Dictators are established when someone is attacking or meddling in a country, which UK and US were genuinely doing from 1950s till now in Iran.
Current government is a product of western actions in Iran.
It’s short sighted. If in 1950s they left Iran alone, the IRGC would disappear a long time ago because their strong grip would not be needed nor justified.
But every western leader wants to record a win, and constant attacks further increases the required grip of the IRGC.
Can even go back another 100 years of Imperialist England and Russia fucking over Iran. With the current regime being a result of the 50's coup that were a result of BP/England wanting to keep most profits of oil, which they had done since early 1900s.
We have the current inefficient, corrupt, and incompetent government in the US because the anti-tax wealthy class threw an all-out tantrum over even the idea of paying a tiny bit more tax.
I live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax. There is always "just that tiny bit more tax" that will magically fix the system (it won't).
Turns out paying more money to an already corrupt government doesn't turn it less corrupt. Go figure, hm?
> I live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax.
I live in the US and pay less raw tax than that, for sure.
But I reported $49k in medical expenses (premiums, deductible, copays, stuff they won't cover) last year on my taxes, and I've got two kids going to college in a year, which may cost $10-40k/year for each.
My trade-off is not seeing a specialist for 6 months and more while paying 10k healthcare premiums a year for state mandated healthcare. Dermatologists in my city only take privately insured patients or self-paying patients. So I pay 300 Eur a visit anyway. On a third of a US software engineer's salary. I don't qualify for private insurance so im OOL.
I’m in the US. We have six month waits for specialists too. And we pay almost twice what y’all pay per capita. Inclusive of both private and public spend.
You forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever. And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical. A single year of taxes in Germany based on my current American income would pay for all of that you just said. So then my question for you is. What were you doing with your money in those other years? I hope it was saving it. Because otherwise I'm gonna eye roll hard at you wanting to increase taxes on everyone just to get a small cut in how much you pay during one fiscal year. Seems silly.
I am very familiar with American student loans. I paid my 40k off in about 11 months by keeping my spending down that year. It was easy. I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget. Also frankly your kids should be paying their own way through college. That's a nice gift you're giving them but it's 100% a discretionary expense and is basically you saying "I have so much money I can simply gift it to my kids". Shit I wish I had that.
I never said I was - I'll certainly try to help where I can. I don't have that kind of money; see aforementioned healthcare costs! They're gonna need loans, it's probably gonna be quite a bit more than $40k, and I'm pretty dubious in the current job market that they're gonna have $40k in discretional annual income on the other end.
> I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget.
And I don't want to go bankrupt from ever-rising medical costs, but here we are.
We have an inefficient, corrupt and incompetent government in the US because we voted for it. And we keep voting for it. That's our revealed preference. We obviously like inefficient, corrupt, incompetent governments.
In what way? I included England just because those particular periods are well-known.
If you look at ALL of Europe's history, all up to recent times, there's been constant movements and migrations. People with different backgrounds, moving around, a lot of movement came as trade increased (and, as it has lately been found, there was much more trade even 3k years ago than anyone had previously anticipated). If you look at a snapshot of time it looks pretty static, but let your time-tick be generations and you see constant changes.
It really hasn't been constant movement and migrations. Once the Germanic and Slavic tribes settled, which wasn't fun for the natives before them and certainly not for the Romans as well, the migration more or less stopped statistically speaking (exceptions were the wars).
Americans go disinformation about all their previous wars, it’s just that they all hate Trump and have social media so they’re able to figure out what’s going on.
Americans acting like they have moral high ground is the staple of your international image, while in fact being a regular old Empire with everything that comes with it.
The thing is, Iran doesn’t need to. US maybe can defend their ships, but they can’t defend commercial ships well enough for them to resume regular operations. Even unsuccessful attacks would cause insurance to make it not possible.
Houthis closed their straight some years ago and US wasn’t able to do anything about that neither. And Houthis are nowhere near as capable as Iran.
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Even 187k is very low compared to Europe, I’m pretty sure all European countries have it higher than that.
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