Even more sad that the US chose NOT to invest this surplus, for instance in infrastructure, education and a sensible health system.
Also, in the US, infrastructure, education, and healthcare is primarily the responsibility of individual States, so it really needs to be measured on a per State basis. For some of these things, some States deliver high quality at low cost and other States deliver low quality with an order of magnitude higher spending for the same thing. The correlation between spending and results is surprisingly weak. Competency and focus seems to play a greater role.
It's the same problem in healthcare. We spend a lot of government dollars on healthcare. But when you have thousands of insurers and then boards per state and extremely complex billing, you're going to be putting the majority of your money into not-care.
If we’re looking for contributors to differences in education spending between the US and other countries, those school boards are one place to look. The overhead of administrative staff at thirteen thousand local school districts is significant.
The US also has quite high salaries by international standards, which increases per-capita spending on pretty much anything.
To some extent higher per-student fees are expected in certain areas, most countries with heavily funded education aren't facing the same issues of rural population density. There's a lot of overhead costs to run so many schools.
Then state policies and regulatory capture is the other side of course, all schools need X teaching aid from Y company for some obscene markup...
But, if the system is so good and utopian, why do so many children get shot at school? And why do so many American elected officials have such a poor understanding of the US constitution?
Absolutely no signs of trouble, hey?
To a very large degree what schools turn out is based on the students that come in. It's the home and the neighborhood far more than it is the schools themselves. You get a better result if you put students with other students of like ability and motivation. This works pretty well at the university level, but historically it was used to discriminate and thus doesn't get done earlier. And, likewise, we are very focused on equality even when it comes at a detriment to the students. (Once again, legacy of it being used to discriminate.)
It's like the majority of us were born to be peasants, so many people are quite happy to give the rich tax breaks for example, as long as their own taxes don't go up. Money's gotta come from somewhere.
Why are Teacher salaries still so low and teacher:pupil ratios continuing to get worse if we spend so much on education? Why is it that literally the primary thing that education tax dollars should be spent on, educators, is not what it is spent on?
Consider that one of the best states in the US for education, supposedly new jersey, pays it's teachers a MEDIAN of $82k. Starting is above $50k according to teachers.
In pretty much every state, the median teacher wage is equal or within 5% of the state's "living" wage.
Most places require a college degree for teachers. If they don't, that's scary in other ways. But why the hell am I spending $40k on a college degree to make barely living wage for the rest of my life? You know who does that? People who aren't very smart. Gee, I wonder why we struggle to find good teachers.
40% of our nation's teachers have a second job. That's funny, because I assure you that damn near any teacher that actually does their job works twice as hard as most other professional jobs. You don't actually get any time in your day to grade student work most of the time, so you have spend your own personal time to do your job. Every single piece of homework your child brings home is at least an hour of grading for that teacher, and that's just a niche subject or small class size. Good teachers are also running their departments, designing lesson plans, building entire portfolios of tests and work, and none of the promises of technology have done anything to improve these parts of the job. Digitized grade books are pretty good, but now they mean teachers have to deal with the worst parents bitching about their kids getting a bad grade because they didn't study, which is not something the teacher can help.
When every fucking time they open a lottery or have a new tax, and promise it will go to the schools, but they defund what's coming out of the general fund to the schools by that exact amount, you can only cry wolf so many times before that doesn't work anymore.
To get this to work anymore you're going to have to create a constitutional amendment or something that the school gets X and there will be no fuck fuck games that they aren't just defunding the schools some other place so they can use it on the next corrupt "construction" project.
Some of the worse performing schools in the US have the most per capita funding.
This is one of the consequences of the US's self-inflicted burden of the Triffin Dilemma.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...
And that's because he's wrong. The US spends huge amounts on car infrastructure. At every level of government numbers are just gigantic.
Given the current costs for NYC to expand its subway, about 500 miles of track given the current costs per mile.
But that also goes back to the original comment about spending the surplus wisely.
Playing "world cop" is a net win for America, not a cost it bears.
The problem is really that the two aren't directly linked. If you operate at a trade deficit, you don't need to manufacture at home. But if you can't manufacture at home, you can't build war machines efficiently, so you can't be the world police and ensure the market needed to operate at a trade deficit.
By defunding the military you're pulling the rug out from under yourself in this sense. I would still agree that it's massively inefficient and needs to be fixed, but the working US-World system would still invest a lot of funding into the military.
But "soft power". We traded long term prosperity for the short term ability to meddle in other people's countries and lives.
You're leaving out a large part of the equation, which is that countries can trade with each other in the reserve currency, which becomes a neutral medium of exchange with respect to the parties. The value of holding US treasuries currently is that everyone will accept them. By having the world's reserve currency, the US becomes the owner of the world marketplace. It's not just about trade with the US. I export to the US, get USD which I convert to US treasuries, and now I have near frictionless trades with everyone else in the world.
One huge impact of this over the last 50 years is that the world is effectively lending the US liquidity at the lowest possible interest rate, which the US then extends as credit to American businesses, universities, etc., fueling a boom in industry, commerce and academia.
Another big impact is that holders of US treasuries are strongly incentivized to support and protect America, because as America falls, so does the value of those holdings. Before China declares war on the US, it looks at its huge pile of treasuries that will become worthless at the first shot, and says "maybe not". It also allows the US to affect other countries through its monetary policy--another incentive for others to play nice with the US.
It's kind of boggling how little this is understood, how much short and long-term prosperity the US has created for itself by doing this.
The problem the US has in regards to healthcare, that the goal of its system isn't to supply its population with the best quality healthcare for the lowest amount of cost — the goal instead is to allow all kind of market actors and middle man to make a profit without the population revolting.
On healthcare, we already pay way more than any other developed nation for far worse outcomes, we're literally WASTING money on it to make some shitheel health insurance CEOs a little richer.
FOH with this woe is us bullshit, boo hoo it's so hard to police the world (something we also overpay for). We could have been taking care of each other the entire time, there is nothing stopping us but lies and attitudes like yours the lies beget.
To be honest, I don't even think it's just the people at the top profiting. The whole system is like designed to create as many useless jobs as possible. If I want to get a blood test, I have to do like 4-5 referrals before I can just get my test done. If I want a diagnosis, I have to wait a week to talk with a doctor who is going to push sponsored medication anyways. I'm better off doing the research myself and buying drugs through telehealth service or the greymarket.
You would be better off just having a free market where consumers figure out what doctors/nurses/pharmaceuticals are safe on their own, and you strip intellectual property protections and legal requirements for prescription drugs. It shouldn't cost a million dollars to get an x-ray. It does because there are high legal barriers that allow rent-seekers to creep in.