Worst Problems in United States

Solution Preview

Let's take a closer look:

The Worst Problems in United States...

1. Nuclear weapons: 6,000 nuclear weapons ready to annihilate the world. People have forgotten about it, but they are still operational and ready to fire. Russia has exactly the same amount of nuclear weapons ready to fire. They are not currently pointed towards the USA, but it takes about one minute to retarget them. A small mistake on either side could cause the destruction of the entire USA (and most of the world) in less than an hour. In 1999 the United States military spending was 2.5 times the total spending of Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and Japan, a staggering 276 billion dollars.

2. Guns: 200 million guns (100 times the Iraqi army) and 35,000 people killed every year (the equivalent of many years of civil war in Yugoslavia). Firearm deaths per 100,000 people (CDCP, Bureau Of Justice Statistics, 1998): 14.24 in the U.S., 4.31 in Canada, 0.7 in Holland, and only 0.41 in England (where not even police carry guns). Which means that if you live in the U.S., you are 40 times more likely to die of gunshots than if you live in Britain. Murders by handguns (1996): 15 in Japan, 30 in Britain, 211 in Germany, 9,390 in the United States. Which means if you live in the U.S., you are 300 times more likely to be murdered than in you live in Britain. In 1999 USA citizens were certainly reassured that "only" 6,000 workers were killed by colleagues in the workplace, a 10% drop from 1994's figure of 6,600... but still just about twice the number of people killed by the Serbs in the Kosovo war. The scariest data are about the other 25,000 deaths by handgun: they are suicides and accidents. In the U.S. a child a day is killed by a handgun. If you define "terrorist" as "causing terror in the public", the N.R.A., the organization which protects guns, can claim to be, de facto, the deadliest terrorist organization in the world. It is not true that the right to bear guns is written in the Constitution: the Constitution talks about guns that were available at the end of the 18th century, and was written before the US developed a true army. It makes no reference to "every future evolution of guns". Therefore, the only guns that are constitutionally legal are the ones that were available two hundred years ago.

3. No universal health insurance: 44 million citizens without medical insurance (1999), or one every six citizens, which makes the US the last in the developed world, lower than Russia, China, India and even all of South America. Only a few African countries fare worse. Every year thousands of USA citizens die because they didn't have the money to cure themselves, and thousands turn into criminals because they can't pay hospital bills. If you have dual citizenship, you can always fly back to your country of origin and get good and free health care. But for most USA citizens a simple sport injury is enough to ruin their entire life. Whatever system the USA has right now (an absurdly complicated patchwork of benefits and providers that makes you miss the bureaucracy of communism), it is the most expensive in the world and one of the most ridicule failures in the history of medical care: the World Health Organization ranked the US only 37th among world's countries in the quality of health coverage (2000). It is embarassing that in the year 2000 the wealthiest country in the world still cannot offer free health care to all of its citizens.

4. Education: the USA educational system is the most expensive on earth and one of the worst in the developed world. Scores of USA citizens with dual citizenship move back to their countries of origins when their children turn 6 or 7: they can get a much better education and even for free, and in a country where kids don't carry guns into school. It is embarassing that in the year 2000 the richest country in the world still cannot offer GOOD and FREE education to all children of the USA.

5. A democracy under attack on so many fronts. See Reform the electoral system at ...