France also has much lower homelessness and supports child care and health care to a greater extent. In the US the most prominent cause of bankruptcy is medical debt, rents are up an extraordinary amount, homelessness is up quite a lot. Child mortality in the US is the highest in the developed world, from a combo of our terrible infant mortality stats and gun accidents.
What are drugs for? For most people, it's not as much chasing the high as pushing away the pain. Look at your own drinking for example (not necessarily you, dminor, but many readers). Mind-altering chemicals are overwhelmingly used in the US to numb oneself and push away the pain of daily living. Folks start with a little to take the edge off, dull the fear & give themselves a bit of mental space, not have to think about the bills, and then...
> We estimate that there were 110 unintentional firearm deaths to children 0–14 annually in the U.S. during this 8 year time period, 80 % higher than reported by the Vital Statistics. The victims were predominantly male (81 %). Approximately two thirds of the shootings were other-inflicted, and
> Yet life is better on pretty much every material metric you list. [...] You think Americans dealing with bills need drugs more than subsistence farmers in Bangladesh?
This is irrelevant. When it comes to using drugs, all that matters is the user's own perception of their life. The fact that we have a mental health crisis among young people clearly indicates that, despite any measurable increase to their material quality of life, these young people are increasingly likely to perceive their lot as being dismal. Look at the article and see how many of these kids thought they were taking Xanax, which is an anti-anxiety medication. They weren't even trying to get high, they were seeking something to help them make it through the day. Finding and addressing the cause of this anxiety is, alas, more complicated than just beheading anyone who gets caught popping a pill.
I don’t see the two things as being in conflict. None of the countries I mentioned use the death penalty on drug users. You can address the demand side by figuring out what’s causing these mental health problems. That doesn’t mean you can’t attack the supply by executing drug dealers.
I think a lot of people in the US agree with you, but I think you'd all be surprised to know there are a lot of juvenile drug dealers out there. Sometimes they're indies, others they're low on the totem pole of some gang. You can't solve the problem by killing these kids, also they want to be drug dealers because of the money and prestige, and the (perceived) control they get over their life.
There's also not a lot of evidence in favor of the death penalty as a deterrent. The most likely outcome of this policy is we just start executing hundreds of young men, mostly minorities.
> Yet life is better on pretty much every material metric you list. Drug overdose rates have skyrocketed even as Obamacare and Medicaid expansion dramatically cut the number of uninsured people.
Is it? From what I hear living costs are higher and higher, real wages are flat or declining especially for the bottom 20%, and while more people might "have" "health insurance" it doesn't seem to have reduced the costs or rate of bankruptcies.
Bottom quintile over time (about 20% higher today than in 2000): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M (edit to add: this one looks to be nominal rather than real income; I’ll see if I can find the real chart on the computer before the edit window closes; I can’t effectively find it on the phone)
My apologies. Only the first chart I posted is real wages (after taking CPI changes into account). I was searching for “real wages over time” but didn’t detect that only the first result was real.
I appreciate your candor. I missed that the first chart indicated real income.
I do find it interesting that housing and living costs seem more unaffordable than the CPI data implies. I came across some Statista data that indicates that real hourly earnings fell for non-managerial workers from a high in 1964 and took nearly 60 years to recover in 2019[0]:
> On average, workers in the United States in nonsupervisory positions got paid $23.38 an hour last month. Denominated in constant 1982-1984 dollars, that amounts to real average hourly earnings of $9.40, the highest amount on record since 1964.
I could be wrong but I imagine that many of these workers were probably hit harder by the pandemic and current inflation than those lucky enough to be able to work through it.
> I do find it interesting that housing and living costs seem more unaffordable than the CPI data implies.
I agree with you that things "feel worse" than the data suggests. I asked an old friend a while ago about this, observing "I never worried about how much going out to eat cost 20 years ago, and I was making a lot less money then. Now, it seems so expensive."
"You have a family, house, and retirement to think about now" was his answer.
Part of the spread in feeling vs CPI is likely that CPI represents reported purchases. If people want steak and buy ground beef, CPI reports on the ground beef while you and I in daily life might be noticing our desire for the steak.
That's a 2.5x - 3x increase since 1975, which is huge given that it is the single most expensive thing that anybody buys in their life. If you take housing out of the equation, most people I know wouldn't need to worry about money.
For housing, I think you have to back out the effects of interest rates as well, since the purchase price isn't what hits the monthly budget of households, but rather the payment price. I don't know what the reputable sources for UK mortgage rates are, but in the US, until quite recently, mortgage rates were about 30-45% of what they were in 1975 (~9%), so I'd expect the same monthly budget in real dollars to show up as a lot more capital buying power (expressed as a purchase price).
> "You have a family, house, and retirement to think about now" was his answer.
That's a fair point from an individual perspective. Although, it's concerning that society as a whole appears to be experiencing the same shift.
> Part of the spread in feeling vs CPI is likely that CPI represents reported purchases. If people want steak and buy ground beef, CPI reports on the ground beef while you and I in daily life might be noticing our desire for the steak.
That's true. I also suspect that people that were struggling before have been impacted much more severely by price rises. In my country, prices in budget supermarkets have increased by a much greater percentage[0]. Own brand products seem to have been affected even more[0]:
> we found other Tesco products, including Hearty Food Co Two Garlic Chicken Kievs (260g), Grower's Harvest Orange Juice (3 x 200ml) and Rosedene Farms Small Pear Pack (550g), all soaring by more than 60% in price.
> At Asda, two versions of its Free From cream cheese products – its Soft Cheese Alternative (170g) and its Garlic & Herb Soft Cheese Alternative (170g) – went up from 93p to £2.12, an increase of 128%.
> You think Americans dealing with bills need drugs more than subsistence farmers in Bangladesh?
well it sure seems that way, don't it?
perhaps the issue is because Americans spend their time alone staring at screens, getting mad about politics and depressed while the Bangladeshi are toiling outside in well integrated communities...
or maybe it's just a supply issue. Then again, wouldn't alcohol and Afghan opium be relatively easy to acquire in Bangladesh?
Living in California, I can tell I you it most certainly is and has been for a while.
Maybe the news paints it as a bunch of cowboys trying to restrict abortions. But look at California, Oregon, Washington, New York, etc laws. They have become so liberal that it has become a meme.
Drugs are almost completely decriminalized, you can buy/sell and consume drugs openly on the street, police will not investigate property crimes under $1000 at all anymore, eviction is almost completely impossible even if the tenant hasn’t paid rent in a year.
California is about to spend 800 BILLION dollars giving money to black people even though slavery never existed there.
It’s legitimately a struggle to think up ways coastal cities in the US could be more liberal.
This thread is an interesting example on how not very well defined terms can let people talk past each other… the original poster suggested “let’s try to be more like France, where this problem is solved”, the next one said “no, more liberalism is not the solution” (apparently implying that liberalism is what France does) and now someone states you can’t get more liberal than California, listing as examples things none of which work like that in France!
Regardless of the merits of each argument (I am doubtful if you can easily transfer examples from one country to another) we obviously have people arguing with each other here based on completely different definitions of key terms in the discussion.
police will not investigate property crimes under $1000 at all anymore
That's just cops being lazy and not doing their job. They like to say "the D.A. will just throw it out!" or "they'll just be back on the street due to overcrowding!" as if either of those has anything to do with the cops' job of enforcing laws and arresting perpetrators.
I don't know if the rest of the article is behind a paywall, but I don't see anything about a policy.
The only policies I've heard of are either police department policies -- which is just codified laziness and refusal to do their job -- or district attorney policy which, as I said, shouldn't be relevant to whether or not police make arrests. It's their job to arrest people for crimes, not to solely arrest people for crimes for which they think they can get a conviction.
> Maybe the news paints it as a bunch of cowboys trying to restrict abortions.
They successfully restricted those abortions. They are trying to criminalize traveling to other states for abortions. And by abortions here we mean also medically necessary abortions.
> Drugs are almost completely decriminalized
This is simply not true. Like ... I dont think it is liberal media lying issue here. Maybe the specific subset of media you read is lying to you - which is way more likely to be conservative.
Sort of, yes. They are not restricted in any coastal cities though, the vast majority of Americans still have access to abortion.
The states I mentioned (CA, OR, WA, NY, and most other states too) have not restricted it. It's a few states in the south. These states/cities I mentioned are where most Americans actually live.
>This is simply not true.
I mean, have you driven through LA, SF, Seattle, or NY? You can watch people consuming and selling drugs 7 days a week in broad daylight. I am not relying on any news source for that information, I have lived it. Have you been assaulted or screamed at by someone high out of their mind on the street in SF? I have.
That does not remove the fact that conservatives are successfully restricting the abortion. Yes, they are trying to create more damage and enjoy the pain they cause. They also provably don't care about lives themselves - they are restricting healthcare in general and don't care about children.
The drugs in USA were not decriminalized. You lied.
They’re moving left too, just more slowly compared to the coasts. If you go issue by issue (god, guns, taxes) the only major shift for republicans has been same sex marriage, where they’ve moved significantly to the left. Democrats meanwhile have moved sharply to the left across the board: https://jabberwocking.com/if-you-hate-the-culture-wars-blame.... For example marijuana is fully legal in North Carolinian, and medical marijuana is legal all across the Deep South. But in California, the legislature passed (though Newsom vetoed, with an eye to his presidential prospects) a bill allowing cities to have government-sponsored drug injection sites.
It absolutely is. Even Trump didn’t oppose same sex marriage (when it was still illegal in several European countries) and also signed major legislation aimed at reducing incarceration: https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp. Drug prosecutions are handled primarily at the state level, and there has been a broad move to reduce such prosecution. Marijuana has been fully decriminalized in deep red states like Ohio and North Dakota. Does anyone even remember 2000? The big kerfuffle was covering up naked statutes. It was a vastly more conservative country (with far fewer drug overdoses).
>Yet life is better on pretty much every material metric you list.
Lack of housing and the subsequent high cost of housing is a serious issue. Taking steps to avoid people becoming homeless in the first place is extremely important. And has certainly become much, much worse. It is a large factor in the amount of addiction and street drug use.
What are drugs for? For most people, it's not as much chasing the high as pushing away the pain. Look at your own drinking for example (not necessarily you, dminor, but many readers). Mind-altering chemicals are overwhelmingly used in the US to numb oneself and push away the pain of daily living. Folks start with a little to take the edge off, dull the fear & give themselves a bit of mental space, not have to think about the bills, and then...