Do you really believe that the Federal Government deliberately strives to debase and crush citizens who are having troubles?

While it is of course a huge complex system about which it’s impossible to make a blanket statement, I would say that unfortunately, yes, I believe both the Federal Government and many of the states often deliberately strive to debase and crush — good choice of words there — its citizens who are in trouble.

Of course, some areas are better than others, but if you think the state is providing quality education, I suggest you drop into a school in New York City, or New Orleans, or Chicago, or Detroit.

New York City schools are a very good example of why the system is so broken. Even though expenses for NYC schools and teachers are far more than for upstate schools and teachers, the state funds NYC schools far less per student than upstate.

Now let’s go to disasters, as you say. Look at at the responses hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Maria. Astonishingly, even though the Federal government had plenty of warning in all three cases to respond, they failed to do so in any sort of reasonable fashion, and failed to follow up.

Indeed, there are plenty of areas in New Orleans that are still not cleaned up; plenty of areas in New York City that aren’t cleaned up; plenty of areas in Puerto Rico that aren’t cleared up. Indeed, it took almost a year just to get the power back on in PR.

Compare and contrast to… Indonesia. That’s right — that developing country, far poorer than the United States had a tsunami in 2004, one that of course came with no warning, and one that affected their poorest province, Banda Aceh (where I happen to know a family).

Their government mobilized almost instantly and mounted a spirited if somewhat disorganized rescue mission, making sure to deal with emergencies and particularly drinking water. Then once they stabilized it, they basically hired everyone there to clean the place.

The result was within a few years, almost everything was clearer up, and within ten years, the only traces left of the disaster were deliberate memorials, like the boat in the second picture here.

I want to emphasize that Banda Aceh is not a tourist area — it’s a poor, fundamentalist Islamic area that is seen with a certain contempt by the rest of Indonesia as their equivalent of hillbillies. But when the disaster hit, the country worked together to make it good again. More or less the same is true in other countries like Thailand that were hit by the same tsunami but I don’t have nearly as much knowledge there.

As I said — I have at least two homeless friends right now, and others that I fear the worst for. I also have at least two friends who were homeless for years and now have a place to live. This is just inconceivable in most other first world countries — and more, these four people, all of whom are pretty decent and two of whom are educated, thoughtful individuals, uniformly described a brutal, unfair system seemingly deliberately designed to be as destructive as possible to individuals. For example, one of my friends who last I heard was in the shelter system in New York City told the same stories I’ve heard before.

He’s worked mostly as a waiter, but because they close the doors to his shelter at 6PM with no possible excuse, he could not interview for many jobs unless he was willing to sleep rough, which meant likely getting arrested (which had happened to him many times before). The shelter offered you no place to keep valuables, so any item he cared about had to be carried with him all day from when they threw him out early in the morning and locked their doors.

I’ve heard shelters are better than this in California but a lot worse than this in the South.

Before I moved to the United States, I never thought such a thing was possible in the present — in Europe, this sort of world is confined to history (this book is a really interesting read). Almost every major city in the US has camps of homeless people and the endless beggars.

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To compare the EU to the US Federal government is, I hate to say this, poorly informed. The EU has a population of 512.6 million people with a 2019 budget of €165.8 billion (or $187.8 billion dollars at today’s exchange rate).

On the other hand, the US has a population of 328.4 million and a Federal government budget of $3.8 trillion, so on a per capita basis that’s over 30 times as much.

As a result, 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.

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And I do want to move back to the schools for just an instant. Over thirty years in New York City, I had a least a dozen friends try to teach schools there. As far as I know, perhaps two of them stuck it out, and the one I know for sure did got moved to a “showcase” (the city’s term, not mine) modern school that specializes in arts and science.

What a school in the Bronx is like is unimaginable. They are endlessly short on materials — teachers routinely use their own money to purchase supplies for the children, an idea that’s almost universal in the United States, and again, alien to the entire rest of the developed world. The roofs all leak, they are cold in the winter, hot in the summer. Due to poor compensation and a decades-long bitter strife between the union and the city, poor teachers abound and are yet unfireable. Drop out rates, teen pregnancy, violence all extremely high.

And there’s a simple reason — in the United States, many schools are mostly paid for out of property taxes. In poor neighborhoods, property taxes are very low, so there is very little funding for schools, while the reverse is true in rich neighborhoods. (In New York State it is complexified by a voting system that effectively gives a few upstate New Yorkers a more powerful voice on the purse than New Yorkers get.)

Now, they had an article here in Amsterdam about teachers in the Bijlmer area — our local slums. (When I lived in New York, I lived in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city, and yet this “slum” is nicer to walk around in than my neighborhood there was — and a lot better to bike in.)

That article interviewed various teachers who worked in the Bijlmer. One of the pointed out that they had more money to work with because, as is apparently universal practice in the EU, the state feels they need to make up the gap that the family cannot provide and gives higher funding to schools in poorer areas. Another teacher said, (paraphrased), “I tried for years to get into this school, and now I’m so glad I’m here. This is a school where you can really make a difference — you can change children’s lives. In a regular school, the kids practically teach themselves. Anyone could do it.”

I simply can’t imagine anyone saying that in the US.

A different world is possible. America treats its poorest 50% of citizens as a resource to be milked, and as bad people who need to be punished— most of the rest of the developed world (the UK being a gross exception there) treats the poor as citizens in difficulty who need to be helped out.

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.