Actually, it's for many of the same reasons that many of us here at DailyKos think so.
An article that appeared in Der Spiegel, and commented upon by Democrats Ramshield over at Alternet, goes into the details.
The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.
The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.
Spending more for less health care here -- why does that make sense to anyone? And why can this "Land of Opportunity" continue to let itself be Third-Worlded as corporations co-opt our government and elected officials?
More from the Alternet article:
Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.
In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.
Are we really a nation that wants to cut Social Security, for example- a self-funding promise that Americans need not live out their retirement years in poverty and misery? Why do even Republicans want to take away a system that working Americans have paid into their entire working lives?
Why does it make sense to anyone to let people run out of unemployment benefits? Ours is a consumer-driven economy, and people who aren't already wealthy tend to spend such funds to get by.
Lefty Coaster has some interesting things to say about that here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
From Der Spiegel:
The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred. And so is Dinesh D'Souza.
Indeed, the United States of 2010 is a hate-filled country.
D'Souza says that Obama's father was an anti-colonialist and that he dreamed of his native Kenya liberating itself from its British colonial rulers. His son Barack has the same dream, says D'Souza. He wants to put America, the neo-colonial power of the 21st century, in its place. "The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s," D'Souza writes. "America today is governed by a ghost."
"The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s"?!?
Give me a break. Racist much, Dinesh?
D'Souza is a canary-voiced, nasally, diminutive, overcompensating prick. Why does anyone listen to vile, delusional people like Beck, let alone elect batsh!t-crazies like Michelle Bachmann?
What I think we may be seeing are the impotent lashings out of mostly older, mostly white Americans who, while tolerant of the pace of change in the past, are now future shocking at the arrival of such notions as marriage equality, or the possibility that their country actually elected an African-American president.
How else to explain people who, having had satisfied their demand to see President Obama's birth certificate made public, then demanded the release of a long-form birth certificate - something that the state of Hawaii does not even produce?!
The sun is setting on our nation as a superpower. We are an empire in decline, and a nation that was never meant to be an empire in the first place. And faced with that loss of exceptional status, people like the Tea Partiers, the Truthers, the Birthers, et al, have fallen into absurd levels of denial, believe preposterous, outright stupid things, clutch desperately to anti-science conspiracy theories, and cling passionately to those beliefs.
In short, the truth seems to be breaking their brains.
So that's my explanation to Germans: America seems to have gone insane specifically because it has.