Amotea wrote:Could you eleborate on these two points, because nobody (myself included) here knows how it works exactly in the USA:
xavier wrote:
we do actually have quite a social safety net
How does it work?
The cynical answer is that each year dozens or hundreds of appropriations bills and amendments to bills and existing laws, are passed through Congress and signed into law, without anyone really paying attention to what we are spending on -- and a significant chunk of those bills and amendments are for the creation of, continuation of spending on, or increase/decrease in the amount spent on, a dizzying array of social programs.
While the average American does not mind spending for social programs to provide a hand-up, the fact is that many of these programs are redundant, inefficient, lack oversight, and worse yet, few know they exist, least of all the people who might need them. The reason I said this is the cynical answer above, is that most of these programs are created by elected Congresspersons for the sole reason of "bringing home the bacon" at election time. It doesn't matter that they are redundant, ineffcient or lack oversight -- to the particular representative in question, it's something that they can trumpet in November (second Tuesday after the first Monday in November is the official yearly election day in the US).
The practical upshot of this, is that the US federal government truly does fall over itself offering benefits to those who need them -- from generalized health care, to post-secondary educational aid and funding, to school lunches, pre-school programs such as Head Start, to Aid for Dependent Children, to Earned Income Tax Credits (which actually will *pay* those who made had no taxable income, an additional tax "refund"), and the list goes on and on (that's just a cursory brain dump). In America, you really do have to try to avoid getting assistance for just about whatever it might be you need help with -- free public education through high school is mandated, so no one can say they are denied an education; between food stamps and other Dept of Agriculture programs, no one goes hungry unless they choose to do so; public housing assistance, from help with rent/mortgage to actual full free housing, is offered to those who need it, so no one can say they truly are homeless unless they choose to be so; and this is all just the government programs that we all pay for out of our taxes. It doesn't include the vast assortment of private charitable organizations or the various philanthropic ventures, trusts and efforts funded by the deep pocketbooks of those such as Bill Gates.
xavier wrote:
the primary difference is who gets to control the redistribution of wealth: the individual who earns the money, or the government.
Do you mean the rich individuals support the not so wealthy?
The United States has a graduated (progressive -- altho some might call it 'regressive'
) income tax system -- the more you make, the higher your taxes. Up to some amount of taxable income, you pay zero taxes, and then tax begins at 14% and limits out at 31% -- this Wikipedia article has a good discussion of it (it also includes a chart showing the relative expenditures of that tax revenue at the federal level -- note that Health and Human Services is the largest portion of spending in the federal budget):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_i ... ted_States
Note that at the top of the income scale, those individual make up a smaller portion of the percentage of the income distribution, yet pay more as a percentage of the total tax burden. As you move down the income scale, the trend inverts, whereby those at the bottom of the income scale support less of the tax burden than their makeup of the income distribution would suggest. Furthermore, those at the lower end of the income scale are more and more eligible for all of the assistance programs I mentioned above, so yes, those with higher income truly do support those with lower (or no) income.
