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Count my blessings?
I just wrote this as a reply to a comment on a previous entry. To be honest, I didn't expect it to get this long. But I got a little carried away.
So I figure it's worth putting up as a stand-alone post. I might expand it a little; we'll see.
I was responding to the suggestion that it's odd to complain about the price of gas (or petrol, for you Brits) rising to $5 per gallon, since Finland (and most of the rest of the world) has always paid a considerably higher price for gasoline than we have in the US. My reply:
I'm quite aware that the price of gas in the US has always been kept artificially low compared to the rest of the world. But I think that's more than counterbalanced by the unnaturally high prices we pay for health care and health insurance. Not to mention daycare; I believe that you get good quality daycare for young children in Finland? And I'm pretty sure the same applies to Europe.
Here in the US you'd be lucky to find daycare for under $500 (approximately 400 euros) per month, anywhere within 100 miles of a major city.
There's also the fact that we're basically forced to work longer hours, get comparatively little time to spend with our families (although I will confess that Japan probably has it worse than the US in that regard), and the general tension of living without a social safety net. Do you have a lot of homeless people on the streets in Finland, begging for food? I suspect not.
You also have elections that you can have some confidence aren't rigged by the powers that be. You have leaders who, presumably, are in some way answerable to the people. In other words, you have a viable democracy.
We do not.
I'd gladly pay $10 per gallon for gas, if I could get those other things. And I'd probably be able to afford it.
Come to think of it, Finland is only three times the size of Ohio, so I suspect that you also don't need to do as much driving as we do. For example, I work approximately 100 km from where I live, because I cannot afford a house in the same STATE as my workplace. And yet our combined household income is above the US median, and far too high to qualify for any sort of federal or state aid.
The average family in this country has nearly $10,000.00 in credit card debt, thanks primarily to predatory lending practices and a government which legislates entirely at the whim of Big Business. My family has only about $1,400.00 in credit card debt, which places us far above the average again. When remortgaging companies call us, they're always amazed that our debt is so low. Because that's one of their primary tools, you see; people are so desperately mired in high-interest debt (rates in the high 20's are not uncommon) that they'll try ANYTHING to get free. And as a result, they're easy victims for other credit card companies and remortgaging scam artists.
It's not a pretty picture.
So I figure it's worth putting up as a stand-alone post. I might expand it a little; we'll see.
I was responding to the suggestion that it's odd to complain about the price of gas (or petrol, for you Brits) rising to $5 per gallon, since Finland (and most of the rest of the world) has always paid a considerably higher price for gasoline than we have in the US. My reply:
I'm quite aware that the price of gas in the US has always been kept artificially low compared to the rest of the world. But I think that's more than counterbalanced by the unnaturally high prices we pay for health care and health insurance. Not to mention daycare; I believe that you get good quality daycare for young children in Finland? And I'm pretty sure the same applies to Europe.
Here in the US you'd be lucky to find daycare for under $500 (approximately 400 euros) per month, anywhere within 100 miles of a major city.
There's also the fact that we're basically forced to work longer hours, get comparatively little time to spend with our families (although I will confess that Japan probably has it worse than the US in that regard), and the general tension of living without a social safety net. Do you have a lot of homeless people on the streets in Finland, begging for food? I suspect not.
You also have elections that you can have some confidence aren't rigged by the powers that be. You have leaders who, presumably, are in some way answerable to the people. In other words, you have a viable democracy.
We do not.
I'd gladly pay $10 per gallon for gas, if I could get those other things. And I'd probably be able to afford it.
Come to think of it, Finland is only three times the size of Ohio, so I suspect that you also don't need to do as much driving as we do. For example, I work approximately 100 km from where I live, because I cannot afford a house in the same STATE as my workplace. And yet our combined household income is above the US median, and far too high to qualify for any sort of federal or state aid.
The average family in this country has nearly $10,000.00 in credit card debt, thanks primarily to predatory lending practices and a government which legislates entirely at the whim of Big Business. My family has only about $1,400.00 in credit card debt, which places us far above the average again. When remortgaging companies call us, they're always amazed that our debt is so low. Because that's one of their primary tools, you see; people are so desperately mired in high-interest debt (rates in the high 20's are not uncommon) that they'll try ANYTHING to get free. And as a result, they're easy victims for other credit card companies and remortgaging scam artists.
It's not a pretty picture.