Fighting over semantics won’t prevent anything.
It’s not just semantics. For years, there has been an active attempt by the Left to conflate European-style governance with “socialism”, thereby neutering the obvious socialist failures of history. Crazy Uncle Bernie tried this during the 2016 campaign, to the point where the the Danish PM publically asked him to stop referring to Denmark as “socialist.”
Now, if you don’t think that’s a big deal, you’re entitled to your own opinion. I think it’s a serious matter when politicians use the ignorance of their voters against them.
Americans on the right define ‘socialism’ as any form of redistribution. That’s just the way things are.
Yea, but their wrong. I correct people on the right, too.
Yes, if you’ve got plenty of money or excellent insurance, you can get magnificent health care.
Bingo. We don’t have a quality problem with our health care, we have a coverage problem. If you compare our insured population with Western Europe, we meet or exceed most, if not all, health care metrics.
You argue that health professionals are underpaid in Western European countries. If that were so, why would they continue working in the health fields?
Medicine is an attractive field, of course. If wage were the only determinant in occupation selection, we’d have precisely no public school teachers.
Thus must be another case of your using a completely different meaning of a word that is commonly used. I take ‘progressive tax system’ to describe a tax system that taxes the wealthy more than the poor.
“Progressive” isn’t that black and white; it refers to progression of rates up and down the income spectrum. The Nordics, for one example, tax the top earners somewhat higher than we do, if you normalize for health insurance, sales/VAT, and state/property taxes, but they run that top tax rate all the way down into the middle class. Further, only about 10% get away with no income taxes at all, whereas in the US the figure is about 47%. Then, on top of that, they have a much flatter scale than we have, with about three or four different marginal rate categories.
Here is a good source that attempts to present a reasonable overview of these considerations:
Here’s the actual data. The OECD creates what’s called an all-in rate which normalizes all those factors:
hope that you don’t require evidence to support the commonly recognized fact that, since the Citizens United case, corporate money has come to play a very large role in federal elections.
Corporate money has always played a large role in federal elections; McCain-Feingold was legislated well before Citizens United.
Not sure what that has to do with a discussion on social services/socialism and taxation policies.
