I am a Digital Nomad, which means that I live temporarily and sequentially in several countries. We hang out in Brest, Belarus in the summer, though we do travel around Europe during those months. We are about to go wander around SE Asia for this winter and spring. In May we will probably go visit Alanya, Turkey (though that could change) and if we like it, lease a BOO (base of operations) there. There are a few dozen other countries on that list of potential places to visit or temporarily reside. No place in the U.S. is high on the list. That is also true on Nomadlist.com, which generally only ranks New York, L.A. and sometimes Los Vegas on its 100 most popular destinations list. Some of that is because the U.S. is just beastly expensive. A $3,500 budget in the U.S. is really a struggle. Over much of the world, that buys an affluent lifestyle. However, some of it, also, is just because the U.S. is broken and, though it is my home country, it is a place to be avoided.
What do I mean by broken? Well, I will explore that in this blog over time. It is central to why I am a DN outside of the U.S. rather than within it. It isn't broken in just one way. It is broken in lots of ways. And the politics of the country makes it hopeless to try to fix it. I know, I tried. And to be honest, with my blogs I hope to, over time, 'fix' it for some Americans, even if nobody can fix America. So, here I point point out a few reasons.
The U.S. is the only significant country that taxes its citizens no matter where they live or where they earn their money. There is a $105,900 Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, so, it is not a serious problem for middle class expats. But, if you aspire to success, it seems more than a little sharp that the U.S. can take up to 37% of your income without providing you with any meaningful services. For a fair number of Americans, that has become their practical reality and many of them are renouncing their U.S. citizenship.
Also, and this is very important, there is a requirement that you spend at least 330 days in a foreign country in order to qualify for the exclusion. Essentially, they are encouraging you to stay away. Additionally, the U.S. charges a repatriation tax if foreign income is brought back home. This is particularly a problem for foreign income of U.S. corporations. When these companies consider where to place new facilities, this repatriation tax pretty much throws the U.S. out of the running. So, and there is more, the U.S. tax code is a complete mess that Congress can't seem to fix and every time they try, they just make it more complicated.
The U.S. has law-abiding people around the world who wait in line for a decade or longer to enter the U.S. legally and, meanwhile, other foreign nationals sneak over the border or don't go home when their authorization expires. These people are now measured in tens of millions and Federal, State and Local government officials are fighting tooth and nail to keep the status quo and, if anything, facilitate the unauthorized aliens. This is morally repugnant and, also, counterproductive to the nations best interest.
The Federal government provides billions of USD to support research in academia and facilitates loans for students while keeping their hands off of the cost of a university education. This is while revenue per student at most Universities is over $50K per year. OK, let's say that a professor has a payroll cost of $120K, there are 15 students in the class and the room costs $30K per year. The direct costs are $10,000. Now, there will undoubtedly be overhead, but that isn't even close to justifying the prevailing tuition rates. How is this happening when Student:Teacher ratios are almost always under 10:1? Because Professors do very little teaching. The politicians are busy talking about student loan forgiveness for the already scammed, and this debilitating debt is a problem. This debt cannot even be discharged in bankruptcy. However, most of the effort should be put into figuring out how to stop the scam and that is not being talked about at all. The U.S. should be proud of many of its universities. But that doesn't justify condoning the extortion of immoral tuition on the backs of young Americans who just want to build a good life for themselves and their families.
The U.S. pays 30% more for its health care than any other country and double the average for the OECD countries. If it got the best result by far, that may be justifiable, but the World Health Organization rates the health care in the U.S. well below the best. While most of the health care costs are hidden in the cost of goods and in lower wages, politicians are far more interested in whether the health care system should or should not be run by the government than just lowering the costs to something similar to the best health care programs in the world.
The U.S. educational system is hopelessly broken. Children graduate from high school barely able to read and completely incompetent in math. However, they are quite proficient in social justice issues, delivered in a politically biased way by teachers who are overwhelmingly supportive of one political party over the other. Once I attended a precinct caucus of the Democratic party and advocated that the Party should have a plank supporting a law that required 60% of the dollars allocated to education nationally must be spent IN the classroom. That means teacher, room, furniture, books and other direct teaching aids. The idea was so popular that I was elected delegate to the District Convention to pitch the idea. This would have lowered the cost of public education by more than $1,000 per year per student. When I got to the District Convention, my proposal wasn't on the agenda. When I asked the Convention Chair why, she said it must have gotten missed. When I asked her to put it on, she told me that the agenda was set and couldn't be changed. Uh huh.
The list could go on and on and I will expound on this topic over time. But the important point is that even if the serious flaws in the American system are voiced to a wide audience, the system really doesn't allow for remediation. That America is broken should be self-evident. That it is hopelessly broken is is only obvious to those who have attempted to fix a part of it. Even then, those people think that the confounding of solutions is just peculiar to their problem rather than pervasive. As you will see here and in my more formal blog http://michaelwferguson.blogspot.com, there are political divisions that are actually ideological in nature much of the time that will eventually break the U.S. into three pieces and probably, by the time it is done, into five or more pieces. How that will happen will also be interesting to consider which I will do here and on michaelwferguson.
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