(no subject)
Reading this article made me angry. It's an article about "America in decline" that takes a look at the healthcare system, foodstamps, the economy, and so forth, especially in comparison to Europe. The writer says he is an ex-patriate American who has been living in Europe, but the unrealistic way he imagines that things happen here make me wonder how much attention he was actually paying, and how much this article is just him absorbing European bias. But we'll get to that. Quotes from the article are italicized.
The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does.
It's true that their economy is larger, but according to the IMF, it's only a difference of 3.5%. And let's keep in mind that the US is one country, and the European Union is 27 countries. Taken individually, none of those countries holds a candle to the US, and most couldn't even compete with most states. The population statement is accurate; the US has around 300 million people and the EU has around 500 million.
Though it [the EU] 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.
I'd like to see the source for these numbers. Do the GNP numbers refer to how much the government spends on healthcare, or to how much individuals spend personally?
As for insurance, one thing that living in Texas has taught me is that it's overrated. Texas implemented mandatory car insurance some years back, similar to how the new healthcare reform will begin forcing everyone to purchase mandatory health insurance. Universal car insurance, surely that means that there will be less wrecks, and people who get in wrecks will be covered, right? If only! What it really means is that families who can't afford it wind up having to allot part of their limited resources to car insurance instead of rent, broken down wrecks parked on the side of the road get ticketed for not being insured, and the insurance companies make a killing. There are just as many wrecks now as there's ever been, just as many people are uninsured because they can't afford it, and thanks to the insurance companies there is never any such thing as a "no-fault" car accident. That means that when two drivers wreck, driver A's insurers tell him it's his fault, and charge accordingly. But driver B's insurers tell him it's his fault, and he gets billed the same. No matter whose fault it really was, or even if it was an accident of the weather or somesuch and was genuinely nobody's fault, both the poor saps get billed as if it were their fault. The insurance companies make a killing left and right, and help nobody.
The moral of the story is, just because you have insurance, doesn't mean you're protected.
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.
These figures are meant to scare. The actual uninsured figure is about 48 million, 11 million less than is claimed (16% of Americans uninsured, according to Gallup). But even that doesn't trouble me; 16% uninsured means that 84% ARE insured. More than 8 in 10 people do have insurance. America doesn't seem so backwards after all.
That's medical insurance, anyway. Dental insurance, once again I'm curious where their figures are from. And, now that I think about it, curious why insurance is equated with access. Don't they know that people can pay with cash? I don't have vision or dental insurance, but I got a new eye prescription and an annual dental checkup anyway, and I paid with cash ($200 and $150 for each, respectively. Which may I say is cheaper than twelve months of insurance would have been.) Just because you don't have insurance, doesn't mean that you can't get care. Many times, people consciously choose not to purchase insurance, often for the same reason I did (insurance being often more expensive than paying cash up front).
As for paid sick leave, call me callous but I don't see why a person /should/ get paid when they call in sick. For longer-term illnesses, most companies have leave of action policies which often do consist of paid leave. So once again, I'm not sure where the author is coming from. I'll get to the food stamps comment in a minute.
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.
European access to care isn't nearly as easy and idyllic as it sounds. Most places are bogged down with waiting lists stretching out for months, even years, before the person can get care. Sometimes people die while waiting for care, because they are kept on the waiting lists so long. (Sadly I don't have an internet resource I can link for this; it's from the book A Journey: My Political Life by Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK). Once again, insurance doesn't mean protection.
Paid sick leave I've already mentioned. I don't see why a person should be paid for calling in sick, and for long term illnesses most companies have paid leave-of-absence programs already. "Paid annual leave" is just another way of saying "paid vacations". Paid vacations are nice, but I certainly wouldn't call them a right. It should be up to each individual business whether or not they want to offer that to their people, not up to the dictates of the government. Paid maternity leave I have mixed feelings on. Paid vacations are one thing; they're both optional and frivolous, and I don't see any problem leaving it at each company's discretion. Maternity is different, maybe optional but certainly not frivolous, and I'm undecided whether it should be held to a different standard. Apparently, most companies in the US don't offer paid maternity leave, although they do offer it unpaid.
"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."
Maybe it's just because Texas is conservative anyway, but most of the Tea Party goers that I've met have been young or middle-aged. I've never met an older person who identified with the movement. They have all been white, though. But, that's just my personal and highly unscientific poll. Ah, Glenn Beck. I love his books, and I hate his TV show. His books are well-researched, well-written, articulate, and basically made of win. His TV show is two blackboards and a crackpot drawing designs and claiming it's the end of the world. It's almost like they are two completely different people (and if he's using a ghostwriter, maybe they really are.) Unfortunately, overseas audiences are much more likely to see his show than his books, so they only see the evil half of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality that Beck has going.
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.
This is the most suspect figure so far. Once again no sources, and once again, any person who lives in the US could tell you that it's complete bunk. 20% out of work? Please. The real figure is 9.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes the numbers for the long-term unemployed.
(In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)
America has fuckloads of people in jail because of drug charges, and I personally believe that drugs and drug use needs to be decriminalized. If it were, the prison population would plummet.
Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out.
Isn't that a bad thing? Where's the incentive to look for a job? Why get paid to work, when you're getting paid just as much to not work? Programs like this may sound altruistic, but they undermine a person's aspiration, ambition, and enterprise. They encourage passivity: why go out and make money when you can get it for free from the government? Except it's not free. The price in return is your independence, ambition, and self-respect.
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.
2 million? Just a minute ago it was 60 million (20% of the population). And once again, this conflates insurance with access.
I think this is a basic misunderstanding of Europeans when they think about our healthcare system. I think they envision a country where no insurance = no access to a doctor; imagine scenes where an injured person, bleeding, is turned away at the door of a hospital and left to die because he's uninsured; think to themselves that anyone who has insurance is guaranteed to get what they need, and anyone who doesn't is guaranteed not to, as if insurance were some kind of passport into the world of medicine.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you don't have insurance, you are not turned away at the door. You are given what treatment you need. If you have no insurance (or if your insurer pulls a typical move on you and says they won't cover your procedure), then you have several options. You can pay cash (and a surprising number of people without insurance are not poor at all; they are middle-class or sometimes even rich, who have consciously decided not to purchase it for similar reasons as I outlined above, namely that the cost of insurance costs more than an up-front payment in cash. It's a fallacy to think that all uninsured are poor. In reality, only about a third of them are.) If you can't pay a lump sum, nearly all hospitals offer payment plans. If you can't pay that, then (in Texas at least), there are usually medical charity networks that will help you. You can take out a medical loan at the bank. You could put it on a credit card and pay the monthly credit bills. If your situation is truly dire, and your medical bills are causing "undue hardship" as defined by law, you can file bankruptcy. Long story short, there are a lot of options, not just the insurance-or-no-insurance either-or fallacy painted in the article. When the author says he wants "insurance" or "universal coverage", what he really means is that he wants it for /free/.
Then comes the story of Pam Brown, mascot for us downtrodden, helpless, backwards Americans.
American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. ... 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.
Please. Unemployment is less than 10%, which isn't too shabby even in good economic times, and is frankly astounding during the supposed "worst recession since the Great Depression". Which incidentally had unemployment rates nearly three times higher.
As for Pam herself, it's her own fault if she didn't save up money for the lean times during the boom times. She had a great job and a great salary, but blew it all on a six-bedroom house for four people, in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Could I please have a side of personal responsibility with my conservatism? She is still buying stuff from restaurants (that buck thirty-five she wasted on take-out coffee could have bought her a full breakfast at a grocery store), so either she is just dense, or she still hasn't learned the lesson of managing her money responsibly. She made 80 grand a year, and it was and is her own responsibility to save and spend responsibly. If she blew all her cash living above her means and now has had to downgrade her lifestyle to match what she actually makes (or rather, match what the government is giving her, since she's not even paying for it), that's /her/ failing, not the government's.
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.
It's important to note that the US doesn't, either. This is where the author of this article made me really question how much he knows about how things actually work in the US. Well, I'll enlighten him. Foodstamps are not actual paper stamps a lá the 1940's that the hapless recipient tears out of a booklet and hands over to the grocer. "Foodstamps" are actually a credit card. They are a regular plastic credit card, and they have a certain spending limit that the customer can use at their discretion. The person can buy all their stuff at once, put it on the conveyor belt, the cashier scans and bags it, the customer swipes their EBT card (Electronic Benefit Transfer) just like a regular credit card, and it pays for all the food. The end. There's also another program called WIC (Women Infants and Children), which is basically the same except instead of a generic dollar limit it has an item limit that ignores price.
For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans.
How many people in the world can survive one day without eating? Hint: All of them. I'm not trying to sound hard-hearted here, but come on. If she were that hard up, she should have saved the $1.35 she wasted on a single cup of coffee, and bought 12 eggs instead (47 cents) or a gallon of milk (99 cents) or eight meals' worth of ramen noodles (16 cents apiece). It's her own fault she's in this situation, her own fault she has zero concept of money management, and her own responsibility to start learning it. She didn't have to dig in the trash; she could have saved wisely when she was rich, or spent wisely when she was poor, or gone without if it were that embarrassing for her (couldn't even tell you how many times I've gone without), or sought help, from family, friends, or even strangers (I used to have people come up to me at my store and ask if we had any day-jobs washing windows or whatever that they could do for a day's worth of pay. There's no reason she couldn't have at least tried to do something similar.) She had a plethora of options, not just the 2 the author tries to portray.
Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.
Wait, what. Just a minute ago she said she was on long-term unemployment benefits. She can afford a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of New York, for heaven's sake. An apartment the government is paying for. How has the government abandoned her, exactly? It hasn't. She's already getting a lot, for free; her complaint is that she isn't getting more, for free.
Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom.
She allowed herself to fall to the bottom. She had an awesome job, and had plenty of opportunity to save, invest, live within her means, and generally act responsibly. I'm interested to know how she lost her job; I'm curious if she was fired or if she just quit. Instead, she lived beyond her means, saved nothing, and prepared for nothing. The government is not a babysitter and does not owe her a living. It has no obligation to save her from herself.
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.
Once again, it's not the government's responsibility to save someone when they sabotage their own life. And, richest country in the world? Didn't at the beginning of the article the author make a special point to tell us that the US is /not/ the richest in the world, but in fact the EU is? What happened with that? And, once again, she's maintaining her living on long-term unemployment benefits, so the government could hardly be said to have abandoned her.
People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.
Well, this has nothing to do with anything.
Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?
A European-style safety net can't even save Europe. Half of Europe is bankrupt now from trying to implement it. Free healthcare for life, paid vacations, free food, endless unemployment and all the rest of it sounds nice, but honey, there ain't nothing free. The money for those hospitals, doctors, medicine, food, money payments, and so on has to come from somewhere. They've been trying to raise it through taxes, but how can a person living on benefits with no job pay taxes? Pay tax payments to the government, out of their government-given unemployment payment money? It turns into an endless circle, where everyone loses. You can't have something for nothing. So even though it sounds utopian, here in non-utopian reality it is not workable (and, in my opinion, not desirable). You can't have your free lunch and eat it too.
The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does.
It's true that their economy is larger, but according to the IMF, it's only a difference of 3.5%. And let's keep in mind that the US is one country, and the European Union is 27 countries. Taken individually, none of those countries holds a candle to the US, and most couldn't even compete with most states. The population statement is accurate; the US has around 300 million people and the EU has around 500 million.
Though it [the EU] 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.
I'd like to see the source for these numbers. Do the GNP numbers refer to how much the government spends on healthcare, or to how much individuals spend personally?
As for insurance, one thing that living in Texas has taught me is that it's overrated. Texas implemented mandatory car insurance some years back, similar to how the new healthcare reform will begin forcing everyone to purchase mandatory health insurance. Universal car insurance, surely that means that there will be less wrecks, and people who get in wrecks will be covered, right? If only! What it really means is that families who can't afford it wind up having to allot part of their limited resources to car insurance instead of rent, broken down wrecks parked on the side of the road get ticketed for not being insured, and the insurance companies make a killing. There are just as many wrecks now as there's ever been, just as many people are uninsured because they can't afford it, and thanks to the insurance companies there is never any such thing as a "no-fault" car accident. That means that when two drivers wreck, driver A's insurers tell him it's his fault, and charge accordingly. But driver B's insurers tell him it's his fault, and he gets billed the same. No matter whose fault it really was, or even if it was an accident of the weather or somesuch and was genuinely nobody's fault, both the poor saps get billed as if it were their fault. The insurance companies make a killing left and right, and help nobody.
The moral of the story is, just because you have insurance, doesn't mean you're protected.
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.
These figures are meant to scare. The actual uninsured figure is about 48 million, 11 million less than is claimed (16% of Americans uninsured, according to Gallup). But even that doesn't trouble me; 16% uninsured means that 84% ARE insured. More than 8 in 10 people do have insurance. America doesn't seem so backwards after all.
That's medical insurance, anyway. Dental insurance, once again I'm curious where their figures are from. And, now that I think about it, curious why insurance is equated with access. Don't they know that people can pay with cash? I don't have vision or dental insurance, but I got a new eye prescription and an annual dental checkup anyway, and I paid with cash ($200 and $150 for each, respectively. Which may I say is cheaper than twelve months of insurance would have been.) Just because you don't have insurance, doesn't mean that you can't get care. Many times, people consciously choose not to purchase insurance, often for the same reason I did (insurance being often more expensive than paying cash up front).
As for paid sick leave, call me callous but I don't see why a person /should/ get paid when they call in sick. For longer-term illnesses, most companies have leave of action policies which often do consist of paid leave. So once again, I'm not sure where the author is coming from. I'll get to the food stamps comment in a minute.
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.
European access to care isn't nearly as easy and idyllic as it sounds. Most places are bogged down with waiting lists stretching out for months, even years, before the person can get care. Sometimes people die while waiting for care, because they are kept on the waiting lists so long. (Sadly I don't have an internet resource I can link for this; it's from the book A Journey: My Political Life by Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK). Once again, insurance doesn't mean protection.
Paid sick leave I've already mentioned. I don't see why a person should be paid for calling in sick, and for long term illnesses most companies have paid leave-of-absence programs already. "Paid annual leave" is just another way of saying "paid vacations". Paid vacations are nice, but I certainly wouldn't call them a right. It should be up to each individual business whether or not they want to offer that to their people, not up to the dictates of the government. Paid maternity leave I have mixed feelings on. Paid vacations are one thing; they're both optional and frivolous, and I don't see any problem leaving it at each company's discretion. Maternity is different, maybe optional but certainly not frivolous, and I'm undecided whether it should be held to a different standard. Apparently, most companies in the US don't offer paid maternity leave, although they do offer it unpaid.
"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."
Maybe it's just because Texas is conservative anyway, but most of the Tea Party goers that I've met have been young or middle-aged. I've never met an older person who identified with the movement. They have all been white, though. But, that's just my personal and highly unscientific poll. Ah, Glenn Beck. I love his books, and I hate his TV show. His books are well-researched, well-written, articulate, and basically made of win. His TV show is two blackboards and a crackpot drawing designs and claiming it's the end of the world. It's almost like they are two completely different people (and if he's using a ghostwriter, maybe they really are.) Unfortunately, overseas audiences are much more likely to see his show than his books, so they only see the evil half of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality that Beck has going.
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.
This is the most suspect figure so far. Once again no sources, and once again, any person who lives in the US could tell you that it's complete bunk. 20% out of work? Please. The real figure is 9.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes the numbers for the long-term unemployed.
(In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)
America has fuckloads of people in jail because of drug charges, and I personally believe that drugs and drug use needs to be decriminalized. If it were, the prison population would plummet.
Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out.
Isn't that a bad thing? Where's the incentive to look for a job? Why get paid to work, when you're getting paid just as much to not work? Programs like this may sound altruistic, but they undermine a person's aspiration, ambition, and enterprise. They encourage passivity: why go out and make money when you can get it for free from the government? Except it's not free. The price in return is your independence, ambition, and self-respect.
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.
2 million? Just a minute ago it was 60 million (20% of the population). And once again, this conflates insurance with access.
I think this is a basic misunderstanding of Europeans when they think about our healthcare system. I think they envision a country where no insurance = no access to a doctor; imagine scenes where an injured person, bleeding, is turned away at the door of a hospital and left to die because he's uninsured; think to themselves that anyone who has insurance is guaranteed to get what they need, and anyone who doesn't is guaranteed not to, as if insurance were some kind of passport into the world of medicine.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you don't have insurance, you are not turned away at the door. You are given what treatment you need. If you have no insurance (or if your insurer pulls a typical move on you and says they won't cover your procedure), then you have several options. You can pay cash (and a surprising number of people without insurance are not poor at all; they are middle-class or sometimes even rich, who have consciously decided not to purchase it for similar reasons as I outlined above, namely that the cost of insurance costs more than an up-front payment in cash. It's a fallacy to think that all uninsured are poor. In reality, only about a third of them are.) If you can't pay a lump sum, nearly all hospitals offer payment plans. If you can't pay that, then (in Texas at least), there are usually medical charity networks that will help you. You can take out a medical loan at the bank. You could put it on a credit card and pay the monthly credit bills. If your situation is truly dire, and your medical bills are causing "undue hardship" as defined by law, you can file bankruptcy. Long story short, there are a lot of options, not just the insurance-or-no-insurance either-or fallacy painted in the article. When the author says he wants "insurance" or "universal coverage", what he really means is that he wants it for /free/.
Then comes the story of Pam Brown, mascot for us downtrodden, helpless, backwards Americans.
American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. ... 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.
Please. Unemployment is less than 10%, which isn't too shabby even in good economic times, and is frankly astounding during the supposed "worst recession since the Great Depression". Which incidentally had unemployment rates nearly three times higher.
As for Pam herself, it's her own fault if she didn't save up money for the lean times during the boom times. She had a great job and a great salary, but blew it all on a six-bedroom house for four people, in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Could I please have a side of personal responsibility with my conservatism? She is still buying stuff from restaurants (that buck thirty-five she wasted on take-out coffee could have bought her a full breakfast at a grocery store), so either she is just dense, or she still hasn't learned the lesson of managing her money responsibly. She made 80 grand a year, and it was and is her own responsibility to save and spend responsibly. If she blew all her cash living above her means and now has had to downgrade her lifestyle to match what she actually makes (or rather, match what the government is giving her, since she's not even paying for it), that's /her/ failing, not the government's.
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.
It's important to note that the US doesn't, either. This is where the author of this article made me really question how much he knows about how things actually work in the US. Well, I'll enlighten him. Foodstamps are not actual paper stamps a lá the 1940's that the hapless recipient tears out of a booklet and hands over to the grocer. "Foodstamps" are actually a credit card. They are a regular plastic credit card, and they have a certain spending limit that the customer can use at their discretion. The person can buy all their stuff at once, put it on the conveyor belt, the cashier scans and bags it, the customer swipes their EBT card (Electronic Benefit Transfer) just like a regular credit card, and it pays for all the food. The end. There's also another program called WIC (Women Infants and Children), which is basically the same except instead of a generic dollar limit it has an item limit that ignores price.
For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans.
How many people in the world can survive one day without eating? Hint: All of them. I'm not trying to sound hard-hearted here, but come on. If she were that hard up, she should have saved the $1.35 she wasted on a single cup of coffee, and bought 12 eggs instead (47 cents) or a gallon of milk (99 cents) or eight meals' worth of ramen noodles (16 cents apiece). It's her own fault she's in this situation, her own fault she has zero concept of money management, and her own responsibility to start learning it. She didn't have to dig in the trash; she could have saved wisely when she was rich, or spent wisely when she was poor, or gone without if it were that embarrassing for her (couldn't even tell you how many times I've gone without), or sought help, from family, friends, or even strangers (I used to have people come up to me at my store and ask if we had any day-jobs washing windows or whatever that they could do for a day's worth of pay. There's no reason she couldn't have at least tried to do something similar.) She had a plethora of options, not just the 2 the author tries to portray.
Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.
Wait, what. Just a minute ago she said she was on long-term unemployment benefits. She can afford a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of New York, for heaven's sake. An apartment the government is paying for. How has the government abandoned her, exactly? It hasn't. She's already getting a lot, for free; her complaint is that she isn't getting more, for free.
Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom.
She allowed herself to fall to the bottom. She had an awesome job, and had plenty of opportunity to save, invest, live within her means, and generally act responsibly. I'm interested to know how she lost her job; I'm curious if she was fired or if she just quit. Instead, she lived beyond her means, saved nothing, and prepared for nothing. The government is not a babysitter and does not owe her a living. It has no obligation to save her from herself.
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.
Once again, it's not the government's responsibility to save someone when they sabotage their own life. And, richest country in the world? Didn't at the beginning of the article the author make a special point to tell us that the US is /not/ the richest in the world, but in fact the EU is? What happened with that? And, once again, she's maintaining her living on long-term unemployment benefits, so the government could hardly be said to have abandoned her.
People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.
Well, this has nothing to do with anything.
Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?
A European-style safety net can't even save Europe. Half of Europe is bankrupt now from trying to implement it. Free healthcare for life, paid vacations, free food, endless unemployment and all the rest of it sounds nice, but honey, there ain't nothing free. The money for those hospitals, doctors, medicine, food, money payments, and so on has to come from somewhere. They've been trying to raise it through taxes, but how can a person living on benefits with no job pay taxes? Pay tax payments to the government, out of their government-given unemployment payment money? It turns into an endless circle, where everyone loses. You can't have something for nothing. So even though it sounds utopian, here in non-utopian reality it is not workable (and, in my opinion, not desirable). You can't have your free lunch and eat it too.