[FourEsters]

It always makes me laugh when Americans go on about how they are a "classless society". The US is quite possibly the most classist society in the Western world with massive differences between the haves and the have nots. Many things that are seen as the norm for everyone in most European countries are made completely inaccessible to low-waged people in the US.

A good way of getting people out of poverty and destitution is education, yet in the US this is in most cases totally inaccessible to people who aren't born into upper-middle class lifestyles. In the UK (the country that have the audacity to call classist), university costs £3000 a year, in the US, try a figure closer to $20,000 a year for a low ranking state university, and if you want to go to a top private one, try closer to $40,000. In the UK the cost is still £3000 a year whether you go to a shitty new university or Oxford.

And its the same with healthcare, the very lowest wage families in the US don't even have any health insurance at all, and allegedly 35% of the country doesn't have enough insurance. For a country to call itself non-classist and yet to have a situation whether over a quater of the country doesn't even have health care is insane. If these people get ill they can be sure to loose any assets and life they have.

How on earth is this US not a classist country when to afford to better yourself you have to have big money to start with? It seems in the US people born into low class backgrounds will stay in a low class background unless they win the lottery or get extremely lucky.

The US sort of reminds me of 1800s UK attitude a bit. The UK brought in some form of health care for normal people in 1911, something the US didn't do until 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...rance_Act_1911

[farmarrl]

United States is the country where capitalism is closes to its purest form. It may not be class based on race, ethnicity (though that's debatable), it's class based on how much money you have in your bank account.

I watched an American movie a few months ago (She's out of my league), in which the character said he couldn't go to college due to money problems. University education is almost free (very low fees like 150 euros) or free in many European countries, also Turkey. A poor guy from a small village in god knows where can study at the best universities if he is intelligent enough.

[Czrzftmz]

How many people in USA never goes to collage?

I think mostly of white people.

[ZX3URrBH]

The U.S. has always been a class based society, to state anything other is to be ignorant of U.S. history and current affairs, in that regard I would agree with the OP's premise pertaining to the foolishness in claims surrounding the nature of the U.S. being classless (in a capitalist society being classless would be impossible, no?). Class structure in the U.S. goes back to the inception, whether it be the pseudo-feudalism of the Antebellum Southeast or the industrial class structure propagated by the Yankees.

On a side note, I do not state this as to show support for any one way of structuring a society, just to illustrate what has existed and currently exists.

[zatronanec]

It is.