And the crazy part? It doesn’t cost much more to do it right. Everyone complains about taxes here, but it honestly they are not much more than you pay New York City, and the goods and services you get for this are astonishing.
This raises a good question. How come residents of New York pay so much in taxes and receive so little in quality services? Do you feel it is deliberate to debase and crush its poor people? That just seems nonsense? Is it maybe that New York has a much higher percentage of poor and disadvantaged people compared to the EU cities you are comparing it to? A little data searching shows that is probably the case and it might be as extreme as poverty is twice as prevalent in New York City as it is in Amsterdam. Europe has more wealthy and fewer poor to support. I do think that better off Americans are less inclined to help the poor and part of that is it is an overwhelming problem with so many poor and so many failed efforts to help them. Half of all New York Residents are poor or near poor.
If a community has 75 well off residents and 25 poor residents it is easier to help the poor than if it has 50 well off residents and 50 poor residents. The first community as three well off residents to help each poor resident, the second community has one well of resident for each poor resident. The challenge of the second community is three times harder than the first community.
On the Hurricane recovery in New Orleans and New Orleans schools I don’t think you represent the situation accurately (work in New Orleans). The reasons some of New Orleans has not recovered completely from Karina are varied and are not due to a lack of Federal Recovery Funding. New Orleans schools have greatly improved in the last decade under State oversight and control is being given back to the city, still rich people who send their children to private schools are not interest in their tax money being spent on public schools and that is bad.
the EU is a direct force in very few European’s lives. No one pays taxes to the EU, or gets services directly from the EU
I take exception to this. Europeans pay taxes to the EU, they are just indirect and pass through their nations government first. They might not get services from the EU but if the EU was not a direct force in European’s lives then Brexit or no Brexit would make no difference.
So the EU spends 187.8 billion dollars but provides no services and no military no wonder its per capita budget is one thirtieth of the U.S. Federal Government’s.
