I've noticed that we have plenty of well-defined bestiary, but what about plants?
Yaos made the bestiary, but nobody really made any interesting plants. Serac made a few, but they are hardly plot-important. Feel free to make one yourself.
To say the very least, our infant mortality rate is the highest of all first-world countries.
Who cares about infant mortality rate? "Oh look Jimmy! The streets in this country are paved with gold!" "Yeah, but their infant mortality rate is slightly higher than ours. Thus our country is somehow better!"
If I would have to guess, I would assume this has to do with a much greater land area and much more rural people. After all, it is hard to get to the hospital just as your water is breaking when the hospital is several hours away.
Germany, if I remember right, is gonna have a budget surplus soon.
Budgets are nothing. Do you know how country budgets really work? We own more of other people's debts then we owe. Not to mention that 32% of our own debt is own by ourselves, so there is that.
Japan has better tech than us...
Really? How so? America has all the best high-tech stuff. It doesn't produce much of it, but it does design it. Do you even know what planet you are on right now?
China's economy...
Is based on what is essentially slave labor, and can't really exist without Americans buying things form them, and probably won't last. Sweatshops do not make for a great economy in the long run.
Australia hasn't had a mass shooting in years, if I remember correctly...
Mass shootings are a bit of a scape goat. Thousands are killed in normal crimes a year, with knives, cars, fists, and anything you can get your hands on. US murder rate is about the same as all the other countries. What is the difference between 20 people getting shot at once and 100 people getting shot over the course of a month in random crimes? Media coverage. Unless you have a reason that makes mass shootings worse than normal murder?
Wage discrepancies
Which no other country has?
police brutality
We know no other country has that one!
privatized prison systems and the fucked up way the legal system is/has been being handled(it should have been pretty hard to screw something like that up! We had it pretty good!)
Don't pretend you know anything about the legal system at all. I have a gut feeling you don't.
racism/sexism/forgetting about separation of church and state
"Forgetting about the separation of Church and State"? How so. I am legitimately baffled. Sexism/Racism are worse in other places than the US, especially recently. They are just a lot better at hiding it. The fact that America is the most culturally and racially mixed country pretty much ever has given the world its first chance at fighting racism, if anything.
only first world country to have to fight a civil war for slavery to end
That is making a complex issue into a caricature of itself. Do you really think that anyone, on this planet, kissed their wife, hugged their kids, grabbed their rifle and went to the door saying "Goodbye, my beloved family, I am off to fight for slavery! I know we don't own slaves, but that nice rich man does, and what is my life compared to that?". Do remember that these where people, human people, fighting in these wars. No war has ever been fought over a single issue, especially not one like slavery. It was part of it, but not the entire reason. Besides, why did we have slavery? If we are going back that far, it was because Britain wanted money and started the slave trade to get some more from America. In fact, if we look back at history, America had slavery for less time then most other countries did. It only existed for a few hundred years, while it had been legal in Europe for thousands before that.
gunboat diplomacy in Japan and assisting the Emperor in regaining power only a few decades after declaring the Monroe Doctrine....
Literally every country shot someone for money before, if it was powerful during the time that was acceptable. Unless you are saying this makes us better than literally all of Europe? We didn't even really kill anybody there, compared to say, England, which started a war just to sell drugs.
Yeah...America sucks
Even under your own criteria, if you hold any other country to it, America is better.
Or maybe just the UK.
Look at the history of "The English Empire", they did much worse than America ever did. You do realize they just gave up some of their colonies at the end of WWII, right? Ghandi wasn't facing Nazis or anything, he was facing the British. Who then proceeded to mess up and create the Pakistan/India situation. Not to mention South Africa, or going back pre-1900s...
(also regarding communism; China tells those economic degree people to suck it, and overbearing capitalism can be just as much a dystopian nightmare as communism. Like I said, we just fail at making things work, when it has to do with large groups of people, and there isn't an enemy to rally against.)
China isn't a real communist country, in fact, it is only successful because it embraces capitalist ideas. A google search could tell you that. Overbearing capitalism "could" just in the same way an overbearing republic "could" be as bad as a dictatorship. In theory, but in practice it never has been. "Coulds" are pretty stupid like that. And what would having people rally against something help Communism in any way?