What does it matter if France has high taxes if the people are happy and able to afford things and have healthcare?
Second, I'd hardly call France a model for the US. They are not a world power, and as you know, most of our money goes to defense.
Why do we need to be the world's police force? And that moeny isn't being spent on defense, it's being spent on offense.
Everyone seems to want to follow other countries, but ignore the inherent failings of them, and ignore how much smaller they all are.
And what is France's big failing? That they can't bend the world to their whims to ensure a steady supply of cheap oil?
Compare the US to Russia or China, not France or the UK.
You can't compare the US to Russia, it's a vast wasteland and during the cold war we intentionally ruined their economy by fooling them into thinking we had way more weapons than we did so they collapsed from all their defense spending.
And you can't compare the US to China. They have 2 billion people that are widely spread out and their problem isn't communism. In fact, they don't have a problem. They're doing just fine as an economy and they're going to surpass us in 10-20 years probably, seeing as they manufacture just about everything. Then the cheap labor that US businesses relied on will dry up and we'll be fucked because we have no manufacturing here at home. In fact we've started making stuff in Mexico because it's cheaper than China, but Mexico's a lot smaller so they'll grow even faster if we start relying on them for everything.
You want Jam? You get 1 choice, it's Jam. You want peanut butter? You have it. 1 choice.
I had someone in Cuba email me about buying something from me and I had to turn them down because of the embargo. If they have only one choice of jam, it's not their government's doing, it's the trade embargo preventing other businesses from shipping the stuff into their country to sell it.
Bill Gates lucked out with Microsoft
Bill Gates was ivy league and had money.
Jobs lucked out with computers being what they were and was in the right place at the right time
Jobs stole Xerox's designs before Bill could. He didn't play by the rules, he broke them. And that's pretty much the formula for success in the US. Look at wall street.
I hope to one day retire a millionaire
And that's why people vote conservative. Everyone has that pipe dream. "I don't want to raise taxes on the wealthy, because one day that might be me!"
You shouldn't throw around the term slave-labor lightly. Slave labor is what's happening in Qatar, with people working in massively unsafe conditions, being not allowed to visit their family after the earthquake in nepal, for almost no money a day, where people die in the course of the job without recourse every day.
Which is exactly what the US was like during the great depression before we had unions and OSHA and a minimum wage. All things conservatives would gladly abolish if they could so we can get back to the good old days.
What we have is a class of people who in a materialistic society, think a TV and a cell phone is "necessary" to survive and can't afford it.
A cellphone is necessary. Try getting a job without having a phone number to give out so they can call you if you're hired. And try finding a pay phone when you need to make an important call.
and it's foolish to expect a country as big as the US, with almost 300 million people, to all live in a comfortable apartment and have jobs that afford them all of life's luxuries.
We could afford it. Not all of life's luxuries mind you, but a cell phone and a tv is far from all of life's luxuries. And if people didn't have TV's or internet then they wouldn't be able to stay informed of what their government is doing.