To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.
If your judgment of "badly distributed" comes from all the homeless people that you see, those people have fallen through like a dozen safety nets to get to that point and most of them cannot be helped.
You could literally hire a full-time dedicated team of 10 social workers and mental health professionals to care for 1 crazy SF hobo and it still wouldn't turn around their lives, they're too far gone.
You never see the iceberg of people who are successfully helped by American welfare.
