Doctor_Satan

If i had to guess, it’s probably less money (certainly right now that’s the case) and more to do with all the bureaucracy.

That Forbes article is 6 years old. Money has been the issue for a long time. On top of a dwindling and almost nonexistent middle class, traveling abroad from the US is just more expensive than traveling abroad from a European country because we have to cross huge oceans.

You can wake up tomorrow and drive all the way across america, with basically no paper work. I would be surprised if many people in america even had valid passports to be honest.

With travel to Europe being so expensive for Americans, our foreign destinations of choice have historically been Mexico or Canada. Americans didn't used to need a passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, and even some Caribbean countries, as long as we went by land or by sea (flying always required a passport). We could just drive or take a cruise there like we were going to any other state. After 9/11, the government began pushing the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and in 2007, passports became mandatory even for driving to Mexico and Canada. So instead of going through the hassle of getting a passport, a lot of Americans are just choosing not to travel outside the country at all.

Not to mention all the work you have to do in preparing overseas accommodations. And potential language barriers. Traveling outside of the US has got to be like 10x more difficult than traveling inside the US.

It really is. And since we don't make it mandatory to learn a foreign language in school (unlike most European countries), the language barrier is a big deal.

I also imagine that if people DO travel outside, they’re going to go on a big trip, to see a lot of things, and it’s going to be more expensive. It’s just how that kind of thing tends to work. It’ll be some shit like a wedding, for example.

Which puts overseas travel out of reach for most Americans.

I wish I could say yes, and maybe between shit like this and Elon threatening Social Security there will be enough angry people to make a third party viable, but I'm not holding my breath on that. This country has been in love with binary choice since the beginning. Everything is black or white, good or evil, win or lose, right or wrong, us or them... You introduce any kind of nuance and people lose their fucking minds.

Same logic evangelical Christians use to oppress LGBTQ folks here at home, Chuck. But you knew that, which is why you don't care about that either, beyond your performative outrage to get votes.

These crusty old dirt worshipers need to go. Every last one of them.

If you think of the government like a restaurant, it makes more sense. Pretty much every restaurant has to deal with vermin, to varying degrees. Most of the time, the restaurant keeps it under control through regular cleaning, but you still see a roach every now and then. Maybe even a rat. So you set traps and you kill the fuckers. If it gets too bad, you hire a professional to come in and exterminate. If you're diligent, the rats and roaches are extremely rare, your food is protected, and the customers never see vermin. But if you walk into a restaurant and see a rat crawling across the dessert display in broad daylight, that restaurant has a HUGE fucking problem. They have an infestation. The rats are eating well, and have become unafraid of being seen.

These monumental fuck-ups like Pete Hegseth are vermin. They are rats and roaches that are brazenly crawling all over the tables, out in the open in broad daylight. If this is what we the customers see, then what's behind the walls and in the kitchen and in the dry goods storage is a thousand times worse. The American restaurant is infested. It needs to be tented and fumigated.

I see a legislative and legal way out. impeach trump for breaking the law

Sorry, I should've been more clear. I meant a legal or legislative way out that's realistic. Even when we had the numbers to impeach Trump twice, we still didn't have the numbers (two thirds) to convict him and remove him from office. The Schumer-Pelosi gang of octogenarian Dems isn't going to control Congress with those numbers ever again. It'll be at least a generation before the Democratic party has that kind of power (if it ever happens), and Trump will be long in the ground by then.

More laws and amendments to enshrine civil liberties and to clearly limit executive power. laws to limit money in politics and make clear that coporations are not persons. stuff like that.

There are two ways to ratify a Constitutional amendment. The first way is to get two thirds of both the House and Senate to vote in favor of the amendment, and then to ratify it you need three quarters of all state legislatures to approve it without changing the wording, otherwise the whole process starts over. The second way is to have two thirds of all states petition Congress for a Constitutional convention (34 states), and again have three quarters of all states approve of the amendment word-for-word (38 states). No amendment has ever been approved by the second method.

For perspective, in the 111th Congress of 2009 following Obama's historic crushing win against McCain, the House was 255-D and 179-R, and the Senate was 57-D, 41-R, and 2-I (who caucused with Dems). This was the strongest the Dems had been since the 90s. To get a Constitutional amendment passed and ratified in 2009, Democrats would've had to convince 33 Republican Representatives and 9 Republican Senators to vote in favor of an amendment, and then assuming that every single Democratic state legislature is 100% on board, they'd have to pray that all 8 split legislature states and at least 3 Republican state legislatures approve it for ratification without changing a single word.**

For even more historical perspective, the last time Democrats controlled enough of Congress and state legislatures to theoretically pass and ratify a Constitutional amendment without any Republican support was between 1937 and 1939, and they still didn't do it (though they did get a ton of New Deal stuff done).

Nothing would make me happier than for the midterms to turn into an alcoholic moment of clarity for the American working class, where "we the people" finally sober up and vote every one of these feckless do-nothing weakling scumbags out, and elect people who will impeach and convict Trump and all his cronies, and amend or straight up rewrite the Constitution to enshrine laws in favor of the people, instead of the monied class. It's just not realistic.

dirty tricks for good though is impossible to fix the system.

I agree. You can't fix the system with dirty tricks. But you can crush Fascists with dirty tricks. It's not ideal, but it may be the only way to get them out. But like I said, coming back from that is the hard part. Once people in power get used to playing dirty, they never willingly stop. They have to be stopped.

**someone check my numbers in this paragraph, it's 4am and I may not be mathing properly

I don't see any legal or legislative way out of the mess we're in when the current government (and about a third of the country) doesn't believe in the law or the rules of legislation, and the so-called "opposition" party is weak and feckless at best, and complicit at worst. We either either get our hands dirty or have a civil war. I'm open to ideas that don't involve wither one. but I can't think of any.

Imagine trying to justify killing babies by claiming babies are involved in combat.

I test drove a couple of Teslas way back in the day. You know what the big selling point was? The "Easter egg" that shows the surface of Mars on the GPS. Oh, and the James Bond Lotus one. It was at that point that I realized this was not a serious company, and it was run by a dork ass 4Chan edgelord.

America is a huge fucking country. If you want to have interesting travel, there are PLENTY of places you can go within america alone.

I would love for this to be the answer for why most Americans don't travel internationally. The US is massive, and it's one of the most geographically diverse countries on earth. Just look at this list of ecoregions of the US. Also, damn near every nationality you can think of has made a home here, and they brought their culture with them. There are Congolese enclaves in North Carolina, Somalian enclaves in Minnesota, Cambodian enclaves in California, Indian enclaves in New York, Finnish enclaves in Oregon, French enclaves in Alabama... The list goes on and on. It's actually insane how much beautiful variation there is here, both geographically and culturally.

Unfortunately, the real reason most Americans don't travel abroad is far more depressing. The numbers that Dogiedog64 was citing come from a survey conducted by OnePoll, which wound up in this Forbes article.

In fact, survey results showed 76 percent of the respondents wanted to travel more than they do currently. The reasons they gave for why they don't are what you would expect: mainly due to a lack of finances or just feeling unprepared and ill-equipped to venture forth into unknown territory. More specifically, 63 percent of Americans who have never left the country said an international trip would be out of their price range.

When you consider that nearly 40% of Americans can't cover an unexpected $400 expense, it starts to make sense that so many Americans don't travel abroad. It's heartbreaking that we basically invented "grind culture", and yet most of us can't afford the same kind of vacation that a minimum wage worker in Denmark gets.

Most people wouldn't, which is why this argument is a non-starter for me. When people say Dems should've played dirty to stop the Republicans, I just roll my eyes. It would never work, because the majority of people who vote Dem would never support that kind of politicking under normal circumstances. But now we're at the precipice, and we are slowly finding out that even the most milquetoast Dem voters are willing to support the dirtiest tricks just to get out from under the grip of this techno-fascist bullshit.

I just hope we can find our way back to some kind of sanity once the dust settles.

I don't know, but it just doesn't roll off the tongue the way "cold turkey" does.

I can tell you right now, there won't be a legal route to a new constitution without a civil war. There is no way that enough people in power would support rewriting that document.