Let’s see. Belgium has 0,26 gini income inequality. (EU 0,29). We have great hospitals. Uz Leuven and UZ Gent being world top class hospitals. When my wife will give birth, it will cost us 300 euros. Median income in the country is 3800 euros gross. Which comes to about 2600 euros net.

Schooling is tax paid. There are like no private schools here because who would want to fund that (there’s one in Brussels, would cost 500k euros to have your kid schooled there till age 18, while public schools get funding from taxes). Higher eduction costs like 1 month wage to fund a bachelor’s degree tuition wise.

Median net wealth per adult is 250k euros. Puts us alongside Australia, Luxembourg and Iceland.

We have unions, personally I’m with ABVV, which is the socialist variant. They help with certain stuff. Went there when I was unemployed for 3 months.

There’s unemployment benefits for 2 years. Only the first year is good income. Not really necessary to be longer than 1 year imo.

Quite some sick leave. Medical bankruptcy isn’t a thing here. There’s a maximum invoice per household per year. Which is a pretty low sum. Depends on income level too. Can easily be as low as 500 euros per year.

Maternity leave is decent, my wife is on maternity leave starting 1 august until 1 February.

Child benefits exist. My wife will get 250 euros from that every month I think. At birth she gets 1250 euros too. And we get a free stroller and car seat. Quite good quality too.

There’s an issue with the amount of daycares. Just no space. But starting age 3, the kid will just go to school. Which is properly funded.

Public transport… there’s rails everywhere. 80% of trains are for commuting in Europe. Belgium is no exception. I don’t have a car, there’s no need for it.

They are building bike lanes alongside the train rails for car free commutes.

It’s very tax friendly to lease an e bike with your company. It uses the taxes on your end of the year bonus. Basically turns a 1500 euros net bonus into a 4500 euros bonus. Allows people to lease a premium quality e bike for commute and buy it after 3 years for 15% of original value.

There’s always investment in social housing.

We’ve got quite a lot of immigrants. Immigrating is really easy. My wife basically went from Indonesia to Belgium with a tourist EU visum. We married and then she never had to leave. Since I have housing and a job.

Psychologist costs 11 euros per session, psychologist gets 85 euros for it.

Trans people can get sex change surgeries and hormones funded by tax money.

One of the earliest countries to allow gay marriage.

47% of EU electricity was generated with renewables in 2024.

Government funded the purchase of electric cars quite a bit until now. Same with solar panels.

Buying a house costs 3% tax if it’s your only house that you will live in. Otherwise it’s 12%.

There’s a lot of funding to teach immigrants Dutch.

Cleaning is the stereotype job for immigrants that don’t speak Dutch, since that job is funded 2/3rd with tax money. The client pays 10 euros per hour and the cleaner earns 13,64 euros per hour. + Free e bike. Can get this job without speaking Dutch, because there’s just such a high demand.

We have a lot of doctors per capita.

Walkable cities like Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, … All cities are walkable.

High social mobility. A lot can be achieved within 1 generation.

It’s a pretty nice country. But my wife does call it boring as fuck 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thanks for the detailed report, bout USA my only information is social media which is limited. I did see a rise in bottom 50%'s wealth % during Biden’s term. But the income gini is still 0,42 so I suppose that’s meaningless.

About 20% of the Flemish people voted for Vlaams belang, they are in general the less educated folks.

That’s why Vlaams belang has to portray themselves as “for the man”. Bring back industry to Belgium, promote manual labour jobs for Belgians.

It’s just a stunt, because they (together with the Marxists) are banished from being in the government. They always are in opposition. The other parties long ago agreed to that.

Vlaams belang is the 2nd largest party now, but in opposition. Luckily. The only issue is that they can always complain about anything that went wrong and promise heaven if people vote for them. Then when shove comes to push “oops, sorry guys we can’t help, we wish we could, but we’re in opposition”. They’ve never actually had to prove themselves capable leaders. They get paid well though.

Aight, I agree it’s better to give positive help at one group instead of trying to punish the other.

Have at it, fuck your country up. Europe and China will love to exploit a weakened America

Aight, I’m a social democrat. Am I a leftist?

Good

Liberals are socially leftist. LGBTQ stuff, women empowerment, environment stuff, pro universal healthcare, …

Personally I view american politics as right wingers compared to west Europe, but oh well.

They still are viewed as a hundred million people on this planet that vote for the left side of their country’s politicians.

It’s not that easy with USA. Bernie Sanders is likely the most left wing there. AOC likely the same.

Joe Biden was less left wing, but he still helped people out during the pandemic compared to what republican’s would have done.

Here in Belgium you have more choice. You can choose between anti immigration, regionalists, liberals, Christian centrists, environmentalists, social democrats and Marxists.

Broader choice. Here in Belgium the left wing is considered environmentalists, social democrats and Marxists.

While liberals, although socially left wing, are economically right wing. Basically the party for the small entrepreneurs. The other right wing party is more for the multinationals. While the anti immigration party actually is quite socialist economically, but the same old “own people first” shit. It just so happens that being a conservative in Belgium means being somewhat of a socialist economically.

Pretty funny, there’s not much difference between extreme right and extreme left here. Basically just… is the socialist a racist or not lol

I’m literally going to financially reward my wife for taking time off work in order to take care of our kid.

Parenting is labour. When you’re parenting, you can’t be doing a different job.

My wife’s parents in Indonesia don’t have a pension much. It’s barely anything. Her mom just gets money from my wife and her 2 sisters.

That’s how it used to be for a long time, pension is relatively new.

So in the vast majority of history, parents always were financially rewarded for having children.

Median age in Indonesia is 30, while in Belgium it’s 42. While we’re far wealthier in resources. People just stopped having children because it wasn’t necessary anymore.

We can’t act like this isn’t a problem, unless the people that willingly caused the aging population issue take full responsibility and go through hardships in order to help the society battle a period of low work force.

Do you think you’re a good person? 👀

These families already are adequately supported. We need to find a way to guide people into the actions we want them to do.

Like, they want me to stop using the car to work. Okay, they allow everyone at my hospital to use their taxes to pay for a commuting e bike. It’s a financial incentive. (Don’t worry I’m not a healthcare worker, just administration, I am not the right person to work with people in need).

Indeed there are exceptions and therefore exemptions. If a medical examination says that it’s difficult for you or your partner to have children, then they’d be exempted of any punishment.

I don’t think it’s psychologically a smart move to punish not having kids, but to reward having kids. That’s why I say “extra pension”. (By behind closed doors reducing pensions in general first, but they don’t know that).

Helping people that can’t have kids… We could allocate resources to them to help them adopt a child. Something like that. Once again, psychologically it would help them accept this. People give them the option that nature didn’t provide them.

We’re competing against the funds actually. I own ETFs that tracks the Stoxx 600. It has a yearly expense of 0,07% while bank funds would take like 2% or whatever.

Personally I’m not even thinking about my pension, cannot know what will happen in 37 years so I’m definitely taking it into my two own hands to accumulate assets.

Now, I understand why a pension is desirable. It’s a safety net. And I agree with that. High minimum pension for anyone who is unable to work due to old age. Just like for people who can’t work for other reasons.

But as Belgian, I know a lot of people that try and take advantage of our social safety nets. For a lot of people it’s not because they need it, but view it as an extra passive income while doing nothing.

That’s damaging to the social democrats. We need to get rid of the abuse, the corruption. We need to motivate people to do effort and reward that. And we have. Minimum wage in Belgium is quite high. Income inequality is 0,26 gini. Median net wealth is 250k euros.

Motivating people to have kids is also a necessity. To live more together in the same household. To use fewer resources. Be economically sustainable in the long term.

People are scared in Belgium, everyone is retiring. We’ve been accepting a lot of immigrants to help us out with this. Luckily, second generation immigrants are tremendously helpful.

To have a meaningful social net, we do need a good amount of people that can work. That can be parents.

We need to motivate people. And everyone that really cannot help society with this, they are exempted of course.

My friend her parents never worked a day in their lives. It’s absolutely normal. Her dad’s disabled and her mom takes care of him.

But another guy “didn’t work for 10 years cuz his knees hurt” while he randomly showed up at our hospital working, magically, when he’d lose his free passive income. He’s doing a desk job. Like everyone else.

Believe it or not, but I also am a leftist. Social democrat.

I say a lot of bad stuff though. Like: old people that did not have kids, should have less pension and use the money they have been saving up by not having kids.

This is seen as insane, but… old people are the wealthiest class in most societies.

Yes there are exceptions and these people need help. High minimum pension for sure. They need a decent life.

But why would I want someone who didn’t even have a kid to replace themselves as productive entity to gain a fantastic passive income on top of their already passive income generating assets?

a compromise would be something as simple as: retired person above age 65 gets +amount of euros per working child in insert home country.

It would incentivise having kids.

The reaction I get usually is that it’s inhumane, that people are seen as production houses only, that people don’t wanna be born… A lot of doomer stuff to be honest.

It would be fun if there’s a place where you can only deny an idea if you can replace it with your own solution to the issue. In this case “aging population” (popular issue in Belgium right now)

Tankies go to .ml while liberals go to the other spaces. You don’t really interact with eachother, there’s several types of leftists etc.

I’m banned on several ml’s and several liberal’s.

They do not like people to talk back.

They moderate the places so that it works as an echo chamber. Mainly for leftists. Not many right wing people are coming towards Lemmy.

It’s pretty silly, Lemmy is at one hand designed so that everyone can see eachother’s content and opinions.

But at the other side, the spaces are moderated so that only their own opinions are allowed.

So there’s a lot of polarisation instead of compromise.

Then you end up with extremists having power that wrecks havoc.

Compromise is the enemy of extremists. They love it that we separate ourselves so easily.

Liberals Vs tankies

Leftist infighting is what happens here.

Lemmy is just left wing politics in an echo chamber

Do we see mastodon posts here on Lemmy?

We lack a translate button. Rednote and weibo have translate buttons. We need that.

There’s no central authority here. But if it doesn’t matter which instance you are on, then all the users on Lemmy are still just part of Lemmy.

On the graph I see other icons than Lemmy.

Are we able to see content from other social media? Or what is meant with that

I can imagine that spamming/constant harassment/advertising/etc can ruin a space. Especially when it can be automated.

Perhaps it would be better with temp bans and that moderation is automated in order to prevent bias.

It’s been 1 week since I found out about Lemmy, liking it quite a bit.

I wonder, is there an area on this social media that are extremist pro free speech?

Such as, okay you’re being a total shithead, I still won’t ban you.

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.

These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.

Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.