| Kasz216 said: Wait, how does that work... your counting the income that came in and just applying it all directlty as "military" while cutting away all the excess in other spending as not military. How the heck does that make sense.
Either way... I do like the Australian model quite a bit. Australia mostly seems to only spend money it has. The thing is... you don't seem to quite get WHY Australia succeeded where the US failed. You spend more on social security and tax the rich higher... well so does every Europeon state that failed during the global crissis and are at worse place then the US Is now! Everything you highlighted as to why you think Australia did better is also true in the failing europeon countries.
Yet you guys never had a huge crash and this was despite your higher rich people taxes and lack of mega rich. Thought steep rises were supposed to cause that.
Why did Australia avoid the 2008 recession? Well, for one. Your housing never burst...
partical due to the Australian central bank RAISING interest rates to cut off cheap capital. Your debt level was low, You have been increasingly more tied to Asia in trade with China as your second biggest export partner. And plenty of more reasons. The article where I got the chart from is pretty informative. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51352693/how-australia-ducked-the-crisis/
As for Health... not really. There isn't much your overlooking. Human Services is just mostly meant to reflect the fact that they care about people as well as keeping the people healthy. The US government just sucks at negotiating prices, because they tend to instead use it to win over lobbying groups... and have HUGE government beuracracy. For example. Our main Medical assosiation was AGAINST the Obama healthcare reforms... until Obama agreed to stop cutbacks in what medicare and medicaid pay docotors for procedures. Expectations for care are much different... the US tends to be "overtreated" and written perscriptions for everything. Not to mention cultural factors which, while Australia isn't great at, the US is worse... like obesity. Oh and the real kicker... cost to be a doctor. In the US, that's 4 years of undergraduate, 4 years of medical school, followed by AT LEAST 3 years of interning. So you start being a doctor at like.... 30. With like 100,000-200,000 worth of student loans owed to the government who you can't deafult to. Also, we don't count education in our spending, because while we do have a department of education... most of are education spending and funding is done directly by the state governments. Something worth noting in all that.. our state governments do way more "non defense" spending then everywhere else.
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The housing bubble bursting in America caused the GFC. It was the aftershocks of the burst bubble that went around the world. The reason why Australia's housing prices didn't drop the way others did was because we didn't go into recession. In other words, you have the cause and effect backwards.
And I never claimed that increased inequality caused crashes. I said that inequality increases in the leadup to a crash. Did you notice the downturn in inequality after 2008? That happened because, between 1996 and 2007, the Australian equivalent of the Republicans held government. In 2007, the Australian equivalent of the Democrats took power, stopping a pattern of rising inequality. Notice that, in America, when Democrats take power, inequality still rises? Your system is screwed up.
It's true that there are other factors in why Australia avoided the GFC-triggered recessions. But the point I was making wasn't that higher taxes saved us, but that they didn't make us more vulnerable. We were able to survive, despite the higher taxes that modern conservative thinking claims causes economic instability.
You bring up lobbying groups. That's quite a bag of worms, so I won't go into it too much, but it's one of the biggest problems with the American system as it currently stands.
By the way, your system of having states be nearly independent entities is another part of America's problem. I understand the reasoning - each state then has to compete, etc, etc... but government is not, and should not be, like a private company. State governments should be complementary to the federal government. Indeed, America's insistence on competition at every level is a MAJOR issue. Consider, for instance, that Australia doesn't have local "school boards". We have a national curriculum, to ensure that all students are taught to a certain minimum level (they can go beyond the curriculum, it sets the minimum).
And if it costs a lot of money to become a doctor in America, then maybe that's a failing of your system, right there? Education costs in Australia are much lower, you get automatic loans from the government while studying that you don't have to pay off until you're earning more than a certain amount, and to be honest, even that's too expensive. Tertiary education should be free to the student (within reason - say, the first undergraduate course plus the first postgraduate course should be free), because they earned their right to study through their efforts at school. But that's neither here nor there.
You may have noticed, by now, a common thread running through my entire argument - America's system is screwed up, it needs to be fixed, not just shrunk.
