Brandi Slavich
"When I look at the world today and the strong winds of technological change and global competition, it makes me nervous. Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that while these forces gather strength, Americans seem unable to grasp the magnitude of the challenges that face us. Despite the hyped talk of China's rise, most Americans operate on the assumption that the U.S. is still No. 1” said Fareed Zakaria in an article published in TIME magazine on March 3, 2011. America was once a great country and we use to be on top; however we are not on top anymore.
Let me begin with reminding you that America was once one of the greatest countries in the world, in the 1950s and 1960s. Our great history has been engraved into our heads. We had a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies. We got through the Civil Rights Movement. NASA founded and we landed on the moon because people still believed in science. We were also cultural leaders of the time and the technological leaders of the entire planet. No one produced more cars, airplanes, locomotives, medicines, bombs, or bridges than America back then. People used to come to America for freedom and opportunity but America has changed. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one; America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
For a start, America’s education has fallen from where is used to be. According to an article entitled “U.S. Students Still Lag Behind Foreign Peers, Schools +Make Little Progress in Improving Achievement” from the Huffington Post on July 23, 2012 in an International Exam, American students ranked 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading; while only 6% of U.S. students performed at the advanced level. While the U.S. is improving, progress within the United States is middling. Although 24 countries trail the U.S. rate of improvement, another 24 countries appear to be improving at a faster rate. According to an article from News One on April 24, 2013 one in four Americans are failing to earn a high school diploma on time and the United States is lagging other countries in the percentage of young people who complete college. In addition, in 2009, the U.S. spent more than $10,000 per student, ranging from about $6k in Utah to about $18k in New York; It resulted in Utah's high school graduation rate being higher than New York's.
Conversely, health care in America is overpriced and underperforming. According to an article from “How Stuff Works” website by Molly Edmonds the United States spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product on health care every year than any other country; yet, the United States ranks 37th out of 191 countries in the health care systems. Our infant mortality rates are even higher than over 40 other countries. Additionally, a flawed pharmaceutical system allows drug manufacturers to pay smaller manufacturers to delay production of generic versions of their drug, thus allowing them to drive up the cost of their own, a practice called “pay-for-delay.”The lack of a medical marketplace allows care providers to generate their own pricing, without oversight. The result is that Americans spend far more than peers on health care, and the quality is not proportionally better.
In a like manner our government is also not funding services that we all depend on, like our National Weather Service (NWS). “The problem is that both objective and subjective comparisons indicate that the U.S. global model is number 3 or number 4 in quality, resulting in our forecasts being noticeably inferior to the competition,” according to Cliff Mass, professor in atmospheric sciences, “I have been working on this issue for several decades (with little to show for it).” Later he explains that it is due to the U.S. having inadequate computer power available for numerical weather prediction, inferior data assimilation, NWS weather prediction effort has been isolated and has not taken advantage of the research community, and the NWS approach to weather related research has been ineffective and divided, along with lack of leadership. Additionally, according to Thomas Hamill from ABC7 “Typically when we increase the resolution, the change permits us to notice deficiencies in the model that we didn’t worry about before. Why don’t we just buy data from the Europeans and be done with it? Save the US taxpayers a lot of money, right? Well, for a few reasons. First is that our government has an open-data access policy. Your taxpayer money paid to buy the supercomputers, the satellites and radars, paid our salaries, and the US government then makes sure that the weather data is freely available to all. ECMWF may share data with the NWS for internal use, but the US government can’t then share that data with the rest of you. Weather prediction is an incredibly complicated enterprise. NOAA deploys satellites, weather balloons, radar data, and more. Our data assimilation algorithms synthesize this data. Our models and our supercomputers crank out the numerical guidance 24/7. Our forecasters are always on the job and bust their humps in ways you could not believe when severe weather is on the way. All of this costs taxpayers pennies a day. And the data is free to all and free to you without advertising.”
In other words, our interventionist policies create a never-ending supply of enemies, forcing us to waste money on a strong military. The United States has a history of meddling in the affairs of other nations. The U.S. helped establish Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and sent money to Afghanistan to fight Soviet Communism in the 1970’s. By interfering in the business of others, America has created many enemies. Saddam Hussein became a despotic dictator leading to both Desert Storm and the Iraq war. People who lost family members to weapons purchased with American money in Afghanistan grew to become Al Queda terrorists, ultimately responsible for attacks on the United States, such as 9/11. Now the U.S. is considering helping Syria and possibly putting a no fly zone there; which would make Russia mad because they have an alliance with Syria. Ultimately there is a potential for another World War III. According to an article entitled “America’s staggering defense budget, in charts” from the Washington Post on January 7, 2013 the United States remains the world’s dominant military power; however, we spent more on our military than the next 13 nations combined in 2011. This is all tax money that would not need to be collected and spent if we would stop interfering in other nations’ business. Countries such as The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and others typically keep to themselves, and thus live peacefully without an ultra-expensive military.
To tell the truth, not only is our government putting us in danger but also is slowly taking away our freedoms as well. The NSA has been spying on hundreds of thousands of their own citizens and other countries’. The U.S. government has been looking at our emails, monitoring our phone calls, our internet use, and much more; which is against the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. In a like manner, the FBI has developed the capability to remotely turn on Android handsets and laptop microphones to record your conversations."The FBI hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things,’ said the former FBI official. Not only is our government overstepping their boundaries but on Thursday June 13, 2013 they went one step further by violating another amendment. A law passed stating that protesters are now prohibited in front of the Supreme Court; which just happens to go against our first amendment. According to an article on reason.com “We all have the need and right to be left alone. We all know that we function more fully as human beings when no authority figure monitors us or compels us to ask for a permission slip. This right comes from within us, not from the government.”
Furthermore, European countries have mandatory paid vacation while the United States does not. The typical U.S. worker at a private company gets ten days of paid vacation and six paid holidays per year, which is remarkably less than what Europe employees receive. A recent study showed, France comes in at number 1 mandating their employees a minimum of thirty paid days off per year. The U.K. comes in second place with a total of twenty paid days off, followed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway with twenty five paid days off per year. This, too, is a matter of law. The European Union in 1993 required all member countries to set a minimum of twenty paid vacation days per year. Additionally, John Schmitt, a senior economist with CEPR and one of the authors of the report, said that even when U.S. workers have paid time off available, they don't always take it. Many may feel they don't have enough job security to risk being out for a period even if they are entitled to the time, he said.
Not to mention, even when we are working we are still lagging behind when it comes to our internet speed. Would our work time be cut or even become more productive if we had faster internet? Probably. According to data from Ookla, which runs Speedtest.net, "the US places below dozens of countries, including Latvia, Moldova, Andorra, Estonia, and Uruguay. Asian and European countries appear to be leading the pack with Hong Kong, Singapore, Romania, South Korea, and Sweden snapping up the top five spots, respectively. Ookla based its download speed results on millions of tests of consumer download speeds from across the globe. It calculates the rolling average of the data in Mbps, or megabit per second, in 30-day periods. Currently, Hong Kong has a whopping speed of 71.22 Mbps, while the US reaches just 20.74. One of the reasons the US ranks lower than so many other countries is because of its size and lack of Internet infrastructure. There are still parts of the US where the Internet is slow, intermittent, or just available via dial-up"
All-in-all, even though we have been influenced to believe that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world when ultimately we are not, but we used to be. Our education is in the middle compared to the rest of the world. The U.S. health care is overpriced when the quality is not better than other countries. The U.S. creates many enemies like Al Queda and Saddam Hussein by interfering with other countries business. Our government is taking away our freedom from right under our noses and we don't have mandatory paid vacation time like European countries. The reasons above, in addition to others, are why we rank behind Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Canada, England, Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Ireland, and several others in the Successful Societies Scale. Once we overcome American Exceptionalism, we can begin to identify the problems that plague our society in an effort to improve ourselves.
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