My Response to Reddit's Question of Which Nation I Prefer to Reside, and Why I Choose America:
Above: Lee Greenwood Singing God Bless the U .S.A. in Accompaniment with the University of Tennessee
Pride of the Southland Marching Band, New Orleans, LA, 1 January 1986 (Sugar Bowl: #8 UT 35, #2 Miami 7)
To my friends in Denmark, I wish you and your great nation good health and even greater happiness.
Having read a sizable portion of this thread, I note the prevailing theme is that absolute egalitarianism and economic equity will beget the same measure in freedom. However, there are major tradeoffs to each and all, and if you will allow me from an American perspective as a conservative to explain, I will state my case why I will never consider living in Europe, only providing your great continent state revenue in the future as an enthralled tourist.
When the Declaration of Independence was signed and sealed officially on July 4,1776, our Founding Fathers did so with the understanding that they had pledged their very lives, good fortune and sacred honor should the British Royal Army arrest them for treason against His Majesty, King George III. Our Continental Army, brave though as it was, stood no chance at defeating the Red Coats in traditional pitched battles as were prevalent for nearly another century in Europe and instead, resorted to guerilla war tactics. The idea that my ancestors were being taxed directly for the first time en masse without any representation in Parliament angered most colonists, but certainly not all. And on the night of April 19, 1775 while attempting to subvert rebellious Massachusetts patriots at Lexington and near Concord, the Red Coats in heavy pursuit demanded our accumulating militiae drop their muskets and surrender. This launched the phenomenon that is today the great American experiment in a democratically-elected republican form of government, and what Ralph Waldo Emerson referenced in his poem Concord Hymn as "the shot heard 'round the world". It indeed resonated well beyond the Massachusetts colony; it launched popular rebellions globally that you see today in Hong Kong with Occupy Central and in the present-struggle in Ukraine versus Russian expansionism.
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are not perfect, but they are better than all other nations' legal codes, and our base has been in effect since 1789 when the first government was set in New York City under George Washington. Americans have failed in many ways as with all people under God: some wealthy forefathers were slaveholders, though they were never forced to do so; we also fought a civil war to both end slavery as well as secure the Union. Ever since, we have striven to grant as much opportunity for all as is possible for women and minorities, and this is where we the people of the United States work to form our more perfect union than in Europe.
Liberty does not come free, nor do your social welfare pensions, your public transportation or roads, you public education or colleges and most certainly not your health care. Someone has to pay for all those things, but I have not yet read one person among the Danes explain just how your pensions are not plentiful, your taxes enormous, your wait times in hospitals and doctors offices far longer than here as well as how you may determine what is wealthy compared to the middle class and the poor. Has socialism ended all poverty, and how affluent is the Euro today? The Eurozone nations realized following socialism's systematic failure the concept of taxing and spending is unsustainable. When the U.S., Britain and Canada liberated Western Europe in 1945, your economic infrastructure was in shambles; you were sovereign German territory, part of the Lebensraum under Hitler, and you had no capacity to fight effectively due to what had already been as long as 60 years of nations employing social welfare dating to Otto von Bismarck's innovation during the 1880s. Our Marshall Plan lifted Europe back to economic relevance and solvency, and we continue to stand by you today, as we always will. If you truly believe your faux solvency was manufactured through statist benevolence, consider what Bismarck stated below:
In 1986 under President Ronald Reagan, the wealthiest Americans paid into the system 55% of all tax revenue; the remainder of the nation, comprised mostly of the middle class, contributed he remaining 45%. To a socialist in Europe, the rich were not paying their fair share at all, but in fact, this is not true in the least. There were far more taxpayers in America in 1986 under Reaganomics than today under Obama where nearly 93 million working age civilians have now left the labor force due to the job market and wages retracting. In four years, more Americans will be receiving and qualifying for welfare than those who are paying for their sustainability. At some point, one has to add up the figures to realize that as socialism in Europe is not sustainable, it resulted in another disastrous economic policy in austerity. The Reagan Revolution did not launch due to corporate greed or total domination by the wealthy over the poor. Rapidly rising unemployment as well as 13.5% inflation resulted in the economic phenomenon called stagflation, and it was far worse in our mother country of Britain with the Winter of Discontent under the Labour government of Jim Callaghan driving inflation to as high as 26%. Margaret Thatcher rose to power in Britain and fundamentally crippled the militant union strikes and ended decades of repressive socialist economics, and Britain is now the healthiest economy in the G7 and the European Union because of the Iron Lady.
When more people pay taxes, more people are working. Socialism does not work because it discourages thrift, living within one's means, hard work and the initiative to ever dream of achieving grander heights never before seen in the history of mankind. When I read of Labour Party members on British Prime Minister David Cameron's Facebook complain about having too little paid them in entitlement pensions, less in welfare subsidies but do not once spare a moment in chastising the wealthy for not being taxed sufficiently, they fail to consider several very important issues as to why the British economy, like ours and most of the West's, continues to perform at subpar levels post the global financial and real estate collapse of 2007-08:
Britain's higher earners shoulder 60% of the country's income tax bill
- Numbers paying the 40 per cent tax rate will rise to 4.13 million
- Rich are paying an increasing share of the tax burden
- Number of taxpayers fall, but pensioners miss out
In terms of economic equity, the rich are not the problem; socialism's steady rise into the people's lives is. Labour did not work prior to Thatcherism, and it still does not today. The wealthiest Britons comprise of 14% of the total national population, and yet it pays disproportionately higher taxes while the number of total taxpayers continue to decline according to The Daily Mail. When pensions decline, there is not enough tax revenue generated to sustain this burden, and the reason for this is just as it is in Denmark and here in the U.S. You too have a baby boomer generation stemming from the postwar phenomenon of massive birth rates and population increases, and your life expectancy figures have grown as a result of better technology in part. But as this is so, today's birth rates have dropped precipitously since 1945, and there are fewer taxpayers to foot the bill for yours and Britain's pensions as well as our Social Security. When a conservative Republican who stems the tide of federal growth or cuts its bureaucratic girth is president, there are more subsidies available as well as more per person for those who actually are in dire need of assistance. As a conservative, I am compassionate and understand this, and am willing to help those in genuine need, but not the lazy. When fewer people pay taxes, jobs are less plentiful; likewise, as the wealthy pay a higher burden, less money is available for them to expand or open businesses to create new jobs. You suggest expanding the public sector, but that requires someone to pay for this since the state is not a corporation and is almost independent of profit-driven goals generating wealth unlike free enterprise. The economy never truly expands under socialism, and when it failed on the continent, another disastrous measure was employed and misapplied through austerity. You cannot create wealth or opportunity simply by taxing your citizens beyond their capacity to pay, and I understand too that luxuries we enjoy broadly in the U.S. are by comparison nonexistent in Denmark. I live in a two-story house on a quarter-acre of land and my family owns two SUVs; most in Denmark can afford neither, and you still have to find a means to locate a train station at some extended distance in measure since none have ever pulled up to your doorsteps.
We once had the choice of a free market health plan because it was more affordable, not to the contrary; and our care, at least once upon a time, was superior and prompted untold thousands of Canadians crossing into the U.S. to pay extra for better care. Those who worked before Obamacare destroyed our health care industry had excellent health care coverage by comparison to Europe; there were far shorter or no waiting lines in doctors' offices or hospitals, and people did not enter emergency rooms simply to have a bandage applied to a cut that could be treated at home. For the poor, many states do have socialized health care strictly for them, and this is an issue for where I live in Tennessee with TennCare since it is the most unsustainable program our state has by far. Caps in medication allotments per month have caused enormous problems, and there again lies the controversy of how much TennCare will be allocated or what doctors are permitted by the state to do to treat health maladies, not themselves. We also have Medicare and Medicaid, but the latter particularly has been poorly mismanaged ever since it was launched in 1965 under the Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson. Medicaid is a national initiative for the poor, but it has resulted in too many falling through the cracks. We were lucky in that for those not covered, wealthy benefactors who donated to charities and hospital funds often extended their altruism to these individuals, and therefore demonstrate the American capacity for compassion and benevolence. Communities also have county hospitals which treat the poor primarily for this reason. Obamacare has closed more hospitals and driven people out of jobs en masse due to corporations or small businesses being unable to pay for the minimum standard of coverage that is extraordinarily cost prohibitive.
If economic egalitarianism is what you desire, that is your choice; you are a free people who vote and are granted the God-given right to self-governance and determination. Our continent was settled by Englishmen on the basis of free enterprise and religious freedom, and today more than ever in our history, both are under attack and on the verge of extinction as natural rights. There are more wealthy taxpayers who are Democrats, not conservatives in the GOP, and while they fund heavily en masse the president's agenda to level the income gap for the bottom 90% to where we almost do not have a middle class today, the top 10% of wage earners receive tax breaks, extra loopholes and corporate welfare subsidies to make them rich while they themselves often close factories, shops and businesses in favor of corporate flight due to labor unions increasing production costs exponentially over the needed profits to pay workers. As for a living wage? Seattle has passed a massive minimum wage hike to the tune of $15 per hour, and businesses are closing, workers being laid off and those who are working often having their hours slashed due to avoiding Obamacare mandates that employers foot the bill of their employees who put in over 30 hours per week. Socialism does not work, and it never will. The Eurozone now has a negative interest rate, and your banks now must pay people to take out loans; you financial sector is soon to crash far more profoundly than it did in 2007-08. Norway's energy bubble is bound to pop since its massive growth over time was obtrusively dependent on that one sector. When it does, it too will see economic collapse or at least a severe recession. As for Greece and Spain? Well, socialism did well enough to cause unprecedented poverty and inflation, resulting in bailouts. Neo-Nazi parties are on the rise, and you still have the issue of Islamists illegally settling on the continent to the tune of nearly a quarter of the continent's population as well as in Britain demanding for the end of democracy in favor of Sharia law, alongside the disturbing resurrection of systemic anti-Semitism. When Subway restaurants and many other eateries are no longer permitted either through legal pressure or coercion by the rapidly rising Islamic population to serve meats that are no halal, the national identity is on the decline. Today, the United Kingdom's three most common names for newborn babies are Muhammad, Mohammed and Mohamed, the three different spellings used for the prophet of Islam. Europe is losing its culture; the Islamic State may not have to invade the continent to conquer her for its expanding caliphate.
Workers in the U.S. choose to put in longer hours weekly and to take less time off work by a plurality. In fact, 40% of our labor force choose not to take all their vacation time. This is liberty, not state-sanctioned freedom under Jean Jacques Rousseau. A plurality of Americans are conservative politically, with there also being more moderates than liberals, while fewer moderates than conservatives. We the people are the government's bosses; the government does not tell us what to do. We choose our own course and manifest destiny, not the federal government. And while we still have the First Amendment, that right has been under assault and nearly repealed by the Democrats in the Senate to aid George Soros' capacity to rule America, but to deny those who are conservatives like the Koch brothers to be able to donate their funds to the capacity they have enjoyed. As we still have our guns; the concept that gun control eliminates violent crime or all offenses is also a lie as Chicago has seen near record drops in crime over the past year after the state of Illinois passed a bill permitting concealed carry. Washington D.C. is another city seeing rapid improvement in murders and crime in general. And now that Ferguson, MO has captivated the world as the police are militarizing to take down protestors who are now resorting to violence and looting, it resembles Hong Kong today, and may expand to what Tiananmen Square experienced in 1989. Yet despite the record levels of plummeting crime nationally after what was already 49% less than in 1993 just in 2014, the Democrats are determined to repeal the Second Amendment, all while militarizing our police forces and continuing to confiscate our vastly unsettled lands.
As global warming has again been refuted as a fraudulent hoax due to glaciation expanding up to 60% since Al Gore seven years said we would not have any ice caps today, so too are temperatures slightly cooling, with a potentially damaging global cooling trend for the next 30 years possibly killing agriculture and crop yields. Russia has prepared for this; the U.S. politically persecute in stealth those who cite empirical evidence contradicting the lies. Our universities are the best in the world, but as my native state Tennessee now provides full scholarships to qualified students to attend in-state colleges and universities from our lottery program, the costs have skyrocketed, and the state cannot maintain pace with this inflation. Less students are entering colleges today, to the point that Middle Tennessee State University saw a decrease of 6% in terms of incoming freshman; my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, has seen similar trends. As our governor is attempting to provide funding to anyone desiring to attend a state community college, Tennesseans are balking because the problem has already become unmanageable at the four-year institutions.
Still we continue to question ourselves far more intensely than Denmark or Britain, and we receive the same to a lesser degree from the rest of the world. And while Europeans may well despise Americans for the perception of our greed and gluttony, at least I know I'm free in the U.S.A. And while you bitterly complain about our negligence towards the rest of the world for not diffusing more of our massive wealth, we are easily the largest financier of the United Nations as well as for foreign aid. You as our NATO partners declare we are uncompassionate, but as we defend our positions, we still will always be here for you, forever and eternally. And in finally concluding why I am proud to be an American and how I never intend to live anywhere else in the world, I will quote Ronald Reagan at the 40th Anniversary of D-Day at Omaha Beach, June 6, 1984:
"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free."
Having read a sizable portion of this thread, I note the prevailing theme is that absolute egalitarianism and economic equity will beget the same measure in freedom. However, there are major tradeoffs to each and all, and if you will allow me from an American perspective as a conservative to explain, I will state my case why I will never consider living in Europe, only providing your great continent state revenue in the future as an enthralled tourist.
When the Declaration of Independence was signed and sealed officially on July 4,1776, our Founding Fathers did so with the understanding that they had pledged their very lives, good fortune and sacred honor should the British Royal Army arrest them for treason against His Majesty, King George III. Our Continental Army, brave though as it was, stood no chance at defeating the Red Coats in traditional pitched battles as were prevalent for nearly another century in Europe and instead, resorted to guerilla war tactics. The idea that my ancestors were being taxed directly for the first time en masse without any representation in Parliament angered most colonists, but certainly not all. And on the night of April 19, 1775 while attempting to subvert rebellious Massachusetts patriots at Lexington and near Concord, the Red Coats in heavy pursuit demanded our accumulating militiae drop their muskets and surrender. This launched the phenomenon that is today the great American experiment in a democratically-elected republican form of government, and what Ralph Waldo Emerson referenced in his poem Concord Hymn as "the shot heard 'round the world". It indeed resonated well beyond the Massachusetts colony; it launched popular rebellions globally that you see today in Hong Kong with Occupy Central and in the present-struggle in Ukraine versus Russian expansionism.
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are not perfect, but they are better than all other nations' legal codes, and our base has been in effect since 1789 when the first government was set in New York City under George Washington. Americans have failed in many ways as with all people under God: some wealthy forefathers were slaveholders, though they were never forced to do so; we also fought a civil war to both end slavery as well as secure the Union. Ever since, we have striven to grant as much opportunity for all as is possible for women and minorities, and this is where we the people of the United States work to form our more perfect union than in Europe.
Liberty does not come free, nor do your social welfare pensions, your public transportation or roads, you public education or colleges and most certainly not your health care. Someone has to pay for all those things, but I have not yet read one person among the Danes explain just how your pensions are not plentiful, your taxes enormous, your wait times in hospitals and doctors offices far longer than here as well as how you may determine what is wealthy compared to the middle class and the poor. Has socialism ended all poverty, and how affluent is the Euro today? The Eurozone nations realized following socialism's systematic failure the concept of taxing and spending is unsustainable. When the U.S., Britain and Canada liberated Western Europe in 1945, your economic infrastructure was in shambles; you were sovereign German territory, part of the Lebensraum under Hitler, and you had no capacity to fight effectively due to what had already been as long as 60 years of nations employing social welfare dating to Otto von Bismarck's innovation during the 1880s. Our Marshall Plan lifted Europe back to economic relevance and solvency, and we continue to stand by you today, as we always will. If you truly believe your faux solvency was manufactured through statist benevolence, consider what Bismarck stated below:
“My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.”Two world wars and a cold war versus Communism in the Soviet Union later, your currency is nearly worthless by comparison to what it was 100 years ago. And despite what you might believe about the American system of economics and taxation, today our wealthy foot 70% of our tax burden. While that staggering total continues to grow, the middle class, as in Europe, has become indistinguishable from the poor.
In 1986 under President Ronald Reagan, the wealthiest Americans paid into the system 55% of all tax revenue; the remainder of the nation, comprised mostly of the middle class, contributed he remaining 45%. To a socialist in Europe, the rich were not paying their fair share at all, but in fact, this is not true in the least. There were far more taxpayers in America in 1986 under Reaganomics than today under Obama where nearly 93 million working age civilians have now left the labor force due to the job market and wages retracting. In four years, more Americans will be receiving and qualifying for welfare than those who are paying for their sustainability. At some point, one has to add up the figures to realize that as socialism in Europe is not sustainable, it resulted in another disastrous economic policy in austerity. The Reagan Revolution did not launch due to corporate greed or total domination by the wealthy over the poor. Rapidly rising unemployment as well as 13.5% inflation resulted in the economic phenomenon called stagflation, and it was far worse in our mother country of Britain with the Winter of Discontent under the Labour government of Jim Callaghan driving inflation to as high as 26%. Margaret Thatcher rose to power in Britain and fundamentally crippled the militant union strikes and ended decades of repressive socialist economics, and Britain is now the healthiest economy in the G7 and the European Union because of the Iron Lady.
When more people pay taxes, more people are working. Socialism does not work because it discourages thrift, living within one's means, hard work and the initiative to ever dream of achieving grander heights never before seen in the history of mankind. When I read of Labour Party members on British Prime Minister David Cameron's Facebook complain about having too little paid them in entitlement pensions, less in welfare subsidies but do not once spare a moment in chastising the wealthy for not being taxed sufficiently, they fail to consider several very important issues as to why the British economy, like ours and most of the West's, continues to perform at subpar levels post the global financial and real estate collapse of 2007-08:
Britain's higher earners shoulder 60% of the country's income tax bill
- Numbers paying the 40 per cent tax rate will rise to 4.13 million
- Rich are paying an increasing share of the tax burden
- Number of taxpayers fall, but pensioners miss out
In terms of economic equity, the rich are not the problem; socialism's steady rise into the people's lives is. Labour did not work prior to Thatcherism, and it still does not today. The wealthiest Britons comprise of 14% of the total national population, and yet it pays disproportionately higher taxes while the number of total taxpayers continue to decline according to The Daily Mail. When pensions decline, there is not enough tax revenue generated to sustain this burden, and the reason for this is just as it is in Denmark and here in the U.S. You too have a baby boomer generation stemming from the postwar phenomenon of massive birth rates and population increases, and your life expectancy figures have grown as a result of better technology in part. But as this is so, today's birth rates have dropped precipitously since 1945, and there are fewer taxpayers to foot the bill for yours and Britain's pensions as well as our Social Security. When a conservative Republican who stems the tide of federal growth or cuts its bureaucratic girth is president, there are more subsidies available as well as more per person for those who actually are in dire need of assistance. As a conservative, I am compassionate and understand this, and am willing to help those in genuine need, but not the lazy. When fewer people pay taxes, jobs are less plentiful; likewise, as the wealthy pay a higher burden, less money is available for them to expand or open businesses to create new jobs. You suggest expanding the public sector, but that requires someone to pay for this since the state is not a corporation and is almost independent of profit-driven goals generating wealth unlike free enterprise. The economy never truly expands under socialism, and when it failed on the continent, another disastrous measure was employed and misapplied through austerity. You cannot create wealth or opportunity simply by taxing your citizens beyond their capacity to pay, and I understand too that luxuries we enjoy broadly in the U.S. are by comparison nonexistent in Denmark. I live in a two-story house on a quarter-acre of land and my family owns two SUVs; most in Denmark can afford neither, and you still have to find a means to locate a train station at some extended distance in measure since none have ever pulled up to your doorsteps.
We once had the choice of a free market health plan because it was more affordable, not to the contrary; and our care, at least once upon a time, was superior and prompted untold thousands of Canadians crossing into the U.S. to pay extra for better care. Those who worked before Obamacare destroyed our health care industry had excellent health care coverage by comparison to Europe; there were far shorter or no waiting lines in doctors' offices or hospitals, and people did not enter emergency rooms simply to have a bandage applied to a cut that could be treated at home. For the poor, many states do have socialized health care strictly for them, and this is an issue for where I live in Tennessee with TennCare since it is the most unsustainable program our state has by far. Caps in medication allotments per month have caused enormous problems, and there again lies the controversy of how much TennCare will be allocated or what doctors are permitted by the state to do to treat health maladies, not themselves. We also have Medicare and Medicaid, but the latter particularly has been poorly mismanaged ever since it was launched in 1965 under the Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson. Medicaid is a national initiative for the poor, but it has resulted in too many falling through the cracks. We were lucky in that for those not covered, wealthy benefactors who donated to charities and hospital funds often extended their altruism to these individuals, and therefore demonstrate the American capacity for compassion and benevolence. Communities also have county hospitals which treat the poor primarily for this reason. Obamacare has closed more hospitals and driven people out of jobs en masse due to corporations or small businesses being unable to pay for the minimum standard of coverage that is extraordinarily cost prohibitive.
If economic egalitarianism is what you desire, that is your choice; you are a free people who vote and are granted the God-given right to self-governance and determination. Our continent was settled by Englishmen on the basis of free enterprise and religious freedom, and today more than ever in our history, both are under attack and on the verge of extinction as natural rights. There are more wealthy taxpayers who are Democrats, not conservatives in the GOP, and while they fund heavily en masse the president's agenda to level the income gap for the bottom 90% to where we almost do not have a middle class today, the top 10% of wage earners receive tax breaks, extra loopholes and corporate welfare subsidies to make them rich while they themselves often close factories, shops and businesses in favor of corporate flight due to labor unions increasing production costs exponentially over the needed profits to pay workers. As for a living wage? Seattle has passed a massive minimum wage hike to the tune of $15 per hour, and businesses are closing, workers being laid off and those who are working often having their hours slashed due to avoiding Obamacare mandates that employers foot the bill of their employees who put in over 30 hours per week. Socialism does not work, and it never will. The Eurozone now has a negative interest rate, and your banks now must pay people to take out loans; you financial sector is soon to crash far more profoundly than it did in 2007-08. Norway's energy bubble is bound to pop since its massive growth over time was obtrusively dependent on that one sector. When it does, it too will see economic collapse or at least a severe recession. As for Greece and Spain? Well, socialism did well enough to cause unprecedented poverty and inflation, resulting in bailouts. Neo-Nazi parties are on the rise, and you still have the issue of Islamists illegally settling on the continent to the tune of nearly a quarter of the continent's population as well as in Britain demanding for the end of democracy in favor of Sharia law, alongside the disturbing resurrection of systemic anti-Semitism. When Subway restaurants and many other eateries are no longer permitted either through legal pressure or coercion by the rapidly rising Islamic population to serve meats that are no halal, the national identity is on the decline. Today, the United Kingdom's three most common names for newborn babies are Muhammad, Mohammed and Mohamed, the three different spellings used for the prophet of Islam. Europe is losing its culture; the Islamic State may not have to invade the continent to conquer her for its expanding caliphate.
Workers in the U.S. choose to put in longer hours weekly and to take less time off work by a plurality. In fact, 40% of our labor force choose not to take all their vacation time. This is liberty, not state-sanctioned freedom under Jean Jacques Rousseau. A plurality of Americans are conservative politically, with there also being more moderates than liberals, while fewer moderates than conservatives. We the people are the government's bosses; the government does not tell us what to do. We choose our own course and manifest destiny, not the federal government. And while we still have the First Amendment, that right has been under assault and nearly repealed by the Democrats in the Senate to aid George Soros' capacity to rule America, but to deny those who are conservatives like the Koch brothers to be able to donate their funds to the capacity they have enjoyed. As we still have our guns; the concept that gun control eliminates violent crime or all offenses is also a lie as Chicago has seen near record drops in crime over the past year after the state of Illinois passed a bill permitting concealed carry. Washington D.C. is another city seeing rapid improvement in murders and crime in general. And now that Ferguson, MO has captivated the world as the police are militarizing to take down protestors who are now resorting to violence and looting, it resembles Hong Kong today, and may expand to what Tiananmen Square experienced in 1989. Yet despite the record levels of plummeting crime nationally after what was already 49% less than in 1993 just in 2014, the Democrats are determined to repeal the Second Amendment, all while militarizing our police forces and continuing to confiscate our vastly unsettled lands.
As global warming has again been refuted as a fraudulent hoax due to glaciation expanding up to 60% since Al Gore seven years said we would not have any ice caps today, so too are temperatures slightly cooling, with a potentially damaging global cooling trend for the next 30 years possibly killing agriculture and crop yields. Russia has prepared for this; the U.S. politically persecute in stealth those who cite empirical evidence contradicting the lies. Our universities are the best in the world, but as my native state Tennessee now provides full scholarships to qualified students to attend in-state colleges and universities from our lottery program, the costs have skyrocketed, and the state cannot maintain pace with this inflation. Less students are entering colleges today, to the point that Middle Tennessee State University saw a decrease of 6% in terms of incoming freshman; my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, has seen similar trends. As our governor is attempting to provide funding to anyone desiring to attend a state community college, Tennesseans are balking because the problem has already become unmanageable at the four-year institutions.
Still we continue to question ourselves far more intensely than Denmark or Britain, and we receive the same to a lesser degree from the rest of the world. And while Europeans may well despise Americans for the perception of our greed and gluttony, at least I know I'm free in the U.S.A. And while you bitterly complain about our negligence towards the rest of the world for not diffusing more of our massive wealth, we are easily the largest financier of the United Nations as well as for foreign aid. You as our NATO partners declare we are uncompassionate, but as we defend our positions, we still will always be here for you, forever and eternally. And in finally concluding why I am proud to be an American and how I never intend to live anywhere else in the world, I will quote Ronald Reagan at the 40th Anniversary of D-Day at Omaha Beach, June 6, 1984:
"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free."
