It's because we were a nation founded by violence and oppression and built on the backs of a slave race, none of which are practices we ever truly abandoned.

You have healthcare, affordable schooling, and labor unions because, wherever you are, your populace is considered a workforce, not a slave race. When your society relies on a workforce, you want them healthy so they can work longer, you want them educated so they can work smarter, and you want them comfortable enough with their salaries and their hours to feel they can afford to have kids, who will one day join the workforce.

Governing bodies in the US don't need us healthy, smart, or comfortable. They just need us to 1) work (hence tying our healthcare to our work hours), and 2) breed (hence minimal sex education, poor access to contraception, abortion bans, etc).

They don't need to give us healthcare (or education, or basic human necessities or rights), because as long as we're breeding, it's cheaper if we just die. And if that ever bothers us enough to take to the streets (which it has, many times), our local police forces are highly militarized and have no qualms about doing to us what their white ancestors did to my native and black ones (which they have, many times).

And to be clear, this isn't meant to be a woe-is-America spiel. These are problems that we've had many opportunities to address over the years, but let hubris, bigotry, and plain old stupidity get in the way. This is very much a mess of our own making, so I'm not trying to throw a pity party, just addressing your confusion.

TL;DR: Violence, oppression, and slavery. The tried and true American way.

The US specifically didn't choose a two party system. We accidentally set one up. The math proving that FPTP has a 100% guaranteed chance to devolve into a two party system hadn't been done until the mid 1800s

The problem with that is there are doctors with individual opinions gatekeeping that welfare. One might think you're disabled, while another might think you can get better. I've been stuck in just that kind of limbo for almost a decade. I'm required to look for a job each month that everyone involved knows I could never do, and so I have to live on the bare minimum until I reach some arbitrary threshold to get the pension I should've gotten a long time ago.

Meanwhile my family suffers, I have to spend what little I get on the medicine keeping me breathing and when I finally get it I'll be too far gone to have any time left.

All this because I happened to get a disease rare enough that there are no experts and it just so happens to interact with the asthma I already had in unpredictable ways.

So tell me, who should decide who's disabled and who isn't?

Because your favorite authors, screenwriters, poets, bands would be homeless under what counts as "work," or they'd not have the time, money, energy to invest in their preferred work.

Its literally a choice if you live on the streets here.

What if you can't find work for whatever reason (e.g. there's high unemployment and not enough jobs for everyone, or the person is somehow considered "unemployable," but not necessarily disabled)? What about single parents with infants/toddlers? Are there a lot of "bullshit jobs" where you live?

at this point, most of us were born into it.

by the time we were born, it was so entrenched nothing but horrible bloodshed could change it.

we've been inundated with news and media since early childhood not to rise up for that change and many of us have (until recently) been left comfortable enough that we don't want to risk what remains.

we've been made to believe (by the aforementioned propaganda) that we can vote in real change. some of us still want this to be true. it's becoming apparent this may not be the case. we're terrified.

I don't understand why anyone thinks it's a good idea to have a two party system.

It doesn't matter if the candidate you're voting for supports the two party system. This current election is the most important one of our lifetimes. So we'll keep voting for people who support the two party system because of the two party system.

I had to take early retirement last year due to a spinal injury that causes random vertigo attacks that drop me to the shop floor more than once a week. Hated like hell to do it but didn't want to be fired as a safety risk since it would've prevented me from getting work anywhere else. The company was visibly relieved by my decision as well so I guess it was my time to drop off the chain, no pun intended.

Yet

national economies handle being welfare states just fine, which isn't so different from what a UBI would be. Also developed service economies live and die by consumption. A UBI would stabilise and stimulate domestic consumer demand.

The Comingle app (beta) is seeking to start our own UBI without relying on the government to do it for us. Seems very promising

how so? why not?

It will only take 1 generation willing to fight for the change.

Or don't wait, and start doing things French style today.

I'd define it as such:

• Health care (this includes good food and water)
• Housing
• Transport
• Education & Information systems

Medical care

Housing

Food

Water

Internet

It’s an ideological position, yes we should be striving for a non-ableist society