Evolving Folks Project

It’s spooky season, and the United States is as scary as ever. There are ICE raids on civilian dwellings. There are billions of tax dollars going to fund multiple genocides across the globe. AI slop videos are flooding social media, further disrupting reality, and millions of Americans are facing hunger because of an inept and corrupt federal government.

Yes, the United States is in a bizarro world, but it’s always been that way. Nowadays, the ridiculousness of the United States is front and center. If you’re paying attention, it’s far more terrifying than any horror movie you’ll watch this All Hallows Eve! I want to present five scary facts about the United States.

1) The United States doesn’t offer all its citizens universal healthcare

Yes, among all the industrialized nations, the United States is the sole outlier in not having a universal healthcare system or a single-payer system for all its citizens, regardless of their income or social status. The reasons for this are complex and straightforward, i.e., racism.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, an American statistician, made his mark with studies focusing on public health challenges. His promotion of scientific racism is also a notable aspect of his work. Hoffman’s first book, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), characterized African Americans as exceptionally disease-prone. A worry over racial issues spurred the work, along with the fact that insurance companies needed to explain the increased life insurance premiums for black people.

In 1897, Kelly Miller critiqued this work, citing problems in the 1890 census data and environmental adjustments. Hoffman found, to his dismay, that the African American population was not growing much faster than the white population, which contradicted the popular narrative of the day. Black people had a higher birth rate, but also a higher death rate, leading to a faster increase in the white population.

In the U.S., the absence of a labor party can be attributed to historical divisions, rooted in racial differences, such as those promoted by men like Hoffman. The inability to unify Black and White workers in politics prevented us from forming a labor party that would have fought for universal healthcare coverage.

Sadly, in 2016 and 2020, we had one presidential candidate who tried to force the issue into the national conversation. However, Sen. Bernie Sanders has backed down after the DNC did everything in its power to prevent the Vermont senator from getting the nomination. Bernie has bent the knee to the DNC and Joe Biden right after the 2024 presidential election. The Sanders campaign also failed to build a working-class, multiracial, unified coalition that could have overcome the DNC meddling in their primaries. Thus, a Trump versus Bernie showdown in 2020 might have been possible.

In 2024, instead of presidential hopefuls debating healthcare, living wages, and free college, they debated whether all citizens should have fundamental human rights. We are now living under the Trump 2.0. era and watching the decline of the United States Empire.

2) The U.S. has the largest amount of medical debt for its citizens

The United States leads all high-income countries in both healthcare spending and medical debt. The reasons for this involve expensive healthcare, the prevalence of people with insufficient or no insurance, and considerable personal costs from deductibles and billing mistakes. 

As people age, they typically use more healthcare and incur higher costs. It’s not surprising that older adults and middle-aged adults have a greater share of medical debt. However, the amount of medical debt held by adults declines when they reach Medicare age. 10% of adults aged 50-64 and 6% of those aged 65-79 report medical debt. 

Black Americans are more likely to have medical debt than other groups. According to this analysis, 13% of Black Americans have medical debt, while 8% of White Americans and 3% of Asian Americans do. On average, women (9%) report medical debt more than men (7%). The gap may be partly because of the costs of childbirth and lower female income. 

Medical debt burdens all Americans, but black, brown, and people living in rural communities, as well as Americans with disabilities, are the citizens who hold the highest medical debt burden. A solution to address medical debt could be to expand the Medicare program to cover all Americans and even to cover the cost of non-Americans who get sick or hurt while in the country. However, our voter base would rather their hard-earned tax dollars go to bloated military and law enforcement budgets. The nation as a collective whole would rather live in a police state than a healthy nation.

3) The highest childhood poverty of any “so-called” developed nation

Child poverty in the U.S. is the highest in the developed world, with a 2022 rate of 20.8%, vs. 11.2% in comparable countries. The rise of single-parent households in poverty influenced a higher rate, more low-income families, and expiring government aid. 

So, people who claim abortion is evil and kills babies are wrong. They need to take action to help children born into poverty. Not just advocates for future babies, because poverty is killing and harming children right now! Just because kids don’t vote doesn’t mean they don’t count. The ball is now in our court, adults.

Kids don’t vote, so our elected officials and many of our fellow citizens couldn’t give two shits about them. Despite living in a time when women are losing bodily autonomy and the right to abortion, those in power are doing little to nothing to curb childhood poverty. I experienced childhood poverty firsthand in my youth as a child in the foster care system. I was fortunate enough to be adopted at 12. Still, it wasn’t like the 80s sitcom Different Strokes where a wealthy white family became my parents.

In the United States, we have a school lunch debt problem. God forbid we use our resources to feed our nation’s most vulnerable population free school lunches and breakfast at our nation’s public schools. I don’t have children of my own, but I’d rather my tax money go to feeding little kids in my community. Versus being sent to Israel so they can continue to drop bombs on little kids in Gaza. Hey, we can’t lift those kids out of poverty. Those needy billionaires need a new yacht for their hot young mistresses.

4) The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world

You’re more likely to be in jail or prison than to be free in the ‘so-called’ Land of the Free. Indeed, the U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate. A stark reality felt by many behind bars, which is 5 to 10 times greater than in other developed democracies. The U.S. holds nearly a quarter of all prisoners in the world, despite having under 5% of the global population. For example, statistics show that almost 1% of the adult population is incarcerated at any time.

I wrote about the United States being a total police state, and this proves without a doubt that the United States does more to lock people up than to address the root cause of crime. The root cause is poverty. In fact, poverty reduction and eradicating homelessness would be the biggest anti-crime programs in the nation. Instead, the highest court in the land has worked hard to make racial profiling legal again. No doubt that law enforcement will target black and brown communities. Since poverty and race intersect with the criminal injustice system in the United States.

The injustice system has targeted migrants and refugees in the United States—the U.S. foreign interventions to stop the spread of communism in Latin America during the Reagan years. On top of the War on Drugs started by Nixon, has destabilized our neighboring nations to the South. This has led to an increase in migration to the United States, as people sought to build a better life. That has turned into a nightmare for migrants as both political parties have focused on building up ICE to further criminalize people living in the United States. The rampant rise of ICE over the last couple of decades has only increased the number of people funneled into the for-profit prison pipeline.

5) Wealth inequality in the United States

As of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion, respectively). The top 1% held $43.45 trillion.

The United States, despite appearances, operates as a plutocracy rather than a democracy. Our society is controlled by the rich — a plutocracy, which is more precise than calling it a democracy. Our empire has been ruled by the wealthy, a plutocracy, since its inception.

Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page examined roughly 1,800 public opinion survey questions between 1981 and 2002. According to their findings, economic elites and business interest groups significantly influence U.S. government policy independently, unlike mass-based interest groups and average citizens.

Yes, I know, to hardline Democratic or Republican voters, this can be a total shock that President Obama or Trump isn’t fighting for them. They’re working on behalf of their major donors and corporate sponsors. It’s why in 2009, President Obama maintained the Bush-era bailouts that put corporations over the millions of people devastated by the Great Recession. Trump’s major legislative victories are tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations.

These are five horrifying facts about living in the United States. Under the circumstances, these horrors have existed in this nation since the “Founding Fathers” signed the Constitution. There’ve been other horrors throughout American history, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, African slavery, Jim Crow, women being treated as property, and children being forced to work in coal mines.

It can seem overwhelming, but the power of people has overcome outstanding odds. Collectively, people can do better. Cutting the defense budget, ending homelessness, providing a basic income to everyone, building affordable housing, and ensuring access to healthcare are all possible. We can prepare and fight against the impending climate crisis. We must cease accepting the politics of mediocrity. Our political system could be improved if we demanded more, such as more than two major parties. Ideas are constantly shifting, and the world itself is just an idea. Therefore, we can improve things. We must overcome the politics of fear and recognize that it’s up to all of us to make a better world possible. Even if the monster is frightening and seemingly indestructible, we can defeat it—all power to the people, and happy Halloween.