Your gun worship is killing you.
For what it’s worth, the majority of the nation doesn’t worship guns. But the very small minority that does, like… They worship them a lot.
This one is far more complicated than non-americans think. I’ve spoken to people outside the country, and they tend to only listen to the really dumb democrats when it comes to this issue.
You can’t close Pandora’s box. There are 393 million guns in the hands of civilians here. If you have a crazy neighbor with a gun, you kind of have to go get one yourself. That, or devise another method of viable self defense. The cops won’t help you, not in virtually any situation.
Better shoot him too, before he shoots you.
The other realistic option is that he shoots me empty handed. No one is going to take his gun and no one is going to save me in time.
Doesn’t seem like having more guns fixes that then.
Well I can’t go back in time to preemptively stop them from getting a gun in the first place, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for that situation.
Amend your holy constitution.
Won’t happen until you stop worshiping guns and the 2nd amendment.
“Just do something a large portion of the country would kill to stop from happening” isn’t a good solution, but you know that. If reason was going to work, we would have used it decades ago.
Funny, though, that there have been working methods of reducing the number of guns in civilized countries in the past.
But somehow every gun-toting American is totally convinced that reducing the amount of guns on the road is technically impossible,
Those countries don’t have the culty gun fetishism we do.
Your bi-Party system sux big d and I toxic to a real democracy
The irony of euros unloading in a thread that the people who most need to see it will never see, just to feel better about having unloaded, is peak self-serving uselessness.
Get the fuck off of Lemmy and go unload in conservative and Republican cesspits like the fox news vomment section, xhitter, OANN, not here where the vast fucking majority already fucking agree with you.
But you know you can’t do that because that would actually mean going for a swim in political sewage, which means doing actual work for your personal beliefs, and which also means you’re most definitely going to get backlash that you know you won’t get here.
TL;DR: non-US bitching about the US on Lemmy, where nearly all lemmy Americans already agree with them, are as functionally idiotic as the conservative white Americans they’re bitching about.
Mom says I get to post the “shit on the US” thread tomorrow!
Donald Trump is the new US President, and you’re responsible.
Gasoline prices are heavily subsidized in the US, the gas price you complain about is cheap compared to other countries.
The commodity price for gasoline right now looks to be about 2 USD per gallon. Retail gasoline in the USA is at least a dollar more due to taxes and markup.
Subsidies may play a role as well, but the taxes in some countries are extreme by American standards. My take on it is that a fuel tax is effectively neutral if it brings in enough revenue to pay for the road system.
What state do you live in that the road system is funded adequately? I never hear someone comment positively about the general state of road conditions.
Florida, with the tourist money and gas taxes all our roads and highways are solid. The great weather year round means they can maintain and build roads all the time non stop.
Adequately is a difficult determination.
Is it adequate if there are state maintained dirt roads? In some states, the state or county chooses not to pave all of their roads.
Is it adequately funded if they have potholes? Due to weather conditions, some states are notorious for potholes.
Is it adequately funded if the road gets washed out or carried away by flooding? California gets mudslides that take out sections of roads, other states get sinkholes or hurricanes/tornados destroying their roads
How long can one of these issues plague a road before we consider them underfunded?
My opinion is that the US has too many roads. Most roads are maintained by county or municipalities, and are funded through infinite growth model.
When a developer creates a new subdivision, they pave the roads. Once done, they usually relinquish these roads to the county/city who are responsible for maintaining the roads.
Typically maintenance is low until they require replacing. The cities and counties don’t save money or plan well for replacing these roads and rely on new tax revenue to fund replacing them.
It builds a slowly ballooning road maintenance cost that someone will have to pay. I believe someone made a video about this very fact. I don’t have the link handy
Any price lower than that required to compensate for all the negative externalities of both driving and using fossil fuels to do it still counts as subsidized.
A failure to set an excise tax on a product or service that offsets its externalities is not a subsidy. A lower tax rate than a competing product is arguably a subsidy.
I’m not aware of any modern societies that make a credible attempt to adjust the price of all or most goods and services to include their externalities. That sounds like a good idea in theory, but very difficult to implement in practice.
In NZ it’s roughly $2.50NZD per litre minimum, or $5.31USD per gallon. This is roughly 50% tax (it’s how we pay for roads, plus is subject to sales tax), so a bit over $2USD per gallon at the moment excluding tax.
Is it really $3 a gallon plus tax in the US right now?
I compare it to how I thought mobile phone calls in the US were super cheap, then found out people pay to receive calls, which was super weird to me. Where I live, my whole life it has never been the case that a normal residential connection would pay to receive a call, mobile or not.
Differences in how we do things make differences appear more than they are.
It’s $3/gal total including taxes here in Illinois right now.
I was in California last week and it was $4.50/gam total
That is about half of the fuel cost here in Sweden
Taxes throw things out because everyone does it different. What are the sans-tax prices?
I don’t know if anyone can really get you that number, because the tax isn’t clearly disclosed when you buy gasoline, it’s just included in the price; the taxes also vary widely between different states/counties/maybe cities too?
Edit: the federal tax is $0.184 per gallon
Huh, the US gets another layer more confusing. Tax is included in gas prices but not in anything else? How do the arguments for not including that tax in the price stack up when gas stations are already including it?
Even more annoying, the gas price really has 99/100ths tacked on, so the price is a cent more expensive because no one thinks of it.
Ie: $3/gal is really charged as $3.0099/gal
Tradition.
Gas prices are also the only retail prices that include tenths of a penny - specifically 9/10, as in all gas prices look like $x.xx9 such as $3.059
that’s work, so no
-Stores
That’s how
Ok apparently Illinois has a 39c per gallon gasoline tax, another 18c in federal, and another 6% or so on state sales tax, plus any regional sales tax. It’s unclear whether the sales tax applies to the gasoline tax (in NZ it does), but let’s assume it doesn’t. Then that’s $3 - 0.39 - 0.18 = $2.43 then remove 6% tax is 2.43/106*100 = $2.29
We can probably knock a bit more off because there is probably some regional/city sales tax but it should be the right ballpark.
It does seem we pay about the same for petrol, though from what I’ve been searching up, this is wildly different across states because states have much different ways of paying for roads (e.g. Hawai’i is mostly taxed at the pump where as Alaska has big taxes on oil extraction to keep taxes for residents low, including for roading).
Sales tax is either included already or not charged.
The posted price is the posted price, no additional taxes on top of it.
Although they add 99/100ths to the price, so $3.00/gal is really charged at $3.0099/gal.
Of course this gets rounded up 😒
I can, Spain only has federal tax and it’s 21% for anything premium like gasoline.
1.63€ per litre with taxes.
So 6.169€ per gallon with taxes.
Or 6.29$ per gallon post tax.
Or 5.2$ per gallon without tax.Literally more than double their price, and they complain so hard LMAO.
Roads aren’t the only societal cost of cars.
Fuel tax in the U.S. doesn’t even come close to paying for the road system. The federal fuel tax covers less than half of federal transportation spending. I don’t know about all of the states, but Wisconsin’s fuel tax covers only about 2/3 of the road spending. And, local streets get built with local property and income taxes.
The fuel tax doesn’t even cover the damage your car does to the road.
That’s probably not true, but hard to calculate.
The previous time I looked, which was a while ago, federal fuel tax revenue in the USA and federal highway expenditures were about equal. Since then, fuel tax revenue has fallen behind highway spending; the required increase to even it out would be modest in absolute terms - something like 15 cents per gallon. States each have their own taxes and budgets, of course.
As for the road damage each car causes, it increases (roughly) proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. Semi trucks and similar heavy commercial vehicles cause almost all of the traffic-induced road wear, and passenger cars contribute very little. It’s likely the fuel taxes paid for a passenger car (even a relatively large one) are several times its marginal impact on road maintenance.
The fuel tax isn’t enough to cover the damage to the environment and quality of life, though. That’s why taxes are that high in many other places. Same way cigarettes are taxed to help discourage use and to help cover the increased healthcare costs it puts on everyone
Fuel, and other car-related taxes (sometimes based on horsepower or engine displacement) in most countries in Europe were much higher than in the USA long before there was widespread concern about the environmental impact of cars.
Which is why I said “environment and quality of life” - they don’t want their cities dominated by cars (making life dangerous for pedestrians) and for cars to become a requirement for living. So taxes are added to discourage (not eliminate) driving and car ownership
But also, the mess of smog from exhaust and other impacts beyond climate change have been known since the first automobiles. Concerns about the ‘environment’ is more than greenhouse gasses.
The fuel tax in other countries primarily exists to make people use less fuel in order to save the world from global warming.
Yes, you really need to rewrite that constitution of yours and declaring something “unconstitutional” doesn’t win you an argument, it makes you look like a brainwashed idiot. Just saying.
America is the whole continent. You guys just fenced the worst part of it.
Drastically reduction of guns WILL save your kids lives at school. But not “muh outdated rights from centuries ago”.
Btw I’m not against guns, military and officers should have “easy” access to them.
This definitely won’t be a pile of horseshit from people never been there, believe everything they see on TV, and operate completely on stereotypes from various sources, sprinkled with the dumbest takes you ever heard, and a bunch of blaming capitalism like it’s the only nation that employs it.
In foreign countries, the people don’t always speak English or “American” and shouldn’t be expected to bow down to you.
American cars suck.
Kinda disappointed in this thread, was hoping to find things that Americans on Lemmy aren’t ready to hear. Everything here seems like the usual complains that most Americans on Lemmy and even Reddit already aware of.
For millions of United States Americans, the so called “American Dream” is achieved in Mexico. They’re often illegal immigrants. They often have mental health problems. They gentrify our cities and are entitled as fuck.
Pot calling kettle and all, but I do wish they’d go back to their own shithole country. They have demonized my country for decades and have weaponized the cartels to feed their own addictions. Most of the problems here can be tied directly to their humongous drug problems.
Yankee go home. The United Mexican States is tired of your shit.
I had no idea we had people illegally immigrating that much. Bet they’re the type to use the word “illegals” pejoratively.
And half of them won’t even bother learning Spanish. I’ll never give someone who immigrates due to hardship a hard time about learning the language, but privileged fucks who go to exploit a lower cost of living or whatever often just end up in expat bubbles and don’t know more than a few words of the local language even after years despite having that privilege of time/money/resources to learn it.
So are there any good ones? Learning Spanish and giving back to the community? Just curious. That’s what I plan to do when I move out of here, learn the language and do volunteer work, etc.
Spot on about the gentrification bit. Entire town populations have shifted from local people to the self called expats and snowbirds. Just look at Chelém, Mérida, San Miguel de Allende, Tulúm, Cancún and many many more including most upitty neighborhoods in México City (Condesa, Roma, San Angel).
Gun control works
