I think this post from Reddit bears reading given the context of this thread:
[–]one_lucky_expat
1452 points 7 years ago*
I had the luxury of marrying a beautiful British girl in 2011 and by extension successfully "got out". Over the past year we lived in both countries and had to make the very real decision as to which country was best for our future and the future of a family someday. For two people who aren't rich, the United Kingdom is, hands down, a better country to live in for quality of life.
You may think that some of these responses are overblowing how volatile the political climate has become here. You may think that people are dealing merely with the annoyances of being surrounded by those that they disagree with who have become resoundingly vocal over the last few years. However, their grievances are pretty spot on.
I spent my last ten years in the US living in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas and the midwest Bible belt. My family is very conservative and religious. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Bible camps were the stuff of my youth and continue in their house to this day. Like many Redditors, I am politically progressive and non-religious. Since 2008, the political climate has become so divisive that I can't even speak any sort of opinion to my family without causing a fight. One particularly nasty argument over torture practically led to me being disowned by them. And I can never come out to them as an atheist. Politics didn't always used to be such a touchy subject, but ever since Obama came into office the right-wing has gone completely insane. Living in England where my views are mainstream and religion plays practically no factor in daily life is like breathing a breath of fresh air after constantly being the dissenting opinion (who can't even voice one anymore) in these highly conservative areas.
But how does it affect daily life and where the US is heading? These opinions would just be annoyances if they did not have a profound effect on how we live and how my family will live in the future. This is the practical, day-to-day realm that you must tread in when you have serious options on the table about where you want to settle. I'll use DFW, Texas as an example of how politicians here have an enormous amount of power on our daily life and profoundly affected which country we chose to live in.
In the DFW area, there is expected to be something like 8 million new residents over the next ten years. The air quality is already so bad that as a kid growing up in 1998 we would have "ozone days" where we couldn't go outside on certain days due to air quality concerns. On a sunny day there is a perpetual haze. We had a record breaking drought last summer killing 20% of state trees, burning an entire state park, and had temperatures over 100 degrees for something like forty days straight. Yet governor Rick "damned" Perry, and the party that so dominates government here, deny global warming and don't follow federal EPA quidelines regulating emissions because the "Texas Clean Air Act" (lol) "works" (scientifically speaking we have some of the worst air in the country). There is virtually no public transport in the DFW area, and what there is, the DART line, is so woefully lacking that I wouldn't even consider it an option. You HAVE to drive. The roads aren't great, the most popular vehicles are trucks and SUVs, and traffic is already terrible.
To solve the infrastructure problem of 8 million new residents in ten years, the government has decided to... build more lanes! No real investment in any kind of permanent, long lasting solution. No acknowledgement that Texans are now completely at the mercy of inevitably rising gas prices. Which very Texan industry do you think funds their campaigns? Politicians are so in bed with fracking companies here that we have fracking operations and natural gas drilling on city property, in city parks, next to schools... with little to no resistance or a second glance at consequences. Our politicians are so corrupt that they changed a scientific report on the effects of the Gulf Oil Spill, omitting key facts because they "disagreed" with them, leading the authors to withdraw their names from the report and issue a damning statement on censorship.
So if we moved to Texas we would both need cars, have to drive in traffic every day, need to live in a polluted environment, put up with polluters buying our policy makers, and spread our ass cheeks and take it as gas keeps going up.
So transportation sucks. What about kids someday? What kind of education would they get? Well, their education would largely depend on where we lived, which would largely depend on what our salaries would be. This is because Texas schools are mostly funded by municipal taxes. There is no state income tax in Texas. Budget cuts have largely gutted the state's education fund, a fund which is far below national average with far below average performance numbers. Governor Rick "Goddamn" Perry, refuses to even acknowledge that there is a problem and call a special session on education, brazenly ignoring facts and statistics once again. It should be noted that Texas is the state where the school board approved biased textbooks that de-emphasized or cut out "liberal" contributions to American history like Cesar Chavez, the civil rights movement, and Thomas Jefferson. Instead, they emphasized groups like the National Rifle Association, distorted facts like claiming the US was a country founded on Christianity, and changed words like "capitalism" to "free enterprise". In schools they can teach creationism alongside evolution and our sex ed is abstinence only despite having one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. When I was a teenager I had to look up how to use a condom online.
So that's the kind of education my kids would get if they grew up here. One with very little investment (unless you're wealthy, then you can be like my parents and complain about your municipal taxes that make sure your kids don't go to school in a shithole) and one with right-wing politics presented as education in a classroom.
What about the working environment? In the states we won't get free healthcare and will have to look for jobs that give us those benefits, or else pay up to the insurance companies each month. In the states we may get the average of ten days vacation a year, but probably less than that because we are young and just starting our careers and everyone wants a job. We can get hired and fired at will with very little consequence to employers. And we can expect that these conditions will not change anytime soon but will probably get worse in a stagnant economy.
The sad thing is that most people in Texas and the Midwest support these policies and the dissenting voices are brutally gerrymandered out of the political process every ten years. My district in Texas is so heavily Republican that the Democrats didn't even run a House candidate in 2010. The amount of money and corruption in our government perpetuates this cycle. Nothing is going to change and the political rhetoric is at levels I have never seen before; levels where one party decides that it will just change the reality instead of react to prevent the real problems that this state will face in the next few decades. The other party can do whatever the hell it wants because what are you going to do, vote in Rick Santorum? These are the practical realities that we had to look at. Unfortunately we don't all have the option to move to Portland or San Francisco.
The UK is by no means perfect, but it was our choice of where we wanted to live long-term. We will gladly pay higher taxes for the ability to have free healthcare, not own a car, and live somewhere that is not so polluted. We get generous amounts of paid time off where we can travel or do whatever we want with. We don't have to worry about politicians and political spin undermining our kids' education. The government here has elements of corruption but the problems with it can't even be compared to what we see in the states. Social issues and religion that are so grating in the US are non-factors abroad.
I think the US will decline in the next few decades, especially as oil prices go up. The average American will have no defense from forfeiting larger and larger chunks of their paycheck to fill up their gas tank. A lot of the young generation is crippled by student loan debt; spending their money on payments at the expense of setting themselves up for the future. Our workers are becoming less globally competitive yet we are dumping massive amounts of our tax dollars into costly wars; wars that both political parties perpetuate. The infrastructure is already in decline, the government has been bought out by special interests, the media distorts everything, police can't be trusted, laws are passed without the backing of science and reason, and the country is becoming increasingly undemocratic. The United States will reap what it has sown. The sad part is that these problems aren't even on the average person's radar.
Leaving was a pretty easy decision.
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[–]thisamericanlife
166 points 7 years ago
You say you will pay a lot more in taxes in the UK. Over the holidays while I was back in Texas from the UK, I worked the maths with some of my family members. The UK basic rate is 20% not including personal allowance and other credits. If you make less than £35K it appears to be a lot compared with what you might pay in the states. I asked some of my family members who would fall under the 35K tax band and they say they pay 16% federal taxes. BUT, comparing tax rates is very deceiving. They have to pay for healthcare (~$4K a year for a $5K deductible for their family + child, smaller deductible can rise up to $10K+ a year) There is no public transport so transportation costs in the DFW area (car payment and a cheap used car, repairs, fuel $2,000+ average) These are MANDATORY costs for transportation because there are no alternatives unlike in the UK.
So quick maths: US: 35K salary - SS + FedTax = $5330 tax Healthcare equivalent to the UK provider (NHS), there are no 'no-deductible' plans in the US I believe. Anyway a 'good' plan for a family in 2009 $13,375 (Kaiser Family foundation study) Car $3000+ Total tax rate if taking into account things provided for free or subsidised in the UK = $21705 = 62% tax rate
UK: 35K salary - NI(same as SS) + HMRC = £8,837.64 Healthcare free (well except £7 for any prescription filled) Transport (depends where you live by £500-3000 a year) Total max tax in the UK = £11837.64 = 33% tax rate
(the top end of the pay scale for each country the trends reverse, the UK you are taxed harder the more you make (ie 50% of all income over 150K) and in the US I have heard stories of millionaires paying at tax rates lower than their secretaries.)
So when I hear my conservative relatives say they don't want to pay those high 'socialist' tax rates like Europe. I give them a friendly smile and think of their 62% real tax rate. :)
So, the poster covered a lot of topics, but the point I wanted to make is a lot of those issues, back in 2011, have essentially exasperated. Instead of addressing very real, very fundamental issues that affects all of us, the Conservative elements in this country have doubled down, elected an insane clown, and are thumbing their collective noses at the world while ignoring the reality that's unfolding around them.
Yes. Leftists are crazy when it comes to identity politics, but Conservative are crazy when it comes to
existence. It's no contest, and it's the reason(s) why I vote Democrat.
- Doc
