There are a lot of different ways to measure democracy but most of the established ones (my own selection based on a quick glance at the “Democracy Ranking” Wikipedia page) ranks Sweden as more democratic than the U.S. so I guess more direct government control and more directly elected officials doesn’t necessarily translate to more democratic system of government.
I think that's completely disconnected from the word Democracy. Democracy is a form of government where political power is vested in the people of a state. As opposed to a Monopoly or Oligarchy. "More democratic" is not necessarily "more good". If 99% of people vote to arrest a specific person because they don't like what he said. That would be the most democratic system but it would be a terrible system.
I think the people making those "established measures" are just measuring what they think makes a good government and then calling that Democracy.
No, the same way it isn't more democratic if all branches of government all tie the same party line.
Modern democracy is based on the separation of powers and, in the vast majority of countries, a constitution or charter(s) that can't be overturned by a simple majority vote. For example, a party can't suspend Habeas Corpus on a whim, even if said party won the presidency, the Congress and the Senate.
But just ask the Supreme Court who carved an exception for the FED and not other government agencies...
Yes, it is. This is for the same reason that deciding all things by plebiscite is a full or direct democracy, yet also a stupid thing. Your error comes from doing what many people now do, which is treating democracy as "good things", and more democracy is when we have more good things, and it as an inherent good. It's not.
While europeans tend to celebrate engines/cars designed for the rich, Americans tend to celebrate engines/cars designed for everyone. Accounting for inflation, the car those engines came in (the 1969 Buick GS 400) sold for ~$30k in today's dollars. For comparison a similarly powerful 1969 Aston Martin DBS V8 sold for the equivalent of $126k today.
Their lander was destroyed shortly after landing and only sent a few images. If you wanted something that could last it would need to be designed to handle that atmosphere
Something like two thirds of the US federal budget is spent on some form of welfare. Assuming you want to keep that ratio you could spend more per person with fewer people withdrawing from that system.
Completely wrong, except possibly if you're defining Social Security as welfare, in which case honesty would compel you to note that no one draws Social Security except based on having previously made contributions via dedicated taxation for social security.
Just a reminder... Social Security requires 40 quarters (ie, 10 years) of income to even qualify for a pension. And the pension is based on what you earn, which is what you pay into the system.
Only 10 years? Damn, here in many EU countries you need to contribute much longer than that to qualify for receiving a pension. And supposedly we're the "socialist" ones.
There’s a difference between “able to receive” vs. “receive a useful amount”. As I recall they tally one’s contributions when determining payment. But like all government systems it can probably be gamed.
FWIW, social security and Medicare taxes are noticeably higher in the US than Canada. Pay more get more.
I agree that Social Security is not plain welfare, but it has significant welfare components. Simplifying some, you get back something like 90% of the first $15,432 income per year but only 32% of income above that up to $92,988. (And above that, it's 15%.) Only getting 32% back of what you pay in so that the rest can be redistributed to others who made less could be considered partly welfare. Also, if you die too young, you don't get the money back, nor can you give it to your children. It's redistributed to other people. I'm not saying it's bad (I think it's probably good overall), but I can see how it's partly welfare.
The US doesn’t lack the capital for welfare. The country decides to instead waste its resources fighting wars, fighting its allies, fighting its trade partners. The money is here, there is no will to allocate it to welfare. You could reduce the number of people on welfare by a massive amount and none of the savings from that would get distributed to the remaining recipient
The US economy did great prior to 1900 or so. During this period, we did not have significant military action outside of the Americas, and we avoided peacetime alliances. From 1820-1900 the US economy exploded from about 40% the size of the UK economy to about 200% the size of the UK economy.
Switzerland has a per capita GDP exceeding the US while pursuing isolationist foreign policy. They are the world's most popular country in opinion polls.
I hate to break it to you, but the world of pre-1900 has been dead and gone for a solid 120+ years, it was killed off by Europe getting itself into two stupid wars that the Americans had to come over and save them from. Nothing works the same anymore.
All those European countries get to invest in those nice social programs and isolationism because the US has at least up until now acted as world police and handled their foreign affairs for the most part.
No, they're essential to protecting Benjamin Netanyahu's ass. No more and no less.
Less vindictively, the only economic interest the US has in the Middle East is oil. Relying on oil for your energy needs is, in 2026, a choice and not a requirement. Wind, solar, and the batteries you need to store them are continuously getting cheaper. And for the people who are net consumers of energy - primarily the US, Europe, and China - renewables are better for everything, but especially they're better for energy independence!
The only things that require oil are airplanes, plastics, and industrial chemical processes (like we make asphalt out of oil and certain inks out of naphtha). Eliminating most of the energy demand for oil would mean a significantly reduced dependence on foreign oil, and more specifically, the political dependence on low gas prices. America rebuilt all its cities in the image of the car and, as a result, made gasoline/petrol a necessary ingredient of urban mobility. This was, again, a choice - we absolutely could have retained and grown our dense urban cores and we can still rebuild what was destroyed.
But this requires an entire governing body at every level that is not a corpse paraded by the ghosts of Tammany Hall, Standard Oil, and Hitler. The primary crisis in America that is driving these wars is a fundamental lack of political will for alternatives.
>"Those wars are essential to protecting our economic interests"
Translation - we bomb people for money. well thanks for being frank anyways. otherwise it is sick to hear all that moralizing about "us being a good guys"
This is a statistic that is technically true but has some hidden nuance.
Depending on what gets counted, "public assistance" stats like this usually include medicare and social security. (Social security gets debated because of how it's paid-in, but I'm not here to argue that. The fact is, it gets included in these stats). Those two make up the dominant consumption of public assistance to the point that things we hear about in the media like food stamps are kind of a rounding error.
Medicare and social security are collected primarily by older people. Foreign born populations have much lower numbers of people in that age bracket than the general popualtion.
Combine those two facts and it's not surprising that when you look at charts of foreign born vs native born, the foreign born population uses less public assistance.
It's a statistic that is more about age distribution than anything. Like when you one of those bad maps trying to prove a point but really just showing population density of big cities.
I'd love to see some source for this, because from what I've seen, 59% of undocumented immigrants receive some form of welfare (the state of California spends roughly $10 billion a year alone on this) and documented migrants are at roughly the same rate, double the native born population's rate of 28%.
I can't find study now from CIS but when I dug into it, it lumped citizen children of undocumented immigrants into "undocumented immigrant", and other studies classify them as native/citizen. It also looked at estimated education costs since schools are required to take all school age kids without regard to immigration status and many of big school systems don't have a breakdown of immigration status. CIS argument was: If parents are immigrants, shouldn't be contribute the kids cost to them regardless of kids status?
Looking at CBO numbers, CBO reports that recent immigration into United States is drain, in particular, at state and local level since that's generally budget that gets impacted the most by people. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61464
> I'd love to see some source for this [proceeds to throw out a bunch of source-free numbers]
I looked up the source for these numbers.
It's the Center for Immigration Studies, and they are notorious for being a right-wing think tank used to dress up up anti-immigration policy using misleading statistics.
How notorious are they? Well, they are listed as a hate group with the Southern Poverty Law Center[1].
The numbers you're citing aren't 'welfare,' the biggest thing is using the education system. The thing that, long term, makes they into productive taxpayers. CIS doesn't figure the long-term benefits into their numbers because that would destroy their thesis.
The HUD secretary mentioned the number, and the number was also included in a Congressional report, though it ended up being through testimony, also from that same source, which I hadn't realized. I'd been under the impression the one claim was independently sourced from actual federal data, rather being from CIS.
In any case, none of this amounts to immigrants using less welfare than native born residents, which is what I was asking sources for.
The vast majority of the difference, according to the article, is social security benefits and Medicare. The non-retirement difference is very small.
> Native-born Americans use an average of ... $3,638 in means-tested benefits in 2023. By comparison, immigrants used ... $3,370 in means-tested benefits.
The article also ignores state provided benefits, and thus the disparity between documented and undocumented migrant populations. The article 's "much less" headline is not really supported by the evidence provided.
So they should turn off the GPS interference whenever they're asked to do so by ATC. Which they did in this case. The timeline is something like , NOTAM issued, flight takes off, flight has issues, ATC asked the military to turn off the interference, the military complies, the flight says they're good now and the interference can continue, ATC informes the military that they can continue, they do, and then the flight crashes. I don't see how the military carries any fault here.
reply