society that is supposedly built on communist values.
America is very nice if you do not really care about how your life negatively affects others.
The US healthcare system is actually even worse than people think. Employers use it to hold power over us all, and even if you have insurance the prices of everything are extremely inflated (my dad went in for back surgery and the total was $47k usd, but get this, one of the items was a single bag of saline solution----$270!), and many people including myself can’t afford health insurance at all so I’m 1 accident or illness away from total financial ruin.
I genuinely love America and the place where I live. There is a lot to like and there are many places where life is much harder, but the US health system is one of those things that is embarrassingly bad and honestly just scary.
That’s because American health insurance is not really insurance it’s a discount plan. Any of you remember being forced to sell those overpriced coupon books as fundraisers in school? That’s what American health insurance is. It’s a shitty discount plan/coupon book that you are forced into buying from your employer and the plan itself makes sure you pay as much out of pocket as they can legally get away with.
At least the coupon book is for products with real prices. Healthcare is a total scam with prices based on who is paying. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom. The US problem is extreme systemic corruption. It is not individual corruption outside of the billionaire supreme court judges level, it is corporate sponsored corruption on a much larger scale.
The USA has a tenth of the laws and protections of any other western country. We have had nearly 50 years of a political denial of service attack from a right wing campaign of misdirection and distraction politics. No one can institute reasonable laws and protections when they are constantly battling whatever stupid inflammatory nonsense that hits the congressional floor. This is why the nonsense keeps happening. It is because it controls the conversation. The only purpose is to keep as many loopholes as possible open for the parasitic worthless billionaires that are funding it. The only fix is to force out the billionaires. The only way to accrue billions of dollars is by exploitation and criminal activity. There are no exceptions to this rule. Every billionaire is a criminal evading prosecution.
There are lots of worse places to be, but it definitely isn’t “namba wan”. Remember, it’s a country of extremes and superlatives. “Everything” is “always” the “worst” or the “best”. There’s “never” a middleground.
Also, out interface with the US is online and the media. Online, people often express their unfiltered opinion or an extreme opinion + behavior, simply because they aren’t face to face with others. It feels much less intimate and thus people behave that way. This has been going on long enough that the opinions online have taken a foothold IRL and the US is a good example thereof (from my outside view).
Also, don’t forget, there are many people speaking English and talking about the US that do not actually live there and weigh in on stuff. Some crazy af opinions might not even be coming from a person physically in the US.
It depends. I’m a Canadian who frequently crosses the border.
The cities close by the border seem perfectly cromulent, everyone’s super nice and accepting. The gas is definitely cheaper, and there is a wider variety of products on offer than in Canada.
There are certainly areas of the US that I’d want to avoid (Florida comes to mind, I would get hate-murdered the very millisecond I stepped there), but the good areas are good. Like someone else said, just don’t get caught being poor or with medical issues.
I think it also depends a lot on visiting versus living there. I’m also Canadian and the US is generally great to visit. There’s some states I don’t trust anymore nor want to give my money anyway, but the progressive states are great and for a large part, American culture doesn’t really feel all that different from Canadian culture, especially as a non resident.
They are considerably higher crime, though, and the way they approach guns just makes me extremely uncomfortable. I’ve never seen places like convenience stores be as locked down in any Canadian city I’ve been to compared to many American cities I’ve been to. I had a long distance relationship with someone who lived in Atlanta and wow does Atlanta feel unsafe compared to really any Canadian city (and I lived in Saskatoon for years, which is one of the highest crime Canadian cities).
But as a resident? Ehhhh. I’d never want to live in the US, even though the opportunity has come up and I’d make so much more money if I did. Their politics can largely be ignored as a visitor, but as a resident, they’d actually matter a lot more. And their health care system is batshit crazy. Canadian health care has a lot of problems, but I wouldn’t wish the American system on my worst enemy.
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I look very obviously non-binary
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No. The US has its problems but it’s not the hellhole people like to make it out to be.
It helps to look at the US in parts rather than as a homogeneous block. The country is huge and varied with 300M people in a land area larger than Europe. Laws can be wildly different from state to state, especially on hot topics like abortion or gun ownership or drug possession. Some states are filthy rich and others are depressingly poor. Some places are perfectly safe and others are dangerous.
For example, take a look at these maps comparing US states to European countries. Depending on the metric the US can look great or awful compared to Europe.
It depends on who you are, really.
If you’re a poor, black woman living in Louisiana where the only work you can find is at a chemical plant, your life is going to fucking suck.
If you’re upper-middle class living in a city, you’re probably going to have a pretty good life.
There are some systems that are just awful by developed standards though. Education, medicine, policing, and politics come to mind. They’re not likely to change, so you just have to cope with them. Basically just don’t ever get sick or interact with the police. You’ll probably die if you do either.
I agree with you. I’ll also add that if you are a poor Black woman in California, New York, Massachusetts, and a number of other states you will may have access to great public schools, where you can be guided into (public or private) college and grad school and programs for certification where you can actually claw your way into the Middle Class. It really depends on where you grow up in the US.
Not American, but I imagine that news reporting uses loaded terms and partly drives the division between republicans and democrats. I assume that in reality most people are levelheaded people that don’t hate or fear their neighbors.
It’s not bad at all (for me), as the other person said it cavaries from person to person. Social media likes to take shots at it but the reality is it’s quite enjoyable. Mass shootings are overblown by the media (they happen, they suck, but they effect like .000001 percent of the population per year, your more likely to be killed by a deer than I vlolved in a mass shooting). Gun crime exists but is mainly in specific poor or inner city areas. The other 99% is pretty safe.
Healthcare is expensive but if you have a decent job the company pays most of it. The care provided is really good in an emergency response way, but poor for general care.
Everyone everywhere is very nice, it’s extremely rare to find an exception to this. If you are brown or Muslim then you may find descrimination more often outside the city, but again that’s rare unless you go to a few areas that no one goes to anyway. My friend is Muslim and doesn’t have many issues unless he goes to the airport.
Stuff is cheap (relatively) compared to elsewhere. You can get a cheap 65" TV for like 350 bucks. Housing is expensive though unless you go to places that are cheap.
It is corrupt politically. That is going downhill, but day to day it doesn’t effect us much.
You have to drive everywhere which kind of sucks. Public transport sucks and it’s hard to find places where you can just walk around.
The air is pretty clean, the food and water is safe to eat and drink, there are plenty of jobs available, there are lots of massive beautiful outdoor spaces, etc.
For most people most of the time it’s a perfectly fine quality of life. That said, it’s a huge country with tons of variation so if you’re looking for bad qualities, there are always plenty of examples to point to.
What pisses me off is that we are nowhere near as good as we could be and as we claim to be. There are some very powerful and objectively evil forces in this country.
