America!!!

America the Beautiful!

I had an opportunity to travel through Northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island over the last week.  

The Americans do know how to build highways! The ones we travelled, especially the ones in Vermont, cut through gorgeous scenery and were very well-maintained. Everywhere there were stunning tree-lined mountain vistas that were uninterrupted by any development whatsoever. Bravo America!

What of America itself?

We stayed in Rhode Island for a week. The weather was awesome. The beaches were not overcrowded and they were very clean. 

Americans post warnings of massive fines for anyone who pollutes. We used to do the same thing. I went on a number of very long walks, and there is no question that the city where we stayed in Rhode Island is very substantially cleaner than Ottawa. We need to post some signs!

The food was BIG! We went to IHOP, and I had blueberry pancakes – four of them in the normal order!  Wherever we dined, the food was big. We cooked and ate mostly at our rented house.

Many of the people were big too. The average American male weighs 196 pounds. The average Canadian male weighs about 177 pounds. They are the same height. Some of the men I saw would have topped out at 400 pounds, easily.

For many Americans, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” has come to mean the consumption of everything imaginable as a path to those ends. “To eat is to be free!!” - of all the things Americans consume, food appears to stand at the top of the list as the great provider of pleasure, and therefore happiness. But many of them look so sad and sick….

The USA has full employment! 

Every single Dunkin Donuts that we went to had help wanted campaign on. It looked like most employees were students – not unusual. One is left to ask…”what about the 40 million Americans who are on food stamps?!” Surely they would qualify for a job at a donut shop!

What’s going on?

Well sir, they don’t have to work! These people are supposed to work 20 hours a week to receive food stamps. Millions of them have been granted exemptions by various states – the only basic exemption for able-bodied persons is supposed to be for people over age 50.

How many people is this? 

Incredibly, 62% of the 21 million able bodied Americans who are on food stamps are exempted from the requirement to work 20 hours per week in order to receive this benefit. That is about 13 million people – twice the number of people who are officially unemployed in the USA.

The math follows. 

The official unemployment rate in the USA is 3.9%, representing 6.3 million people. This is what is called U3 – one of six measures of unemployment used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It measures  the percentage of people in the work force who are unemployed, and who looked for work in the last four weeks. If an unemployed person did not look for work during that time, they are not considered for the purposes of U3.

The U6 measure of unemployment considers all people who are unemployed or underemployed in the USA in a given year.  That rate is 7.9%, and this is considered to be a much truer representation of the actual unemployment situation in the USA. This would be about 12 million people.

But U6 does not go beyond one year. This measure would not pick up the people who are living on food stamps, who have been unemployed and/or underemployed for more than 12 months. The number of people in this category could be upwards of 13 million people unemployed and another 8 million working 20 hours a week, and therefore underemployed. 

Of course, there would be some overlap as some of these people would be captured by U6 as they would be in this situation during the year long period covered by U6.  Nonetheless, it is probably not a stretch to posit that perhaps another 13 million people are either underemployed or unemployed in the USA, beyond the year cut off of U6, and they are therefore not captured by that measure. This would be another 8% of the workforce.  Added to U6, this represents a possible real unemployment rate of perhaps 16 - 17%.

Trump wants to revise the food stamp program to reduce the number of exemptions so as to get people back to work. Requiring that someone work or that they go to school in return for social assistance is absolutely normal. There will be a great hue and cry when he “attacks the poor!”, but from what I saw, there are many, many jobs available for anyone who wants to work. 

Back to Rhode Island!

The people were very friendly. I like Americans – many of them treat you like you are a long lost family member with whom they cannot wait to get reacquainted! It can be quite charming.

But RI was a tad odd. I know that there are Black people in the USA, but we may have seen no more than ten in all of our time there. There were no Black people on one of the beaches that we went to…by that I mean absolutely zero non-White people. Coming from Ottawa, which is a highly integrated and multicultural society, the absence of anyone other than White people was a tad odd.

I liked the ocean. It was warm and surprisingly salty! I crashed into waves with my kids for upwards of five hours in total. They had a blast, and have life-long memories to cherish. I did not get sand in my butt, which is always my great fear.

The Americans do war memorials better than we do. 

I went to the local war memorial, and it commemorated all American wars back to WW1. Unlike us, they remember the women who died in the wars, as well as the men – often nurses killed near the scene of various battles, or who died of disease while in service or after being captured. We could learn from them regarding this aspect of our collective national memory.

Americans do ice cream right! Enough said.

The news was odd. I watched the Great American Divide unfold right before my eyes on the tv every night after the kids went to bed.  On the one side we have CNN…on the other we have FOX. It was bizarre, with the same stories spun so completely by both networks as to be unrecognizable.

Conclusion - the US news networks do not report news. The reporting of facts is very limited compared to what is a massive, almost non-stop editorial commentary. These networks are bought and paid for – are Hannity’s guests actually paid to wear their fake, smug know-it-all smiles when they appear on his show to spew their lies and distortions?  Some of them are renowned legal scholars who have accomplished great things. How sad that they are reduced to shameless shills.

“Money is the great leveller, and Greed is its handmaiden.”  

I would go back, but maybe next time to a desert place like, for example, Las Vegas.