Europeans have the biggest sense of entitlement. It only took us a little over 200 years to have the largest economy in the world, meanwhile Europe is only just catching up. They pretend to not need us for anything, but I wonder what would happen if we pulled all our troops out from our installations over there.
Well your economic development started with you lending a shit ton of money to Germany (and other European countries) after WW2 for reparations. Also, it's a shitty measurement that tells you almost nothing. We do not need your troops, you have about 60k stationed in all of Europe and they are not going to save us from anything serious, they just commit warcrimes through drones they control from there anyway.
Unfortunately for the USA, there are so many different things wrong that are quite embarrassing for having such a huge economy. It's quite a pitty that only very few of the flaws are repeatedly pointed out on this sub.
Workers' rights are a mess. Workers' unions are always squashed, workers don't get a say in what the company they work for is supposed to do. No fucking paid sick days, no paid vacation, no paid parental leave and you're legally not guaranteed to get your job back after parental leave. The American people are the most overworked people. Inequality is soaring due to a number of reasons. As an example, schools only get access to funds through the taxes of the district they're in. Therefore, poor neighborhoods create bad schools which as a result creates a vicious cycle. Americans are the leading nation in terms of obesity. The government's response to Corona was embarrassing thus far. Institutionalized racism. Unsupervised and unregulated lobbyism. A bi-partisan system, not focused on improvement but on keeping power. One of the worst press freedom in the Western World. A huge gap between rich and poor for the Western world. I could probably list many more things with more time but you get the idea. I personally know very few people who would like to live in the USA.
It's okay that your country is flawed "insight is the first step to recovery". Nobody here is saying their country is perfect because such a country does not exist. We Germans have numerous problems, too. Our internet services are incredibly expensive while simultaneously being pretty bad measured by EU standard, our main railroad company is pretty shitty, we have problems with right wing extremists in our military and police, we have very corrupt politicians in our most voted party, digitalisation is a joke etc.
We don't need the USA. We're not entitled, we know our weaknesses. It's just the fact the for years Americans bragged and were always like "America First" "We're the greatest nation in the world" I mean hell, the NBA champions are called "World champions" by you. It's just nice to sometimes get back at these annoying patriots.
While I agree that there a lot of people who are quite annoying, the entire first half of your third paragraph is almost completely wrong. Meanwhile, it's been proven that for public school systems, pumping money into schools does not improve performance. We've been dumping money into the school system since the 70's, and yet test scores haven't improved. The response to COVID was abysmal, for sure, but the thing about America is that we give a lot of power to the states. The Federal government is already very limited in power, and it doesn't help that this past election cycle was one of the most divisive in our history. Institutionalized racism over here is heavily exaggerated. I won't bother going over the rest in that paragraph because I don't have the energy to, and you're right about most of it.
Although a bit of a correction. There is a difference between annoying patriots and nationalists. The people touting "America First" and all that bullshit are nationalists, not patriots.
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u/PastaPastrami Mar 13 '21
Europeans have the biggest sense of entitlement. It only took us a little over 200 years to have the largest economy in the world, meanwhile Europe is only just catching up. They pretend to not need us for anything, but I wonder what would happen if we pulled all our troops out from our installations over there.