Current Events > America is the richest Third World country

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https://www.alternet.org/egregious-lie-americans-tell-themselves

Basically what he's trying to say is "If America is so fucking rich, then why do our public services suck so much compared to the likes of Europe and Japan"

But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call economics. The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone whos compared the nine-plus-hour train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux, an equidistant journey, or whos watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German election and compared them with the fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida.

The answer he says, is simple corruption. America has tons of wealth yet the vast majority of it goes to the very top.

Now, it is true that bridges collapse in Europe, too, although this past summers tragedy was in Italy, whose famously ungovernable corruption may be the closest continental analogue to our own United States.

There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere. Seville, a pretty, modest city of less than a million people in the south of Spain, built 80 kilometers of bike lanes for $40 million in less than two years, and eliminated a lot of ugly, on-street parking in the process. Imagine a commensurate effort in New York City, a far wealthier place on paper. Well, its supposedly liberal mayor is going to give Amazon $1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.

And concludes by saying that voting is a waste of time until we can somehow get our shit together:

I voted last week, an exercise that now feels like mouthing polite prayers at someone elses church. The line snaked out the door of the tiny, hot basement room and into the cold rain. There were only three voting machines. One was broken, and one seemed to be working only intermittently. A young woman with a baby in a stroller was in line in front of me. After wed waited for 10 minutes without moving, she looked at me and rolled her eyes. Can you believe this is how we do this? she said. In 2018.

I smiled. I shrugged. I waved at her cute kid. I did not say, Yes. I can believe it.

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America can't, by definition, be a Third World nation.
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There's some truth to this. America's infrastructure is surprising bad for what you would expect from a first world country and the most influential one at that.
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HylianFox posted...

Well, its supposedly liberal mayor is going to give Amazon $1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.

hahahhaha
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Comparing ourselves to Japan is like comparing ourselves to a nation that's incredibly xenophobic, hella repressed, has an aging population, and such an insanely problematic groping dilemma that they make a special train just for women to try and tackle this issue.
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Medussa posted...

America can't, by definition, be a Third World nation.

This.

The American middle class is much wealthier than the typical Western European middle class.

It's all about tax allocation. Europeans value public infrastructure (and feelgood forced charity), Americans value personal wealth.

Considering we have people dying of easily preventable diseases in a medical system that individually costs more for nominally less coverage, yeah. America is shit.
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