Defending free Ukranian land from Russian invasion is important to keep American influence across the globe. Your comment about Taiwan is just a complete conjecture, but we would absolutely respond the same way w/ Taiwan as we are with Ukraine. More USA influence over the world = a freer, richer, more democratic, happier world. Of course you should want as much of it as possible.
Is Ukraine free when the US is meddling in its internal politics and orchestrating coups to protect ‘American influence’? Where is the freedom and riches you promise in all the countries the US has bombed over the past 60 years?
Protecting ‘American influence’ = an unending payday for the corrupt military-industrial complex monopolies and nothing more.
> ... mportant to keep American influence across the globe ... More USA influence over the world = a freer, richer, more democratic, happier world
You just proved my point about US imperialism and "protecting its interest" around the globe is the main economic hindrance for both Europe, and the rest of the world.
You can't be rich if you are under the control of an evil empire. Even if you claim that being colonized is for their own good, the US is still an evil empire, since all empires are evil by definition.
> The US organized the coup in Ukraine, overthrew the legally elected president, installed a puppet government
That is a narrative that is majorly rejected outside of Russia. Inside Russia, this is taken on faith, because, well, its Russia.
Of course, invading and occupying parts of a country isn't considered as imperialism in Russia itself if its the one doing it, because..well..its Russia.
There was nothing wrong with organizing a coup in Ukraine and getting rid of pro Russian president and government. I have no idea why you think that narrative is rejected outside of Russia.
Europe has largely been behind the US economically ever since being decimated by the World Wars. Allowing Russia to freely expand without penalty is undoubtedly the worse economic decision.
That is if you believe the threats in the news that Russia is an enemy of Europe, which is of course not. Any claim that Russia would plan to invade the EU is just propaganda. A little knowledge of history suffices to recognise that.
Russia is, and will always be an enemy. They will never drop their imperialist ideals until possibly beaten in Ukraine. If they have a chance they'll take the Baltic countries and maybe Poland. A little knowledge of history suffices to recognise that.
the main reason they wont do it is because the economies and populations facing them in that case would be worth over 40 trillion have almost a billion people.
> US refusal to allow Europe to buy cheap energy from Russia
Europeans passed laws to cut it off. Nothing American did. Europeans don't want to fund the guns that will be used by Russians when they decide who to invade next.
I don’t think pissing off the largest military power in the world is a good idea for Europe when there’s currently a hot war going on there. That spreads and who do you think Europe will be asking for help?
God, you don't kick out US army in one shot. You build your army up to the task and then elbow the others out.
I mean, it's going to be a lot of expenses, but it's the crucial first step if EU wants its own independent policies.
That said, just my personal opinion. I could be wrong. Maybe it's perfectly fine to have someone else's army on your soil. Maybe you already have independent policies but just happen to agree to the other side more or less. I'm not of EU or US citizen so I could be wrong.
> Sure, but that would also eventually lead to a war between the US and EU
Do you really think that the US will wage war against Europe if they refuse to keep the US army on its soil and pay for protection? You mean they won't just leave peacefully and let the Europeans take care of themselves?
I don't think so, US is a democracy. That would be illegal.
Or maybe, just maybe, US will find a passing explanation why it is a good idea to start a war against Europe.
If EU wants american military bases out, then I'm all for it. Why do you people want so much killing?
Then, you turn around and say " look at how much killing religion/ideology/etc has done" but at the end of the day it pales in comparison to the kills the military industrial complex has racked up and you defend because a guy with the opposite political affiliation than you can't ever be right. But hey, think of the GDP.
Are you making the assumption that I am American with the "you people" comment? Well when will you please realise not everyone on here is necessarily American ;)
Also the EU countries don't get to be part of NATO I guess without an American base or two there. When shit starts rocking...who are those EU countries going to come ah knocking to? and oh its ah rocking!
Why are you making the assumption that I somehow like "military industrial complex" based on my comment?
Talk about jumping to conclusions! Please point out where? Cool thanks, that's what I thought.
I'd argue that at some point in the past the empire understood that a strong Europe is in its interest, right now it's just devouring its vassal though. That cannot end well ...
As a US taxpayer, I would love if Europe started carrying it's own weight militarily rather than having our taxes pay for European security. The Ukraine conflict at least seems to have woken some Europeans up to the fact that they need to contribute equally to NATO instead of just relying on the US. But there doesn't seem to be much of an appetite in Europe for trading social spending for defense spending. It's more fun to dunk on American healthcare and pretend that Putin just really wants to be buddies.
Maybe, but US hegemony is sort of important. It keeps our dollar the currency of choice and allows us to print money. A mainly obedient and docile EU makes a perfect platform for power projection. It’s a good deal for the US and makes treasuries even more in demand.
Now, how we spend it is up for debate. But I’d be careful about throwing the baby out with the bath water.
> As a US taxpayer, I would love if Europe started carrying it's own weight militarily rather than having our taxes pay for European security.
Why does your government push Europe to pay more for the military? Why would that interest you? Why don't you just move out your army and stop caring about Europe?
> The Ukraine conflict at least seems to have woken some Europeans up to the fact that they need to contribute equally to NATO instead of just relying on the US.
So the Ukraine conflict pushed Europeans to do more of what the USA wants them to do? It looks like it was beneficial to the US, after all. Pure luck that it started so suddenly :)
> But there doesn't seem to be much of an appetite in Europe for trading social spending for defense spending. It's more fun to dunk on American healthcare and pretend that Putin just really wants to be buddies.
I think your army should just stop "protecting" those evil and condescending Europeans. Just leave Europe and let them suffer for their choices.
Even inflation "truthers" truflation.com had to stop showing their chart of "true" inflation because it had dropped so much. Prices now are higher than they were 3 years ago, but continued inflation is not currently a problem.
Ain't it funny how the raw potatoes dug out of the ground are just as cheap as they were 5 years ago here in my state, while potato chips have doubled in price? Even the supermarket brand chips are still only a couple dollars.
That sound like "Inflation" to you? Steak is still $8/lb but my sugar free soda is suddenly twice as expensive
Appreciate you fighting the good fight here, but this one is actually a valid point. If real GDP growth is at 4.9% while the government deficit is at 5.3% of GDP, (in most cases) GDP isn't actually growing organically.
That's not really how it works. US deficit spending isn't producing goods or services. It can motive the production thereof, but it doesn't change the fact that actual things were produced and then purchased using that money.
If people took 100% of the government deficit spending and left it in a savings account, it wouldn't count towards GDP. But clearly that's not happening.
No, it is really how it works, (as I caveated) most of the time.
I don't understand what you're arguing here. Is your claim that most of that government deficit was not spent in the domestic economy (therefore stimulating GDP growth)?
The US economy is not growing through innovation which is what is always implied.
Its "growing" because we are 1) printing more money 2) replacing American workers with wage slaves from poor countries to work for peanuts and pocketing the difference.
Do you have any pointers or read about either of these? Because to the best of my understanding neither of these can explain a GDP growth as high as this.
Nothing can explain GDP as high as this and it will quietly be revised downward at a later date after politicians have long since finished their victory laps.
That seems like a political belief, and not one based on any numbers... GDP growth was expected to be high. There are plenty of economists that can explain all the current phenomenon, they just get called "heterodox"
If you are talking about "slave wages" then I am asking for some pointers to numbers that show that the US is relying on imports more, rather than less.
I don't think there is any growth in US that Europeans have to be jealous of. Any "growth" is just more wealth for billionaires, at a high cost to individuals.
Health spending accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy [1]. Between 2000 to 2020 health expenditure tripled from 1.4 trillion to 4 trillion, at a 4.2% annual growth rate. This is projected to accelerate, grow at 5.3% and reach 6.8 trillion by 2030. [3]
It is mostly health-care, which grows faster than the economy. Then higher rents, high cost of food, the numbers go up! Almost all sectors are monopolies/oligopolies with pricing power, they can extract more and more. Of course, the numbers will go up. But I doubt anybody is happier.
GDP is the worst metric ever devised. Even the guy who came up with it said not to look at it. If we ever fix healthcare the GDP is going to plummet, and everything other than GDP is going to be way better.
Here in Spain health spending is so high that you have to pray to the gods to see a GP. Usually you end up having to go to the ER for any kind of problem because there are no appointments available for weeks.
Food and rent have skyrocketed these years. The official inflation numbers are a joke, they are like... 5%? When food has gone up in average by at least 50%.
The growth in the US economy between 2000 and 2020 has resulted in many high-paying software jobs, including my own. Absolute BS that it’s all going to billionaires
Europeans can boost the GDP significantly by embracing American style healthcare.
For example, having an appendicitis in US increases the GDP by $10K but in most of Europe it barely moves the needle, thus Europeans lag in GDP metrics for the same healthcare.
Fresh, healthy produce as standart? Maybe good for people but destroys the GDP statistics. If Europeans embraced the idea that healthy stuff is for the rich and charge for it accordingly, they too can extract much more numbers from the tomatoes and have nicer GDP.
I'm sure there is more adjustment than in your caricature, but it is interesting to wonder how exactly a medical procedure contributes to GDP when every patient gets a different price and a significant fraction skip the bill (7% of people currently have significant unpaid medical debts).
Every patient getting a different price should not be an issue, nothing is priced the same everywhere and there's plenty of stuff priced per client.
So the situation with the US is that, their spendings on healthcare is gigantic percentage of their GDP and Germany is a distant second with the rest of the Europe and the world trailing behind. US also doesn't have much to show for that spending, all the health and longevity metrics are worse than Europe. The defence is usually that Americans are paying for R&D and UK, Europe and the 3rd world are freeloaders. The counterargument is that, US relies heavily on immigrant researches that were trained in those countries those they foot some of the bill for the R&D and non-trivial costs of the healthcare in US is in administrative costs and not drug or machinery that was R&D'ed in US.
So we can argue over the issue all they long but the fact remains that there's lots of accounting differences so it's not possible to compare GDP number to GDP number and if you compare other metrics about the output of that GDP, the USA lags quite a bit behind countries with much lower GDP or GDP per capita.
US of course has it's own unique strengths, making it the dominant country of the world.
The biggest problem is there isn’t a critical mass of dynamic, global companies that can move the needle. This creates a feedback loop for the economy in general.
There’s only so many luxury bags and apparel that can be sold. Europe needs to come to grips with their risk adverse investing culture because there’s a great pool of talent there. But it isn’t being utilized well.
We can also increase government spending by $1 trillion and therefore increase our GDP by $1 trillion.
The US government is running a deficit that is equivalent of the GDP of Spain, while Americans life expectation is similar to third world countries. I don't see this as wealth generation.
The US choses to have too many suburbs which incurs a huge cost to maintain so many streets, and typical US states are completely brankrupt, so federal government needs to constantly save and help (like Biden's Build Back Better campaign and infrastructure package).
Because of this, US will always have a huge GDP that will just keep growing, but whether this is really better for the citizens, I have my own fair of questions.
It's very cheap to get some running shoes and go running and stay healthy, but some countries think they need protein powers, gatorade and Crossfit gyms in order to maintain a "healthy" lifestyle, maybe even take some testosterone, that all become GDP numbers, that's why GDP is a useless metric when comparing countries.
A lot of the US supposed growth is over the death of European economy. Just look at how many German companies are moving to the US and how much the Europeans are paying for US natural gas. The US won't ever say no to Saudi Arabia even as it commits war crimes in Yemen, but Europe is supposed to say no to Russia's raw materials.
The US doesn't import much from Saudi Arabia. It is mainly for East Asia and Europe. Even tiny, little Belgium imports as much oil and gas from Saudi Arabia as the US does.
And the Yemen conflict is nearing a negotiated end. Soon you can stop worrying about Belgian economic support for Saudi war crimes.
Not even close. There are no negotiations underway for peace in the east. Between Russia and Ukraine about 3000 soldiers are estimated killed in the last week alone.
Meanwhile in Yemen the UN says fighting has subsided[0] and Iran and Saudi Arabia have begun rehabilitation of relations[1]. Comparing a frozen conflict in its negotiated end stages to an active war with thousands of casualties a week and hundreds of missile strikes on cities each month screams complete ignorance of the war you pretend to care about.
So you don't care about Yemen, it was only a red herring. Well whatever your reason for raising the argument, it hasn't influenced western European governments like Belgium to prefer Russian gas over any other sources.
GDP numbers like this are adjusted both for CPI and for seasonal savings. So by any metric that is agreed upon by economists, yes it is growing at a great clip.
I'm curious what aspects of inflation you think are not covered by CPI. I see lots of pessimism from people that is not because of their own experience or any numbers that they can point to, and I'm always curious why. For me, it's housing. I want to move to a bigger house but there's almost nothing on the market, and the very few houses in the market at absolutely astronomical prices relative to mortgage cost.
Are you referring to home sticker-price or life-of-mortgage price? Increasing mortgage costs are a direct consequence of Fed inflation-fighting policy. I personally benefited from the Greater Fool, selling and purchasing my home just when the buying frenzy was near its peak, making a tidy profit on my old home and locking in a 2.5% interest rate on the new one. But it was a frenzy.
There's no good way to force down housing costs without signaling to sellers that the prices are simply too high (because no one can afford the mortgage).
There are costs associated with making it more difficult to move, of course, but the pessimism about being unable to afford loans is the very thing driving down inflation; so I actually consider that mood on the ground to be a positive signal for the economy.
It's actually not because there are too many doses right now, because most people can mot afford to move to a house of a comparable size.
There were way too many dollars when mortgage rates were at 2-3%, not at current mortgage rates there are very few dollars for buying homes.
This is less a monetary inflation of prices and more structural and supply related. Whoever said that "inflation is always a monetary phenomenon" was a religious nut, IMHO.
Most people now have super low mortgage rates, and could not afford to switch to a comparable home, because sticker prices have barely budged. This leads to a very tiny inventory of homes.
However, part do the reason that prices are staying high is that we are still under supplied on homes, and interest rates being high also means that construction starts will be way down, keeping those sticker prices higher for longer.
As others have pointed out, inflation is gamed. We’re paying 50+% higher prices on food, 100% more for fuel, 200% more in mortgage interest than two years ago, for example, but no inflation print has ever reflected that.
The totally subjective hedonic quality adjustment (sure food is more expensive but iPads have more ram!), also this knife only ever seems to cut one way, enshittification doesn't have a inflationary effect like you would expect.
Owner imputed rent as opposed to looking at what consumers actually pay.
The basket of goods is unrealistic, most households don't have teams of economists putting their shopping list together in order to maximally limit inflation.
There is owner imputed rent and rent. It’s two separate categories. Owner imputed rent is meant to capture the implied rent that home owners pay themselves. The old method used interest costs, which historically didn’t do a good job because if you lock in a 30-year mortgage rate then you have no inflation if rates rise.
>The totally subjective hedonic quality adjustment (sure food is more expensive but iPads have more ram!), also this knife only ever seems to cut one way, enshittification doesn't have a inflationary effect like you would expect.
Quality adjustment is only active for a few basket items, and their contribution to the overall cpi is minimal. All the extra food inflation that's supposedly happening isn't being held back by faster iPads.
>Owner imputed rent as opposed to looking at what consumers actually pay.
Most Americans are homeowners. For them, they don't pay any rent. Pretending that they pay market rent has no relation to what their actual expenses are. How do you propose we capture their expenses?
>The basket of goods is unrealistic, most households don't have teams of economists putting their shopping list together in order to maximally limit inflation.
I said two years ago, but yes, in fact I do have receipts from that period. Here's the breakdown between a combination of receipts from October 26th & 30th of 2021 vs. the prices today:
2021 2023 increase
-----------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------
Breaded Fillets 50 oz. | 5.46 | 14.48 | 165.2%
Polska Kielbasa Smoked Sausage, 14 oz | 3.48 | 3.98 | 14.4%
Goldfish Snack Crackers, 30 oz Carton | 1.53 | 2.64 | 72.5%
Darigold Eggnog, 1 Quart, 32 fl | 2.61 | 3.37 | 29.1%
Mini Pretzel Twists, 16 oz | 1.98 | 2.24 | 13.1%
Cheese Ravioli, Pasta, 25 oz bag | 2.98 | 4.27 | 43.3%
Original Dairy Whipped Topping, 13 oz | 2.98 | 3.20 | 7.4%
Au Gratin Potatoes, 4.7 oz | 1.18 | 1.68 | 42.4%
Organic Reduced Fat 2% Milk, 1 Gallon | 5.68 | 7.96 | 40.1%
Steamable Mixed Vegetables, 12 oz | 0.64 | 0.98 | 53.1%
Honey Maid Graham Crackers, 14.4 oz | 1.32 | 4.68 | 254.5%
Garlic Whole Fresh, 3ct Bag | 1.38 | 1.88 | 36.2%
Fresh Green Bell Pepper, Each | 0.66 | 0.76 | 15.2%
Fresh Whole Yellow Onions, Each | 0.36 | 0.70 | 94.4%
Fresh Whole White Mushrooms, 8 oz | 1.98 | 2.08 | 5.1%
Fresh Organic Grape Tomato, 10 oz | 1.96 | 2.83 | 44.4%
Organic Spring Mix Salad, 5 oz , Fresh | 2.76 | 2.98 | 8.0%
Snapple Peach Tea Drink, 64 fl oz | 2.18 | 2.28 | 4.6%
Greek Plain Nonfat Yogurt, 5.3 oz | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.0%
Yoplait Original Yogurt Pack, 8 Ct, 6 OZ | 3.98 | 4.94 | 24.1%
Tomato Sauce, 8 oz Can | 0.32 | 0.48 | 50.0%
Petite Diced Tomatoes, 14.5 oz | 0.64 | 0.96 | 50.0%
Dark Red Kidney Beans, 15.5 oz | 0.62 | 0.82 | 32.3%
Saltine Crackers, 16 oz, 4 Count | 1.02 | 1.74 | 70.6%
Buttermilk Pancake Mix, 32 oz Box | 2.48 | 2.82 | 13.7%
Cream Of Chicken Condensed Soup, 10.5 oz | 0.57 | 0.68 | 19.3%
"JIFFY" Honey Corn Muffin Mix | 0.72 | 0.78 | 8.3%
-----------------------------------------+-------+-------+-----
total | 52.11 | 76.85 | 47.5%
Please excuse the rounding in my earlier comment.
Edit to add: the table above is from Walmart grocery. We buy meat and most fruits and vegetables elsewhere, so except for the frozen fish, this list excludes most protein. If you just eat Costco rotisserie chicken, you would not have noticed a price increase.
PS to the edit: besides removing duplicates the list above is a raw combination of food items on two receipts without exclusions.
I'm actually surprised you are able to draw direct pricing comparisons, it feels like half the products I buy are now 15% smaller portion size while increasing in price.
Nice try. I said food costs 50% more and showed where that number came from. Now you're saying I need to reduce the standard of my "basked of goods" to make it fair. Guess what, that's how they come up with inflation numbers, too! Adjust the basket until you get the narrative you want. I had to substitute milk because a) it's a weekly purchase in our house and b) the previously cheapest brand in our area is no longer available, so I chose the next cheapest equivalent.
You asked for receipts, I gave you a literal transcript of my receipts at no cost to you with actual prices that showed a 47.5% increase in our grocery bill over the past two years. I showed you mine, you show me yours. Show me how you're not spending around 50% more than two years ago for equivalent products. Those two receipts are reasonably representative of the things we buy at Walmart and cover most food groups.
We typically buy the cheapest brand, usually private label store brands, except when there is a noticeable difference in quality. I took many brands off for brevity, but 12 of the 28 were Walmart brands and 5 were commodity vegetables. If a local chain grocer has a better price, we buy it there, but typically a week's worth of groceries cannot be found by just buying weekly specials.
The very reason I know where my receipts are and could make the list so quickly was because we are ruthless about keeping cost-of-living low, track prices religiously, and avoid spending money on higher priced equivalents within reasonable limits (there might be a cheaper price on widget foo across town, but if the transportation cost to get it is higher, then I cannot realize the cheaper price).
I could reduce my standards even further and replace all of it with boxed macaroni[0], but even that has increased 35% in the last 19 months[1] (the earliest price I can find, about 44% increase extrapolated to 24 months). (Target's store brand Mac & Cheese is only up 18%, but still more expensive than Walmart.)
It's good for a specific reason: you can see if this person did not buy the worst 6-7 items (or changed brands, you can find similar items for similar to 2021 prices today), their increase in grocery spending would have only been about 20%. That's still a lot, but it isn't 50%.
Walmart still sells organic milk for $5.98. You can get 8 packs of yogurt for $4 still. I can't find something for his breaded fish, but I guess that's not a luxury item. :(
Walmart claims to sell organic milk for $5.98, but it's been unavailable in our area since April. It was $5.68 at that time the last time we could buy it (April 6th, 2023). We can get Shamrock Farms for $5.78/96oz ($7.70/gallon, -26¢ from the table above), which would bring the total increase to 47.0%.
I can't find a cheaper equivalent for the frozen fillets[0]. There are differently breaded fillets for cheaper (23.8¢/oz vs 29¢/oz, wheat vs. corn), but they are still around 120% more than we paid for the ones we like in 2021. If I substitute those for this particular example receipt, the increase is _only_ 42.7%.
My point wasn't that I can't reduce my standard of living to live more cheaply. My point was that food prices have risen dramatically in the past two years. If I had already started on the cheapest foods and had nowhere lower to go, my prices would still have risen by approximately the same amount.
For fun, however, I went through and replaced each item with the cheapest equivalent at Walmart, including cases (like the fillets) where I would consider a decrease in my quality of life. That still leaves me at 32.8% increase in cost. And I'm eating soggy fillets, yogurt that tastes like aspartame, have to doll up my cornbread with extra ingredients, etc., etc.
If your cost of food has only gone up 20% since 2021, consider yourself lucky. That certainly isn't the case in our area. CPI says it's only gone up 14.3% in that same time period.
Don't buy frozen fillets if they cost too much. Buy chicken, or whatever.
I'm not saying you need to eat worse food, I'm saying prices of things fluctuate, and not everyone's grocery bill looks like yours. Being realistic, if you're upset that yogurt has gone up so much, don't buy it. Or, do buy it, but realize that not everything has gone up 35%. It's not true. 15-20% is the average.
I said prices went up, you say buy something else to keep the costs the same. Those are not equivalent. Even if I bought differently, I could not keep them the same (as commented elsewhere), and changing brands or products to keep costs the same does not prove that costs haven't risen. I'm missing the point you're trying to make. I showed the numbers. Not everything went up, some things went up a lot. The average price of my bill has gone up 47.5%. Show me a comprehensive receipt that hasn't.
Do the same with mortgages. In October 2021 a 15-year fixed rate mortgage was 2.55%. Right now it's 7.59%. What product can I replace if I need to move today vs. then? I'd have to go back one month to get 100% increase for gas, but September 2021 gas was 2.36 vs. 4.61 average September 2023, 95% change. What can I substitute for fuel?
Costco almost isn't a fair way to compare prices because they have intentionally been losing margin and raising prices as slowly as possible to retain customers.
eyeroll I give you a direct example of a 50% price increase and you just blah blah with some irrelevant bs
Ok, then let's look at my local Safeway. Shit is OUTRAGEOUS. If you don't think groceries haven't gone up 30/40/50% then apparently you don't look at any prices while you shop.
Costco doesn’t believe in lossleaders AND they have a policy of limiting their profit margins to a fixed percentage. So it seems like the would be perfect for comparisons.
2. If this were true, shouldn't we be seeing meteoric rise and fall in gdp during the pandemic, when the s&p 500 grew 40% within the span of less than 2 years?
I love how people are so confident with their completely incorrect statements that could be disproven in 30 seconds on Google. HN is basically reddit now.
does this account for government deficit spending? Because we are adding nearly 2 trillion to the deficit this year alone, around 8% of GDP.
The numbers I see coming out about the state of the economy just seem more and more out of sync with reality on the ground. Legit 5% GDP growth should mean a booming economy with people feeling good, yet people are struggling to cover their basic needs and pessimism seems high. I work remote so I see this in both the bubble of the tech world and in the "real world" outside of tech
basically, I'm wondering if we'd go into a recession immediately if the government was forced to cut spending to sustainable levels. The debt is finally hitting a point of no return where we have to cut, next year we'll spend more on debt interest payments than our military
the main argument that the economy is doing well is that "the labor market is strong" and unemployment is low, but how many jobs are tied to government deficit spending via contracts or direct employment? If that spending is cut back, I'd imagine the jobs numbers will quickly start to decline
The government has been reducing spending since all the COVID support in 2020 and 2021. At its peak, government spending was over $7 trillion, which was over 30% of GDP in 2020. It appears to be trending back to the pre-COVID ratio: ~20% of the GDP is government spending. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
That's really the key thing. What level is sustainable? I've come around to the idea that the main danger of deficit spending is inflation (because of the idea that government debt is private sector wealth).
The big levers the government have access to are spending and taxes. The first adds wealth, the second subtracts. In this way, government debt is really nothing like household debt that you and I have.
Inflation is their primary lever actually. Why bother paying down the debt when you can simply make it worth less? It's fiscally irresponsible, but that's how it works.
You seem to agree with Keynes. Assuming you’re in the lower 99%, are you wealthier in proportion to increases costs over the past quarter?
I personally don’t buy it. When other country’s start divesting from US treasury ties, the party will be over. Already prices are rising faster than income. What did Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina, Venezuela, etc. do wrong, that the US is doing right?
A better question is to ask what is Japan doing right since they are a lot farther down this path. Their debt to GDP ratio is something like 230% which is almost 2x the US ratio.
The answer is that Japan isn't doing it right. People struggle, taxes are high and pay is generally low (but for tourists, Japan is incredibly affordable). They still do OK, but we shouldn't see Japan as a model of how to do things.
The USD is in quite a unique place that makes this formula a lot more complex. For example, a mixture of being the global reserve currency, as well as the largest consumer market in the world helps the US to effectively 'export its inflation.' A quick search [1] on that term can turn up a bunch more hits than this brief(?) post.
Think about Carland, a country that makes lots of nice cars, and largely sells them to the US. Imagine the US decides to print a bunch of money, weakening our currency relative to Carland's. Carland's cars now cost more for Americans to buy. This might sound nice at first (for a Carlandian car peddler), but in reality what's going to happen is less cars are going to be sold, and your cars are likely to become less competitive than those from other countries. So the Carland government has a major incentive to try to weaken their own currency, and start doing exactly that. So other countries effectively end up absorbing much of our inflation, helping to greatly minimize the impact of any given batch of money-printing.
So if the USD hits a point where we're no longer able to effectively export our inflation, the result's not going to just be inflation. That's a SHTF moment, because it means we'll have reached a point where we're inflating so much that other countries simply can't afford to absorb it without or imperiling their own economies, or have become okay with not exporting much to the US. Given how extremely dependent we are on imports, this is going to be a catastrophe.
Beyond this there are lots of self-feedback effects to consider, especially with borrowing, but this post is already long enough!
The money is coming from somewhere. If it wasn't lent to the government, it would be spent in other ways. So the only reason that it should cause a recession is if the government is spending it in better ways to grow the economy than the private sector would/could (e.g. because the best investments are infrastructure related).
But if it's actually providing a boost to economic growth, it also means the debt isn't actually unsustainable. If you boost economic growth this year by 0.1%, and afterward it returns to previous growth rates, then the economy will stay 0.1% larger than it otherwise would have been perpetually. If your interest rates are comparable to the base line economic growth (true now, last decade they have been lower), and you take a twenty-year view, then taking on 5% of GDP in debt to generate a one off 1% growth boost to the economy is a no-brainer. The real issue is to understand when the government (vis a vis the private sector) actually can spend money to generate genuine extra growth, and when it cannot (e.g. if it only shifts growth that would happen anyway forward you would expect growth to dip after the initial boost, but that would be true whether the deficit spending stops or not).
The argument against debt is often not based in economic sense or sound science (remember the debacle when a widely cited study on the problems with high debt turned out to be based on an Excel mistake?). In my view, it's based on an aversion to the government having too much spending power. After all, a version of the argument, above was used by conservatives to sell tax cuts that were supposed to pay for themselves. They didn't because the tax cuts did not actually generate growth, they merely redistributed wealth to the top. For deficit spending, the evidence that it can boost economic growth is much more robust.
The real debt crisis will hit once countries start to seriously shrink...
Or it would've been placed in the reverse REPO facility at delicious interest rates paid straight from the printing press. A lot of COVID spending was sanitized this way, without it inflation would've been much higher. And this money has started to get back into the economy.
Agreed that GDP in isolation is a poor measure, but when you take it in context (every report is done the same way) and with other financial data it can help paint a picture (still an imperfect picture).
The Bureau of Labor Statistic. Non-partisan enough, the methodology hasn't changed from the last administration. And take it from a non-US-based inflation expert: it is accurate enough, some gripes about "quality adjustment" of electronics and about using owners' equivalent rent instead of house prices notwithstanding.
They are, but that's assuming that the GDP deflator is accurate. I for one don't agree with the CPI substitutions and gamesmanship and when CPI was suggesting 7-8% I calculated my personal basket had inflated ~15% YOY over the previous two years.
There are all kinds of reasons why this figure might be politically influenced. The reality on the ground is we've had to make significant cuts to our standard of living just to maintain spending flat even with wage increases. The wage increases have been on the order of 3% per year and not tracking with inflation for both my wife and I.
Inflation still rampant, unaffordable cars, unaffordable homes, salaries growing slower than inflation. In other words, things that don't affect the rich (that's why the numerical growth in GDP), but are essential for the middle class (the majority).
Inflation is way down, salaries have been growing faster than inflation all year, unemployment is very low, car prices have been dropping since late 2022, and home prices are finally starting to decline.
So when you talk about numbers “you see coming out” you’re at least a year out of date.
I’m assuming you’re going to just start saying “the numbers aren’t real man”. But in that case why talk about the “numbers you see coming out”.
Core Inflation is down but that doesn’t account for food or energy, which are the two biggest complaints people have. Id like to see your proof that housing prices are going down, that’s news to me.
> I’m assuming you’re going to just start saying “the numbers aren’t real man”.
Nice way to prove you are arguing in partisan favor and not discussing anything in good faith.
No it’s a nice way of heading off what I guarantee was going to be the response. There is literally nothing you can say to sway the “inflation numbers aren’t real crowd” in the same way you can’t argue with a conspiracy theorist. I don’t care about partisanship. I think the economy would be in roughly the same state it’s in regardless of which party won most recently.
Core inflation doesn’t include housing and fuel. But fuel is down 10% from its peak last year and the median home price in July 2023 was 2% below the median price in July 2022.
Inflation is going down, wages are going up.
You can’t argue that “the numbers coming out” are showing the opposite because they aren’t.
People don't think of inflation quarter to quarter or even FY to FY. They think of it in terms of what they are calibrated to think normal prices are. For most people that's going to be pre-pandemic. Since prices have not returned to pre-pandemic levels the economy is bad. Especially so since their wages haven't gone up comparably to match.
This is why the numbers are largely useless at gauging public sentiment. Nobody cares that this quarter the rate of inflation has slowed. They care that chicken breasts cost double what it should. They care that a Ford Mustang GT can cost $50k when they were pretty sure they were $30k. They care that fast food costs as much as a sit down restaraunt should and the sit down costs as much as a nice one should.
Now you can all explain that with numbers and reports but sentiment doesn't care about that. Public opinion is an inherently irrational thing. But it is still incredibly important because elections are decided by it. It doesn't matter if GDP is positive and inflation is good right now if everyone thinks we are in a recession and the prices of everything are too damn high. You will get voted out. I'm not sure why this is a hard concept to grasp.
Consciously? No. Like I said, public sentiment doesn't work that way. People don't want deflation. They want reasonable prices. Its not rational. The only sensible way to achieve that is to get wages increasing so the relative cost of living goes back down.
I looked up buying a Chipolte Carne Asada Steak and Guac, after tax it was $15. FWIW, I normally get chicken no guac, I think was like $8 or so after tax now its $9.31 after tax.
I looked up the price for Amy's Vegan Supreme pizza at my local Kroger, in-stock for $7.99. No sales tax on that item, so just that price.
> It doesn't matter if GDP is positive and inflation is good right now if everyone thinks we are in a recession and the prices of everything are too damn high. You will get voted out. I'm not sure why this is a hard concept to grasp.
Because they're two different concepts. Public sentiment is generally a lagging indicator on the economy. People will think we're still in a high even after the economy has started to falter. And people will still think times are bad even after the economy starts to come back.
You are correct that public sentiment is on what people vote. That doesn't mean they are accurately assessing the economy.
I’m not talking about public sentiment. I’m responding to someone who was talking about “the numbers they are seeing coming out”. When someone responded what numbers, they listed the things I rebutted.
Someone’s belief was causing them to invent numbers coming out to justify that belief.
Just curious, do you expect prices to return to pre-pandemic levels? If so, how do you think that will happen? Disinflation is very different from deflation, and nobody should be rooting for deflation.
It's astonishing how nearly every single comment below this type of thing is "well inflation is up so this number isn't real". Nearly everything, on every platform. People don't want to believe the economy can possibly be good.
Official inflation figures might be misleading and designed to mask the real impact of inflation. So it makes sense to ask if this "inflation adjusted growth" is real or not.
A lot of users just chime in to brandish their pitchforks after reading the headline. I hope that is changing, because some of the discussion can be pretty good.
Adjusted by what? Official inflation figures. Look at official inflation and they restrict the measurement to items that are probably less than half of what the average person needs to buy. So inflation adjusted GPD is really misleading in times of high inflation. We might be close to zero growth and the official statistics would still show economic growth.
>Adjusted by what? Official inflation figures. Look at official inflation and they restrict the measurement to items that are probably less than half of what the average person needs to buy.
It's not inflation adjusted. It's GDP Price Deflator adjusted. Like CPI this measurement has a number of ways to game it lower than reality and a great deal of political incentive to do so.
GDP measures the value of goods and services produced in the country.
For the question you're interested in, you'd want to look at other measures like the deficit as a share of GDP. Which is trending badly in large part due to lower revenues (variety of non-ideological reasons).
Yes, the gov is spending 8% in deficit to achieve 4% in GPD growth. This doesn't sound like good economic policy to me. The growth should at least match to make this even workable. Of course, Washington doesn't even know how to calculate basic things anymore, everything is distorted to help the party in power at the moment.
The best way to build economy is to give money to those without. Then they spend it. Trickle Down is bullshit. Bubble Up is the one that works. The rich still get theirs - but less and after the money has passed through a few hands.
It sucks that we had to pay 1.5x as much for a dozen eggs during and shortly after that global pandemic, but put blame where it is due, and it is not really due to your neighbors getting pandemic relief.
I don't get what point you're attempting to make. Your comment suggests you think inflation came from from pandemic (a loss in productivity?), the the link is about corporations sopping up the extra cash that was floating around via raising prices.
The latter would fall into the bucket of government handouts to the bottom cause inflation, would it not?
If you're skipping the monetary interaction and saying "it's not the handout, it's the greed", then I'd like to point out that companies have been behaving the same way forever (trying to maximize profits), yet inflation has been low for a decade.
That corporations would take advantage of poor people having more money to spend is intended behavior, and something that needs to be accounted for in functional monetary policy.
> companies have been behaving the same way forever (trying to maximize profits), yet inflation has been low for a decade
This isn't true. Companies only started to maximize profits under shareholder value recently. Corporations originally were thought to have a responsibility to society at large, thus with things like pensions being provided to their employees.
Additionally, the small handouts to the poor are much more dwarfed by handouts to the employers at the time. Which made it baffling that large employers then raised prices anyways, when they already got the vast majority of covid relief money. No, it is pure greed.
Yea. Tax those corporate profits and tax those wealthy C-suites. Then the taxes help those on the bottom rung; and the circle continues. Accumulation at the top blocks the flow.
This says nothing of economic output. If you just hand out money to people, that has an economic output of zero. Short term this might work, but long term, I believe it would shrink the economy, and leave it saddled with people that don't produce according to the markets' demands. Why would they?
All top 10 richest men in the US are self made. And they worked damn hard at it. Of course they worked smart too, and took chances - that's the part most people miss.
Why wouldn't they? Do you think folk would just sit on ass after getting the handout? Would you? Some, perhaps - but they sit on ass now - and have no social safety net or anything, they outdoors.
The human condition is to endeavour. Even with free money the majority of folk will work, or do something to improve their situation.
I think you'd at least want to get a 1-1 ratio for spending to drive growth and ideally an actual ROI. The government is operating like a VC funded startup right now
I think what the comment is saying is, if the government is spending a lot of money inefficiently (i.e. spending $100,000 on a weapon that has $10,000 in raw materials plus layers of bureaucracy that are hard to quantify as costs) and accruing a lot of debt in the process, it is hard to understand what your cost is for basic things.
I don't understand why there should be any relation between deficit (which is a percentage of government revenue) and gdp growth (which is a percentage of total gdp of the whole country).
The 8% deficit listed above _is_ a percentage of total GDP of the whole country (although the Fed has it at only 5.3%). The numbers are directly comparable.
One is a rate of growth and the other is a rate of spending. It would be like comparing that you spend 8% of your income on food and that you got a 4% raise this year. The two numbers have nothing to do with each other other than using the same unit.
No, that's a bad analogy. It's more like I borrowed 8% of my annual income this year, and then bought 4% more than last year. If I hadn't borrowed all that money, I wouldn't have been able to buy that much. It's both intuitively obvious and empirically demonstrable that government deficits stimulates economic growth in the immediate term, since most government expenditure happens in the domestic economy.
Because tax revenue is fairly consistent as a percentage of GDP as well, so if deficit as a percentage of GDP exceeds faster than GDP growth then our debts are growing faster than our ability to repay them.
Tax renevues were down 9% for the 2022 fiscal year which is part of why we saw a larger increase in the deficit. Part of that decrease is due to tax delays related to disaster relief and will come in during the 2023 year so the numbers are skewed.
The deficit is on percentage of GDP! Part of this GDP is direct consequence of government deficit spending. If you remove the 8% deficit you remove a big chunk of this GDP growth (probably all). But the situation shows that the gov is spending way more than the resulting growth, so this means it is a completely inefficient investment. You should expect at least 1 to 1.
I have always pointed out this, be it a republican or democrat government. They all use the same tricks to inflate GDP by borrowing. Now, I'm not against borrowing for the sake of economic growth, but you cannot keep borrowing 6% to get 3% growth, in the end this policy will not work.
If your assets, lets say your house of value grew by 5% , you would say yay me.
However, to make things simpler assume you don't have cash, for example, because you are unemployed.
So, if you are making the mortgage payments using the credit card and the total CC payments this year alone are 8% of the value of the house, you can see problem.
Eventually, the debt becomes due, and no amount of house will repay the incurred debt.
So the relationship is, you may buy any house (assets) that grows in any amount, but if your CC hole is growing faster, you are actually worse than you started out.
Analogies comparing household finances to government finances are pretty apples to oranges. A household can’t easily get unsecured loans below prime, print money to cover debts, or do many other things that governments can.
Financing and even currency issuance depends on trust.
I can get a 0% from family and friends if i needed for far more my net worth. With connections I could also get counterfeit and
pass it around.
It comes down to the fraud triangle: opportunity, incentive, rationalization.
The government may have more leeway to commit fraud than an individual. But the comparison is still apt, the fraud is the same, whether its a house being paid with CC or GPD with govt bonds. Ignore that at your own peril
The dynamics are similar in many ways, but not the same. Scale and occupying a significant part of a market create their own qualities. Government bonds are closer to shares in a company than personal debt, or even corporate debt for that matter. Many people want to own government debt as a stable store of value. Even moreso as the global military hegemon, where other countries want to own the government's debt as a stable store of value.
Conversely, the US government has also spent the last 40+ years abusing the fallacy that loaning money is completely different than spending, which has grotesquely distorted the financial industry and the housing market. So the sooner we shove off these misguided notions, like that the government's balance sheet is anything like a private balance sheet (and even worse, that the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is somehow distinct from the government's!), the better. Modern Monetary Theory is more in line with the actually-conservative Austrian School than the hybrid catastrophe of the past four decades.
Still, there's no free lunch. You can see this clearly with smaller nations that try those strategies. If the US government has to do those things then there are negative repercussions in the form of distorted interest rates, inflation, capital misallocation, etc. All else equal it's obviously beneficial to have a balanced budget, low debt, and organic economic growth from dynamic markets. The federal government still has the exorbitant privilege of the USD as the global reserve currency, so can export much of its inflation across the world. Though at the end of the day these trends matter, and the long term debt cycle, coupled with worsening domestic issues, does not bode well with increasingly powerful strategic rivals and proxy wars.
But what if you can set the CC rates as you please (let's say to 0% because why not and we've been doing that for the better part of last 12 years). And if push comes to shove you can just get infinite "loan" from a biggy bank that you happens to have.
Technically you are correct that the govt can set the rates.
But that's just like you demanding to have a 0% CC from a financial institution. If you are Bezos, you may be able to swing that.
But that demand only follows your credit rating. You can demand 0%, but that doesnt mean you will get it. If Bezos is suddenly bankrupt, bet he's not getting the same CC, or even any CC.
Making the bet that the USG can set rates as they please forever just because they have for 12 years is just saying "I'm a turkey and life is good, this nice farmer feeds me every day!"
I don't think this captures the point I was trying to make, the US government have ultimate control over Federal Reserve and its policies.
Thanksgiving will always arrive but the government is not going to be the turkey with its debts, in this case, it could be a global stagflation. The US government can always make good on however many debt it has as long as it is denoted in US dollars.
Well, the idea of spending more, is working more, which the latter is reflected by GDP.
If the government spends more, it should cause more work, which should lead to higher GDP.
This is one simple way to look at it.
If the government is spending more, but GDP isn't growing by the same, it might be a sign that the governments expenditures are wasted.
Now, I'm not saying that's happened, but it could be. Government spending is historically the most likely to be wasteful, in comparison to individual/retail/business spending.
I have "opinions", but if you are interested in this topic, rather than me dumping it here, it can be worth reading up a bit on GDP, then googling around for GDP criticisms. I think there's a sense in which it measures something useful, but it isn't measuring what people think it is and what the media sort of pushes it as meaning; it is correlated to the health of an economy but it is by no means a measure of the health of the economy, and the fact government expenditures are simply straight-up added to the GDP has such an obvious way for the government to manipulate the numbers that I can't hardly even call it an exploit. Whether they are doing that, I'll leave that to the reader to decide.
Another relatively obvious issue is that the GDP number waved around in the popular press is generally not adjusted for inflation. That's not just the US GDP in 2023, it's any GDP the press will talk about, anywhere and anytime, so I'm not trying to make any stealth political point here. It's something to be aware of in any context a "GDP" comes up, look to see if it's inflation-adjusted or not. Such measures exist and more serious economists definitely use them. The wikipedia page I linked to above has a wide variety of other interesting definitions and that's still a Wikipedia overview itself, of course, not the fullness of econometrics.
I dont I think that is the right way to think about this, but I agree that the government grossly overspends.
A one time expense of 8% GDP for a 4% growth is great. That means it would get paid back in two years, or faster if you consider compounding.
The problem is determining if the 8% spending is related to the 4% growth (and how much.
Another way to to frame the whole topic is that the US government spends %40 of GDP in taxes, plus another 8% borrowed, per year. Even this could be a good deal, but it comes down to how much of the growth is causes by govt spending, which types of spending, and if the growth is permanent.
Government debt is completely irrelevant as long as the debt the government has is in its own currency that it can print more of. US government can print however much money it wants.
It will never default because it can just create the credit. That’s what the Federal Reserve did with its zero interest rate policy. It distorts the economy, and the economy can shrink and be torn apart, but the government can always pay its debt by simply printing the money.
The real problem lies with private debt, and that's what's actually leading to a default. When people default on their debt, they end up forfeiting property to the creditors. What we’re seeing now is a large scale transfer of property such houses and cars that people had bought, and so on, that they can no longer keep making payments on. this results in a transfer of income from the 90% to the 10%.
The wealth transfer means that the working majority is pushed ever further to the margins. US is already in a situation where around half the population has no meaningful savings.
Having no savings puts people in a position where they're not able to absorb further unexpected expenses. This is what's making the economy so fragile.
Government internal debt is a problem too because while, sure, you can print your way out of it, you are still devaluing the currency repaid.
Take social security for example. You can print money to repay all the money borrowed from the fund, but in doing so, you have debased the currency it pays out.
If a retiree is owed 100$, you pay it with printed money, so in theory they are made whole, but it no longer has the same purchasing power. It is a rug pull for the retiree.
That's not how fiat currency works. There is no direct relationship between the amount of currency in circulation and the value of the currency as expressed in the price of goods and services. The prices are set by people who own businesses based on how much they believe their consumers are willing to pay them.
nonsense. Double the currency in circulation and hold goods constant and you will deflate your currency. There is a clear and direct relationship.
You can expand the money supply and amounts in circulation without inflation in the exact case where you expand the value goods and services in equal measure.
Even then, the purchasing power of currency holders is less than the counterfactual where the money supply was not expanded and you had deflation as a result.
Money drop a million printed dollars on each consumer, and prices will skyrocket.
Are you trying to tell me that the expansion of the money supply in Venezuela has no direct relation to inflation.
Once again, inflation is a result of business owners choosing to raise the prices. If money that's created goes directly to consumers, then it allows business owners to raise prices on goods. However, that's not what's happening when US government is printing money to pay off its debts. You appear to have an incredibly superficial understanding of how money supply works, and you appear to be just regurgitating tropes you've memorized.
>If money that's created goes directly to consumers, then it allows business owners to raise prices on goods. However, that's not what's happening when US government is printing money to pay off its debts.
This is exactly what happens when the government expand the money supply to repay debt. It send out social security checks, pay workers, and buys goods. This puts money directly in the hands of consumers.
You even agreed we are talking about an increase in the money in circulation. Are you walking that back and saying that money in circulation doesn't give consumers more money? The creditor of Government debt Is citizen consumers with benefit obligations.
What about Venezuela? Consumers don't have more currency there either?
> This is exactly what happens when the government expand the money supply to repay debt. It send out social security checks, pay workers, and buys goods. This puts money directly in the hands of consumers.
Not really, because most government debt isn't consumer debt. US isn't increasing money supply to pay for social security or to pay workers. It's increasing things like military contracts for large corporations.
> You even agreed we are talking about an increase in the money in circulation. Are you walking that back and saying that money in circulation doesn't give consumers more money? The creditor of Government debt Is citizen consumers with benefit obligations.
I'm not walking anything back. I'm saying that the currency that's being created isn't going to the hands of regular people. This is obvious from the fact that majority of the working population can't even afford to live on the salaries they make forcing them to take on debt to buy essentials
>Not really, because most government debt isn't consumer debt. US isn't increasing money supply to pay for social security or to pay workers. It's increasing things like military contracts for large corporations.
You are confusing the debt owner, and where the money was spent. The governments make create internal debt for a military contract, but the debt is held either by the public (e.g bonds), or intragovernmental ( e.g. borrowed from the social security fund) When these get paid back, they go into circulation.
Besides, Most government spending goes to salaries and benefits.
I'm not, as the link I provided you with clearly explains, personal wealth in US is decreasing. It's now at the point where people have negative assets because they're forced to borrow to meet their basic needs.
If what you claim was happening then we wouldn't be seeing this happening. If money went to salaries and benefits, then workers wouldn't be under water financially the way they are right now.
"You appear to have an incredibly superficial understanding of how money supply works, and you appear to be just regurgitating tropes you've memorized."
There is no relationship between money and inflation because the money doesn't go to the pockets of people who can spend money. The extra money goes usually (the covid programs are an aberration) to the pockets of the financial elite, and they become stocks and other financial assets. The price of these assets go up, so there is asset inflation, but not real product inflation. The characteristics of fiat money work because the created money is really going to the pockets of the rich to inflate their net worth.
Sure, that's part of it, and the other half of the equation is that when economic crashes happen the rich use their liquid assets to buy up physical assets that everyone else if forced to let go this concentrating tangible wealth with the capital owning class.
Future money is cheaper than current money. The approach totally works in a low rate environment. But as rates get higher in relationship to inflation expectations it becomes unsustainable
If you spend 8% and the GDP is boosted by 4% once, and then grows at the normal rate afterwards, then the GDP will stay 4% larger indefinitely.
That 8% debt would generate 4% more economic output this year, next year, the year after, the year after that, etc...
If your 8% debt only generates 0.5% of extra growth once, and then we get back to a baseline 3.5% growth, the additional economic output will equal the debt in 16 years and continue generating economic output afterwards.
But it's also completely unclear why, as a government, you should care about the ratio of debt to growth. The two numbers are of an entirely different nature. That economic output corresponds to things produced by the economy. The 8% debt corresponds only to who has control of which money pile (in particular, it includes the promise that the government will redirect a large chunk of money to the lenders in the future, which you might or might not find problematic). It doesn't take anything away from the total sum. So by shuffling money around, you have created real economic output. That's great!
Look torward higher borrowing costs and inflation and while GDP can rise the economic situation can be people are unable to afford to buy a home and making ends meet is primarily a inflation problem.
But, that doesn't mean the the economy overall is seeing growth so we can hold all three things can be true.
That's the thing - according to most polls, people ARE feeling good, but at the same time certain that everyone else - the public in general - are struggling to cover basic needs. There's a wide disconnect caused by negativity in media, mostly stirred up for political reasons.
Like this:
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-perso... TL;DR: 71% say economy is bad and 51% say it's getting worse, while for 60% people in the same poll their personal financial situation is just fine.
There are many similar polls, all point to the same thing.
It all depends on what kind of social group you're in. Upper middle class and higher are still doing just fine. People like you most probably don't have friends who are living in the streets or cannot afford to buy cars anymore. Just look at the statistics of people living in the streets of big cities and the situation looks more like the great depression.
Homelessness is on a long term decline and since 2007, it's down from 0.21% to 0.17% population. It's probably just concentration in the certain area because of police doing a bad job cleaning the streets.
Also, economic growth in U.S. is now mostly concentrated in lower income groups. It seems that high middle class (statistical one, i.e. top 10-20% of population - "people just out of poverty" if you look at it honestly), are on the losing side now. Hard numbers are hard to come by but once the tax season is over we will see them next year.
Deficit spending is still spending. But anyway economic activity isn’t evenly distributed. You may not live in a booming area, but there certainly are many booming areas. I recently moved from one mid-sized city to another, in different states but not all that far apart, and the difference in how the local economy feels is remarkable. One place feels stable but gradually deteriorating and the other is dynamic and growing fast.
Besides regional differences, it’s also the case that more and more economic activity is being captured by fewer and fewer people. So, if the richest billionaires grow their stash fast enough, the rest of the country will probably feel less dynamic.
I believe we are in the first stages of the implosion of the US dollar and the US financial system but since it's a huge system it's happening in a motion that the typical brain does not understand. People think it'll happen in a matter of hours but that might not be the case. It might be happening right in front of our eyes but we have never had such an event so we don't know what it looks like. Until maybe 5-10 years later.
Well, the world is increasingly becoming more unstable which is good news for the dollar. The US financial system will continue to excel so long as global demand for dollars remains strong.
Demand for dollars will remain strong as long as they are the least onerous way to conduct international trade for essential goods. The US makes very few of these goods domestically. Eventually the mountains of sanctions, central bank asset seizures, endless debt and money printing, and policy of foreign meddling will tip the scales.
I am not a pessimist. I don't believe the geography/demographics argument. Brazil had that and yet the performed really badly. Argentina has a great geography with no demographic tensions and have performed catastrophically. Also, the US is coming from a high point, not 0.
It's also that the U.S. is a developed country. Most countries are either developed or have good geography, demography and access to natural resources. U.S. has all or it.
There are people who think the job market never recovered from the ‘08 crash, just because they can’t find a job, so sentiment is probably not a useful measure of economic activity in the US.
People will never “feel good” about the US economy again.
Fuck their “feelings”. I’m so tired of hearing about people’s feelings when it comes to how the economy is doing. The only thing that matters is the data.
It turns out people live in a nation and not an economy. Tying someone's kids' healthcare to their employer who could fire them for no cause at any moment sure has a way of making people nervous about the future. I guess it gets results out of them, but it doesn't seem to make them happy.
But what the hell does that have to do with quarterly measurements of economic growth?! Wildly conflating every issue into different random grievances helps nobody, and arguably delegitimizes an otherwise very real problem.
Making everything about everything is an extremely effective way to paralyze any potential improvements. It’s unhelpful and exactly what I’d do if I wanted nothing to change.
With massive inequality, those in the lower classes fall ever behind the top quintile or so. Do you think they enjoy hearing about how much better the economy does as they see their and especially their childrens' standard of living fall?
Again, from the standpoint of economics, what difference do their feelings make? Should we adjust economic data to how people feel in any given day? Maybe we could do that for businesses too. “The CEO FEELS great about the company so we’re going to use Leader Adjusted EBITDA to say profits were 20% higher than what the CFO says they are.”
I bet it sucks to hear things are going well for others and not them, but that’s not what economic growth is supposed to measure.
Also it isn’t largely accurate, so the fact that they feel it is disconnected from reality, which is kind of my point anyway. For some it’s probably true, nothing is ever 100% good, but for the vast majority of people who feel that way they’re a) not helpless but indeed complicit based on their voting (or lack thereof) and purchasing choices and b) their lives are indeed improving even if they refuse to accept that.
> The U.S. is failing less-educated people given the dismal life expectancy prospects they face compared to their more educated peers, researchers said.
Their lives are literally shorter. How do you think that data makes them feel?
I get that the privileged are too isolated to understand the issues facing the unprivileged these days; it seems like yet another self-reinforcing doom-loop that will eventually lead to some sort of national breakup/collapse. At which point the GDP will probably fall and then there may be some concern. I've never been much of an optimist though; maybe everything will just work out somehow.
So your argument has shifted to "Some people are suffering" from "everyone is suffering." On that point, I agree, but to claim that the economy is terrible for everyone, or even most people, is not accurate.
Further, to conflate "many people are generally unhappy" with "the economy and choices related to the economy are what is making many people unhappy" is unhelpful. The economy can be doing well (the subject of this submission), and people can, separately, be struggling for non-economic reasons. It's unhelpful, however, to constantly bring it up when it's irrelevant, such as right now.
If you can find where I said that "everyone is suffering", I'd be surprised, but I suppose I'd own it. I've been pretty explicit about lower classes, though of course that's always a bit hard to pin down. As the article above showing the literal huge divide in life expectancy demonstrates, college education is one rather simple way of differentiating. And yes, I'm saying that the economy can in fact be doing well, but if only a minority of people are benefiting from those economic gains (like for instance, living almost a decade longer), then perhaps it's at least worth considering that those at the bottom might not be so thrilled about the situation. Something is certainly pissing them off.
What's the point of the economy, though? If a bunch of people think the economy's not doing well, that seems like a pretty strong indication that it in-fact is not in terms that matter, regardless of what GDP growth et c look like.
To pick an extreme to illustrate the point: if GDP shoots up 100%(!) but it's all a dozen people trading with each other a whole lot and everyone else is now impoverished, is that better? GDP is better! GDP/capita is better, too! But the economy is definitely worse.
Another exaggerated example to illustrate the point: if GDP is outpacing consumer inflation—let's say 4% growth in a quarter, and 2% inflation in the same—but only because we've made the "basket of goods" to calculate inflation qualitatively worse, and meanwhile several important things that aren't part of that basket have gone up 1,000% and everyone rightly reports feeling poorer—is the economy doing well?
Both of your examples presume the sentiment is justified, but that isn’t a given. How do you account for a generally poor outlook that externally influences sentiment despite a well functioning economy?
Maybe everyone is miserable because they’re newly aware of the violence and injustice in the world generally. How is that useful when trying to understand the state of the economy specifically? It’s important to understand how people feel as a society, but this isn’t supposed to be that. How do you filter out the “noise”?
We can’t really use “vibes” to determine if interest rates should go back down, for example. That would be disastrous.
Everyone is miserable because of interest rates and inflation. It's hitting the consumer right now and those are really obvious indicators how things are going. McDonalds costs as much as a meal at a proper restaurant did before the pandemic. That's not good.
Everyone is decidedly not miserable, and even if they were, your choice of highlighting inflation, a number that has been steadily decreasing for some time now, is curious.
You act like people would finally be happy if inflation were just under some number. No. People will just find the next thing to be miserable about. That’s how people are now.
Again, an individual “feeling” like the economy doing well shouldn’t be used as a measure for how an economy is actually doing. Like when they interview people on the streets to see how they “feel” the economy is doing.
>If a bunch of people think the economy's not doing well, that seems like a pretty strong indication that it in-fact is not
People radically misreport this stuff for political reasons. "The economy is doing well" numbers will change radically in a week when a different party takes the White House, typically in a purely partisan fashion [1]. The economy didn't get better in that week, it's just that people "feel" differently about things when their preferred (resp. disfavored) candidate takes office.
The reality is that for republicans, "how good the economy feels" is tied directly to the letter next to the guy in the white house. It's not even based on who controls the senate, where their senators have spent the last 5 decades ruining the economy every single time they have had a chance.
How much deficit did we add last year? The year before? OK, two years ago means they are Covid numbers, so... five years ago?
How much did the economy grow in those years?
I'm not sure that you can say anything as simple as "the growth is because of the deficit". I suspect (but I don't currently have the numbers) that there have been lots of years when the US ran a large deficit and did not grow.
This literally always happens during a Democrat presidency: the numbers are good but everyone goes “well it doesn’t FEEL that way so I’m gonna ignore it.” At what point are you gonna admit that your feelings are a crap metric?
The fact of the matter is the feelings of public are the feelings of the rich propagandists who, on principle, don’t want a leftist in power, regardless of whether he’s good for the economy or not.
Maybe these metrics are what's crap? GDP doesn't mean much for people day to day. Neither does how high a score the stock market happened to hit in its arbitrary magic points system.
People care about the job market, the cost of living, direction effects of inflation on buying goods and services. When people say they economy sucks they mean they can't buy a car right now because the bank will only give them an ass interest rate even with great credit and the price of groceries has skyrocketed.
I've believed for awhile now the stock market has been a poor measure of the economy because its become decoupled from the "real" economy, ie: the things I listed above.
When people say they economy sucks they mean they can't buy a car right now because the bank will only give them an ass interest rate even with great credit and the price of groceries has skyrocketed.
With regards to grocery prices, what does corporate greed have to do with the president?
As for the car, the FED has a big hand in interest rates, and yeah, Biden did choose to re-nominate Powell, but Powell was originally appointed by Trump, so I don't know how voters can really say the republican would have done better.
The American economy is bad for people under a certain line, yes. The question is why does the media always overplay the economy when Republicans are in power and downplay it when Democrats are?
Anti-monopoly policy is one lever the president has and has been essentially ignored since the 70s in favor talking about the fed the fed the fed all the time.
As one example the meat packing industry has become highly consolidated, squeezing both farmers and consumers while extracting massive profits. But across the entire economy many industries have become highly consolidated and subsequently raised their profit margins to the detriment of everyone but shareholders.
OK, even if one thinks this is specifically failing of Biden (or a generic democratic president) then, realistically, what is a republican going to do about this? Trump in fact favored corporate consolidation in his 2020 Economic Report of the President.
The media obviously wasn't talking about this when they were talking about how good the stock market was under Trump...
Do you think I'm saying this because I'm a Republican? Biden has actually been the best president of my lifetime for these issues but that just speaks to how pathetic the Democrats have been on economic issues for decades. Barely opposition at all economically speaking, they differentiate themselves more by wearing Kente cloth and engaging in divisive culture war stuff these days.
>With regards to grocery prices, what does corporate greed have to do with the president?
Most people aren't extracting the root causes to high prices. They watch the news, hear there is inflation and go to the store and see prices are high. Even if they had an inclination to, that kind of economic education is not standard. The population at large is very ignorant to how the economy works. They blame the prices on inflation and companies looking to gouge prices know this and take advantage of it.
But, corporate greed and monopolies have a lot to do with the president. At least Teddy Roosevelt thought it did. And he did something about it. It's not unreasonable to ask why Biden doesn't. There was a point, brief as it may have been where it at least seemed like our institutions cared more about how the economy effected the common man.
>The American economy is bad for people under a certain line, yes. The question is why does the media always overplay the economy when Republicans are in power and downplay it when Democrats are?
I should have made this more clear in my first post. But my core point is, public sentiment doesn't care about economic reports. It cares about tangible every day things like prices of goods and interest rates. It doesn't care nor understand the root causes. It blames the guy in charge. For better or worse POTUS is always to blame for the current state of the economy. It comes with the job. Instead of saying the public is stupid, I think its more productive to accept it and work out how best to deal with it.
And I don't think they downplay for republicans and exaggerate for democrats. The large media corps are selling a product and outrage helps. The kind of outrage the sells best depends on a lot of things. When trump was president, it was effective to just sell him as the outrage product. Biden is a much more dour and boring person. You have to focus on other things than the personality at the top. Before 9/11, Bush was getting attacked for the economy. He presided over the dot com bust. But with GWOT most criticism for him switched to that. The 2008 recession happened while Obama was in office and had long since left the news cycle by the time he left so duh.
Unemployment is way down, real wages are up even compared to before Covid-19, and inflation is back to normal levels.
The large majority of people are doing well. When people say the economy sucks they are largely not talking about their own economic situation. Most people believe that they, personally, are doing well, but that some nebulous "the economy" is doing badly. We have a nation of thriving people who believe everything is falling apart.
I'm going to copy paste a comment I made elsewhere to get my point across.
People don't think of inflation quarter to quarter or even FY to FY. They think of it in terms of what they are calibrated to think "normal" prices are. For most people that's going to be pre-pandemic. Since prices have not returned to pre-pandemic levels the economy is bad. Especially so since their wages haven't gone up comparably to match.
This is why the numbers are largely useless at gauging public sentiment. Nobody cares that this quarter the rate of inflation has slowed. They care that chicken breasts cost double what it should. They care that a Ford Mustang GT can cost $50k when they were pretty sure they were $30k. They care that fast food costs as much as a sit down restaraunt should and the sit down costs as much as a nice one should.
Now you can all explain that with numbers and reports but sentiment doesn't care about that. Public opinion is an inherently irrational thing. But it is still incredibly important because elections are decided by it. It doesn't matter if GDP is positive and inflation is good right now if everyone thinks we are in a recession and the prices of everything are too damn high. You will get voted out. I'm not sure why this is a hard concept to grasp.
> Especially so since their wages haven't gone up comparably to match.
The economic data indicates that average income has gone up more than prices have since the start of the pandemic. If you look at Real Personal Income (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI) it's up 5% relative to the end of 2019.
Yes, public opinion is irrational, but the more obvious political question is why public opinion is so wrong now, when often it is not so pessimistic about the economy.
Unfortunately I could not find data on prices after discounts -- I would love if you could point me to some! I find it hard to believe the average discount in 2019/20 was $8k off on a base trim GT, but if you actually bought one with that discount then fair enough. Note that's still a significantly smaller increase than my parent comment indicated.
To that I would say there is likely a problem with average. I didn't see a break down of the data in your link, but admittedly its my lunch break and I didn't have the time to really dig for it either. But its entirely possible that some groups saw an outsized growth in wages while others didn't.
Apples to apples here -- the 2020 GT Premium was $43,315. So we're still not looking at nearly the same size of increase.
You think the average income is being computed incorrectly? Or that there is just a lot of variance so many people are worse off? It is true that wage increases have been uneven, but they are actually much larger at the low end -- this is why you see the most inflation in low-wage service-heavy categories like restaurants.
> Now you can all explain that with numbers and reports but sentiment doesn't care about that. Public opinion is an inherently irrational thing.
Is it public opinion being irrational or governments around the world playing games with "basket of goods", "core" inflation and other bullshit designed to convince their citizens to trust magic math formulas instead of their own eyes?
I'd argue such voters are significant because they will potentially impact the results of an election, but I'm not sure they're important in the sense of being worth any politician's time trying to address. There's no realistic way prices across the board are going to significant deflate (i.e. return to pre-pandemic levels) absent some economic catastrophe, especially when the people demanding it mostly seem to be over-estimating how much the price of things actually went up (like Ford Mustangs and chicken breasts). And it's definitely not something any elected official has the power to actually achieve. Increases in real spending power could help people generally concerned about purchasing power, but it doesn't help for the people you're describing who are anchored by past absolute dollar prices.
That literally always happens with every presidency.
Good luck gaslighting the working class into believing their day to day situation is something it's not. "Don't believe your lying eyes. Your grocery bills and rent and gas and car and healthcare didn't go up, and you're closer to owning a house than before! It's the bad people telling you otherwise. Trust Us. Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad."
Rents around me are going down. Gas is under $3/gal here. I filled up my ICE about a week ago for ~$2.75. Lots of staple foods have dropped closer to pre-pandemic price levels but many do remain high but have seemed to stabilize.
I'm obviously only looking at a small part of the overall US, but if we're going to go by what we as individuals see the numbers I'm personally seeing largely match the trends I see from the BLS.
The right seems to be able to do it constantly. The right takes control and the white working class goes “oh the economy is so good” while they privatize the services that the working class rely on and then strip them of all their assets . The white working class doesn’t ever seem to mind then.
This sort of thing happens with subjects where it's difficult, time consuming, expensive, or risky to get the actual information you want.
Feelings are more present and real. It's a mistake to expect that anyone will ignore their feelings. The question is how to get upstream of those feelings.
I had a big anger problem when I was a kid - my dad told me that if someone can make you angry, they control you. It's hard to tell someone they are being controlled while they are angry though.
Sometimes people are happy to be angry because it makes the world simpler. All I have to do is be angry, and this guy will fix things for me. And maybe that guy fixes things, or fixes one thing, but later things get worse again, because just being angry and trusting someone to fix things doesn't work.
Humans are very smart animals, but the world is very complicated.
> This literally always happens during a Democrat presidency: the numbers are good but everyone goes “well it doesn’t FEEL that way so I’m gonna ignore it.”
A common and easily mocked media meme. On the New York Times Pitchbot humor account, an hour ago: "We're not in a recession. So why does it feel like we are?"
One thing I do like about Democratic presidencies is that it makes the Republican party care about the deficit again. Every time we elect a Republican president they explode the deficit and lie to our face that deficits don't matter.
The Republicans are willing to shut down the government over it, and set it up such that they get to have this battle over and over again just to make the point.
How does temporarily shutting down the government help the deficit? When they had all three branches of government they didn’t do squat about the deficit, in fact they cut taxes making it worse.
The Democrats don't care about the deficit at all. The Republicans also don't care about the deficit, except when they're not the predominant party. Then all they do is talk about the deficit.
Debtors really don't care about the deficit. There's not a lot of places to park large quantities of cash. Even if the US Treasury was offering a measly 1% most bond buyers would still take that over any higher yielding riskier debt. It still confounds the typical US taxpayer that other countries buy our sovereign debt because that is how they insure their currency.
You are correct that Republicans only talk about the deficit. When it comes to financing more deficit spending, the House Rs keep passing debt limit increases and CRs to kick the can down the road. Yes, it is all talk and the actions are more spending.
The numbers are meaningless, even if they are accurate, which I sincerely doubt. GDP is up 5%? My salary hasn't gone up 5%, but my grocery bill has gone up way more than 5%. Health insurance costs went up more than 5%. Maybe all those increases in prices are boosting GDP, but wages aren't keeping up. Maybe the numbers are hand-waving nonsense.
People know whether they are doing okay or not. GDP is a blunt instrument metric of little value except as a broad comparison. But noting that it "happens during a Democrat presidency" is quite telling.
For one, grocery prices have risen by more than 5%. (My own experience is more like 30-40% just in the past year.) For two, grocery prices are one metric among many in the cost of living, e.g. you also have to account for housing prices, energy prices, etc. And, of course, wages are not rising commensurate with the overall CoL, they have been essentially flat for decades.
So while your math is good, it's not meaningful. I find it very weird the lengths people will go to in trying to make one-off metrics reflect a different reality than what is very clear from people's experiences.
Did you switch jobs? A voluntary job switch is an average ~20% bump in salary. Job switchers and union members are getting the vast majority of the gains. A low unemployment rate makes switching easy, and low end workers were switching at a much higher rate then normal.
But job switchers (rightly) give themselves the credit for their salary boost. OTOH the government gets the blame for inflation and job loss. It's a crap job, you get blamed for the bad stuff, but don't get credit for the good stuff.
Median wages have not kept up with inflation in decades.
Suggesting that people job-hop is insane. Most workers cannot do this for a multitude of reasons, and most jobs are fungible. It's a very keyboard-warrior way to look at the economy, which is like getting advice on which car to buy from hedge fund managers.
You're missing the point. Look at wages compared to home prices, for example. You've adjusted wages for inflation, great, but that's meaningless unless you compare wages to what it costs to live.
> You've adjusted wages for inflation, great, but that's meaningless unless you compare wages to what it costs to live.
That's literally the point of adjusting for inflation. You can of course pick the fastest growing components of the CPI (housing is already a huge component) and complain that we're not outpacing the fastest growing component, but that's arbitrary.
That chart looks at wages rather than income, e.g. excluding healthcare contributions. You can argue that we shouldn't count healthcare because it's gotten way more expensive for no real increase in quality (which is true!). But healthcare is a huge and rapidly growing component of CPI which we are using to deflate wages -- you can't have your cake and eat it too by excluding healthcare payments from compensation but including it in your deflator.
Also that chart just seems to be wrong (they don't actually show the source or data). You can do the comparison yourself easily enough -- take the average hourly wages (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003) and use FRED's graph editor to compare to a deflator (e.g. CPI -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL). This is up ~10% since 2008. It's not massive but it's not nothing -- and remember the caveat above that this is an underestimate.
And re: switching jobs for low-wage workers -- either they are getting big raises or getting big pay increases from switching jobs, or the BLS is massively wrong. Which is it?
Feelings of the public matter when groceries start costing double, or triple in some cases. What once filled my entire fridge now gets me one shelf. Rich propagandists don't feel this. Everybody in my life that I talk to however, do.
Government spending contributed to 0.8pp of the growth. Pretty significant. But the main driver is consumer spending, especially on durable goods.
These are the good times that the government should use pay to pay off debt by taxing more and spending less.
I don't put much stock in your feelings about the economy. My feeling is, I see people shopping at the mall, I see them filling the bars, and I see them buying new cars. The problem some people may be having is that they over-extended themselves and now owe too much. For example, while their real wages have actually gone up, they may have underestimated how much inflation would erode the real value of their nominal wage increases (I did this, in fact). So they took out loans they thought would be easy to pay, at interest rates that were higher than they were used to, and found that they had made the wrong bet. The disatisfaction, imo, is all about disappointed expectations, not the actual living conditions people have. I got a 20k raise, but now it feels more like a 12k raise, and meanwhile I took out a loan for a kitchen remodel.
Are you saying that poor people could not have under-estimated inflation relative to their (very real) income gains and acquired debt that they could not, as it turns out, pay for? The point is that uncertainty increased, and many people made the wrong bet, e.g. your hourly wage went from $10 to $15, a 50% increase. You buy a car (yes, even poor people buy cars), but the used car market spiked in price, and the interest rates too, and besides, everything just got more expensive. And so, it turns out that your wage increase feels more like a $2/hr increase instead of a $5/hr increase, and you're stuck trying to pay off more car than you can actually afford.
Yes, I am fortunate enough to earn a middle-class income for my family. I grew up poor in a poor neighborhood with a lot of crime. Sometimes you can climb the ladder.
Yeap, this spending is clearly unsustainable and sugar rush from it will be relatively short lived. To better demonstrate this point: imagine a country with struggling economy, government then issues a huge amount of debt at crowding out interest levels, it then build a huge dynamite statue and blows it up. In the near term you see a very pleasant spike in GPD, you have to manufacture dynamite, pay workers to assemble the statue, etc. You even get a bit more taxes from this activity. But after the dynamite was blown up, you end up with economy in an even worse shape and additional public debt burden.
Obviously, the US government deficit spending is somewhat better than building dynamite statues (but only somewhat) and we can expect some degree of returns, but I highly doubt that the spending is efficient enough to outpace raising debts and the crowding out effect of the private sector.
> Legit 5% GDP growth should mean a booming economy with people feeling good, yet people are struggling to cover their basic needs and pessimism seems high.
Is it so hard to believe that people's negativity is often not about hard numbers and facts?
The deficit for 2023 is $1.7 Trillion total. Do not conflate the deficit, how much expenses exceed revenue, with debt, the cumulative sum of deficits running back decades. We have only added $300 Billion to the deficit this year.
The US deficit spending this year is 6.6% of GDP. Last year the deficit spending of $1.4 Trillion was 5.5% of GDP. In other words, if there were no growth except that caused by government deficit spending, and that government spending was a wash - $1 of government spending for $1 of economic growth - you'd expect an annualized GDP growth of 1.1%.
Further, GDP growth fueled by deficit spending is still legit GDP growth, the same way that taking out a loan to remodel your home still creates a legitimate growth in your home's value. That remodeling may not have been the optimal investment, it might not even be a profitable investment, but it still is an investment.
if GDP growth fueled by deficit spending is still legit GDP growth, then couldn't we easily have double, triple, or 100x growth just by more deficit spending? Why limit it to single-digit percentages? Let's really get things cooking.
Yeah, you can 100x growth, you just need to find someone to give you a $170 trillion loan, and then service the interest. That's a bit tough when world GDP is $95 trillion.
If a government takes out a loan to build a $100 million bridge, is that bridge any different from a $100 million bridge that was funded by taking money out of the coffers?
A bridge will pay dividends for many years. Currently, the government is borrowing at 5.5% mainly to fund medicare that keeps 83 year olds alive and drawing on debt-funded social security for an extra 2 years.
Medicare and social security aren't bad things, but funding them with debt is pure consumption rather than a long term investment in US growth and productivity.
These two are often lumped together, though are quite different. SS deficit can be fixed with slight increase of retirement age and slight payout reduction and slight contribution increase. Medical spend is completely broken and unfixable without going after the medical cartels.
The fact that it can be fixed doesn't matter if its currently not fixed. Those are the two biggest budget items, so it's what the government is spending the most money on.
Technology developed that goes into keeping 83 year olds alive actually does have second order effects on productivity and being able to work for longer.
The 83 year olds aren't having dollar bills ground up and pumped into their bloodstream. That money is being paid to doctors, hospitals, medical manufacturers, etc. All of these entities are then going and spending those dollars on the inputs they need. Increasing hospital capacity is as legitimate a thing to spend money on as reducing traffic congestion.
More to the point though, if you spend $20k keeping grandma alive, is she any less alive because that $20k was loaned versus pulled out of her mattress?
GDP is not a measure of how optimally money is being spent, it's just a measure of how much economic activity is going on.
If you project the first three quarters of GDP growth, the US should end the year with $27.6 Trillion of GDP. The annualized rate is 8.5% without adjusting for inflation. Inflation adjusted, the annual rate of growth is 3.75% in the first three quarters.
In that case, the $1.7 Trillion deficit is 6.1% of GDP, so actually a half-percent lower than your calculations.
It isn't government spending. We're just seeing the result of corporations successfully capturing all the post-pandemic money that was floating around which is propping up GDP numbers.
Once the consumer buckles and spending drops then the GDP should drop, pulling the US into a recession, that should cause rounds of severe across-the-board layoffs (not just isolated to tech) which then cause housing to buckle. And at some point commercial real estate should detonate as the loans there hit their maturity dates and roll over.
When every single objective fact contradicts people's feelings, it isn't the universe that's wrong.
Remember: the nation's largest propaganda machine is dedicated to making people believe the economy is in shambles, because a booming economy fueled by government spending in green energy and protecting families falsifies their ideology.
Part of the "pessimism seems high" story is there is a very intentional concerted effort by republican politicians and their media backers to sow the feeling of pessimism. This is not negligable!
Can you show some evidence that GDP is more frequently revised downwards than upwards in the United States? Coming out of an uncertain economic time, my understanding is that estimates tend to be more conservative.
They're not nervous enough. Things are getting worse and worse for the non-rich every month due to housing costs/rents and medical expenses growing faster than inflation which is already not great (3.7%, officially).
They shouldn't be worried about losing some % of net worth in the stock market and/or increased union activity. They should be worried about civil unrest.
There's no free bread and the commoners are getting fed up with the circus.
In my experience rich "nervousness" is like yuppie "busy-ness" — it's kind of a glorified exaggeration that serves as some kind of coping mechanism.
What specifically are the rich nervous about? Outside of complete economic collapse they've got far less to worry about than everyone else. If they're worried about economic collapse they're essentially worried about becoming like the rest of us... not anything worth advocating for here.
I don't know. If you assume rich people hold assets that are vulnerable performance wise to the exposure of equities, rich people are currently taking a bath given that the S&P is basically flat (except for dividend reinvestment) past 30 months (SPY was $411.49 on Apr 9, 2021, today it is $412.55)
Sure, but they can rebalance equities and carry those losses forward for years, reducing their taxable gains. They aren’t playing the same game as most of us.
Having cash and taking advantage of treasuries and other loans is providing pretty solid returns as well.
The rich people’s accountants have this covered for the most part, I think they will be fine.
I know US has lot of problems. However, I was just thinking this earlier that if you are a US Citizen, you already have so many advantages and opportunities that many don't just because of that Passport. It is a great privilege especially as an Immigrant who became US citizens years ago. Not saying we are perfect obviously and just had a mass shooting earlier this AM (an unfortunate normal now) but if I had to choose a country to get ahead in life with the most opportunities possible as an immigrant, US is still the country to be at. Especially if you are entrepreneurial and want to control how you live your life.
Agreed. As an immigrant myself - I think this gets lots on both sides of politics. Everyone talks about how the country is being ruined - when really its got the most advantages relative to the rest of the world.
I think it depends on where you're comparing it to, and what you mean by the "rest of the world". Most of the rest of the world, by area or population, is very poor. But the US is not so special compared to the developed parts of Europe or East Asia or Canada, offering many of the same quality-of-life benefits with inferior social services and less participatory democracy.
It's not quite so easy. I was born and raised in Spain, and live and work in the US. I have plenty of family still there, and travel there often enough. Does Spain have significant advantages in social services? Sure! Politics are a little better there too. I also vastly prefer Spain's urbanism, where even small towns are far more alive than the largest, densest US metros. But that's not all there is to it.
I look at Spain's labor market and I see a country that is massively failing: Triple the unemployment rate. People out of college there, with good majors, that end up making far less than what they'd to at McDonalds in the US. Young adults can't afford housing either, but not because they have massive student debt, or high healthcare costs, or extreme housing prices, but because salaries are pretty sad. My brother does bioinformatics and has a Ph.D, and he'd make 4x what he does, today, doing the same job in the massive, booming metropolis that is... St Louis, Missouri. He lives with our retired mother, and they can barely make ends meet.
Ultimately the higher growth advantage for the US is long lasting too: If your GDP growth is 0.5% higher than your neighbor, every single year, compound interest makes the difference very stark after a few decades... and a place like Spain already starts 30% poorer.
So yes, I'd still argue that the US is ahead in many areas. The riskiest issue is the difficulty of reforms: Good luck reforming higher education or healthcare, even though other countries have working systems that are better. But even though all it takes to see the advantages of change is to look a little bit, progress seems very difficult, as there's just so much money and power on the line in keeping the status quo. But that might be the theme of the last couple of decades in all democracies: Unwillingness to reform in the face of dysfunction.
As a US citizen, resident of 34 years, born and raised in the UK, I applaud your analysis.
I'd also add that the US is a fabulous place to live if you make a solid income (say, 10-20% above median), but a pretty shitty place to live if you do not.
I'm an immigrant myself, and I share this sentiment deeply as well. The best description which I ever heard, curiously enough, was on a really old episode of this American life. My memory could be playing tricks on me, but I think it was some small story of folks doing car audio competitions, where the point was to build the car with the loudest possible speaker. It was absurd, silly, and for a nerd, obviously enthralling.
But at some point, I don't know if it is the narrator or someone in the story, but they say something to the effect of: "Everyone wants to be king of the hill, but there aren't enough hills to go around. The US is particularly great at creating more hills."
Ha, yeah, that's it. And, the quote in question, from David Segal, apparently:
"Everyone wants to be the king of the hill. That's international. But the number of aspiring kings always dwarfs the number of available hills. So in this country, we build more hills. We're geniuses, in fact, at building more hills."
Which is great until those hills directly or indirectly affect people's health. Healthcare should not be a hill. Prisons should not be a hill. Politics should not be a hill.
They affect health by creating enormous numbers of new fields for research and medicine, which after patent expiry is generified and manufactured cheaply for eternity.
You can have medical research without charging $1000 for an ambulance ride, $10k - $20k for having a child, $100,000 for staying in the hospital a few days. Those are the things I'm talking about.
You can, but these are complex systems, where some areas will have a profit incentive and be efficient, and others just mired in regulation, either directly or in a way that prevents competition arising. I don't think anyone deliberately built that hill. It's made up of lots of awesome hills and lots of hideous quagmires.
Pick your poison - would you rather have too many hills or not enough hills? Turns out limiting hill making is complex, and requires an even bigger hill that calls the shots
A flat landscape implies no opportunity for anyone to do anything. If you really want, go live in the wilderness on your own. That is the only true flat landscape
This is impossible, because in this scenario, someone will get weapons and will forcefully take over and rule everyone else. This is just how human nature works
It's not depressing at all! It's actually just part of natural selection. We, as living beings, will compete for resources. This is why us humans are as dominant as we are on this planet, and why we will continue to spread as far as we can. If we were not like this, our species would have never made it to modern homo sapiens and would have died out tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago
That's because we've built some very large hills to prevent this - notably powerful governments with militaries and police forces. Lack of hills is essentially anarchy, where all of a sudden the strongest now become the ruler
Your system only works if everyone is uniform. Unless you strongly disincentivize or eliminate the desire to see over the heads of the crowd standing on the plain, a taller person will be able to see further than a shorter person. The shorter person, who happens to desire to see at least as far as the taller person, may then try to scoop some dirt into a pile to get their head above the crowd. Hills and valleys of all types will then be made by the taller person to preserve an unobstructed line of sight.
The only way a person can absolutely reject authority is to live alone in wild territory (since managed territory is ruled by governing authorities). This scheme works until another person decides they want to live in the wilderness and happen to choose the exact same spot of woods as you, which is statistically probable since some geographic locations are more desirous than others. At that point, you will either find a way to coexist with this person or attempt to push them out. If you try to push them out, you're saying you're the ruler of the territory, so that option contradicts the objective of rejecting authority, for how can you say you reject authority and then become authority without being a hypocrite?
So, the only viable option is to coexist. Over time, more people who reject authority arrive, and you must coexist with them or pack your bags for somewhere else, which you really don't want to do. Presumably, you'll work the land in some way to provide for your own sustenance. One day, your neighbor accuses you of killing their livestock overnight. You obviously didn't, and you tell them that, but they just don't believe you because they know they saw you on their land the previous night. At this point, you're frustrated because you're innocent but can't demonstrate it, and the other people who reject authority like yourself are unable to decide who to listen to because neither one of you has more authority than the other. Someone comes up with the idea of writing down a common set of life principles and rules for dispute arbitration, so both legal and judicial systems are born. Down the line, someone decides to ignore the arbitration outcome, and the community decides that arbitration outcomes must be respected, so enforcement systems are created. At that point, everyone living in that spot of wild territory have created a government under the rule of law.
The point of all this is, at some level, we are all ruled by something, be it a single human or a government. Are you primarily taking issue with monarchy? If so, absolute monarchy exists in only a handful of places in the world, with most monarchies being constitutional monarchies which delegate much political authority to democratically-elected individuals. And yes, some people like trusting that the rulers will do a good job. If that makes them peasants, so be it, but consider that even the people in the wilderness community must hope that their government under the rule of law will be successful. If they aren't rooting for its success and actively work against it, the rule of law will eventually collapse.
I want to add as well, that you will all deride Elon Musk, but in secret you want to be Elon musk, you want to be that same person on top of the hill. So, even though you’re not him, you’re no better than him.
> I want to add as well, that you will all deride Elon Musk, but in secret you want to be Elon musk, you want to be that same person on top of the hill. So, even though you’re not him, you’re no better than him.
Yes, this is what America is built on. American culture is winner take all, and we generally want to be the winner.
We don't deride his success, we deride the fact that he acts like a child on social media
The fact that you are so sure of what you are saying here is a reflection of your own character. You are projecting.
I am not the person you are replying to, but I assure you that “I” never wanted to be a on top of anything. I don’t want celebrity or wealth. I want to be left alone most of all, and having just enough to achieve it.
Just telling you this so that your horizons of what people want open up a tad and you don’t assume that everyone around you is a different looking copy of you.
> The US is particularly great at creating more hills.
Because the US government has a money printer and an insatiable appetite for debt. The day will come for us, our kids, or our grandkids where it catches up to us.
I think that the argument goes US debt actually really doesn't matter, so long as Pax Americana is maintained. Being the global empire really helps out... until it doesn't
The US is running out of challengers. Europe is gone...like gone gone. Ditto Russia. China has a demographic bomb coming but they have a lot of things going for them so maybe they are the next challenger? Maybe India? They have problems but they too have a lot going for them.
I guess it is possible that maybe in a generation or two Europe, Russia, China can fix their problems, get a solid working class and challenge the US.
But it really feels like the entire planet is sinking right now and the US is the best of the worst.
> Because the US government has a money printer (...)
I don't think your non-sequitur bears even a passing resemblance to the subject.
I think the whole point of the thread you're replying on is mentioning the individualism and personal freedom that's the US's cultural basis, and that has a profound impact on the well-being of those who feel the need to be the best of what they do, regardless if what that might be.
A while ago I stumbled upon an Instagram account of a middle-age man who had a bunch of videos of him juggling random stuff in his back yard, and he made it his point to stress that he was the best at what he did and he made a whole career out of it. Such a random thing, and I'm sure there weren't that many competitors for the title of best pillow juggler, but that fit definitely the description of someone making his own hill to be its king.
Also valleys tho. Gotta have a lot of lows to have that many highs There's definitely at least three Americas. And that bottom America is a frightening reality that so many have never known otherwise
Even so, putting on Rawl's Veil of Ignorance, if you were in the bottom America, would you choose to be in a lottery that would place you, randomly, in another situation? Sure, you might end up a living in a chalet in the Swiss Alps, but it's a lot more likely you'd be in the global south toiling just to survive day to day.
US still has 2nd highest murder rate and highest incarceration, so just statistically, absolutely ANYWHERE BUT America if you are at the bottom, US is great for the middle and upper classes.
Thats kinda what I was obliquely referring to originally
Edit: and also, I feel like there's bigger and smaller examples of similar equally or moreso populous jurisdictions that are quite safe and peaceful to the extent that I feel like its gotta be the god and its gotta be the guns.
I guess I might be often missing the part that like even if you're the poorest here, like you're technically still richer and have better qol that many other jurisdictions. Reminds me of Dracula where he's in the shitty ghetto apartment that is depressing af and he's beaming like "Kings never knew such luxury"
Still though particularly in places like Appalachia or rougher cities, its terrifying. America is realky liberty or death with few in-betweens
Speaking as a marginally disabled US citizen - it's a terrifying place where if I become too disabled to maintain employment, I'll lose my health insurance and then my access to healthcare. I guess it's good that a lot of people are making money though; it seems like the advertising business is going gangbusters too. I don't really consider that much of a national purpose, but it seems pretty hard to get everyone to agree on what that would be anyway.
Edit: I'm rate-limited so to answer the apparent question everyone has: I live in Texas; it's not exactly friendly regarding Medicaid, but I don't know what it takes to qualify.
Depends on how you became unemployed. There is a long wait for Medicare if you "voluntarily" left your last position, even if you were forced out by cowards who wanted to keep their record clean and be able to say they never fire anyone.
Medicaid coverage often has many requirements to qualify. Most notably, in many jurisdictions, there is an aggressive asset limit that requires you to liquidate almost everything you own, in order to get coverage when disabled or elderly. Those limits can apply retroactively up to five years, and can also prevent disabled people from being able to marry, because they would lose benefits due to a partner's assets.
The Medicaid trust is the way around that. It's not a great solution, but it's at least something if you're in that position and have the time to plan.
I live in Texas, and as far as I know as an adult man, I'd not qualify since it is not a medicaid expansion state. Perhaps if needed I could move to a different state, but that poses plenty of problems as well. My plan is mostly to save every dollar I can in the event that I'm unable to find suitable employment. I'm actually pretty happy with my job now, but it seems inevitable that that changes; every employer I've ever had is now out of business or consumed by private equity and a shell of what it was. I guess that's helping the GDP though and I should be happy? I'm not particularly though.
I'm pretty sure some states (conservative) reject federal medicaid dollars simply because they are ideologically opposed to government funded healthcare.
It's not hard to imagine these same states make the bureaucracy of obtaining low income healthcare benefits arbitrary, difficult to navigate, and counter-productive as way to 'prove' government healthcare doesn't work.
Oh that's one of the big hidden costs is just the amount of paperwork ( in many cases physical paper ) to document, submit in triplicate, and then waiting and waiting and waiting
Also note their use of 'marginally disabled' here. If you have a disability but are still considered 'able to work' you don't qualify for medicaid or medicare. Keeping health insurance becomes super important and ACA plans not only have very thin networks, but are often exceedingly stingy when it comes to approving specialty meds even if your doctor considers them medically necessary.
I'm really sorry your comment is getting so much pushback. I have a brother with some Medicaid benefits in Texas who can never live independently. He's mute, can't take care of his own hygiene, and can't swallow food, so needs to be fed through a stomach tube. Medicaid is constantly trying to deny him nursing benefits, and he can't ever hold more than $2K in any of his accounts or he would lose SSI.
People have this fantasy that the social safety net takes care of people that can't take care of themselves, but that's really not the case. It is extremely easy to lose benefits and hard to get them in the first place for various services, with very long waiting lists for some things.
HN is an interesting place, but the bubble of privilege is more like a concrete dome sometimes. I'll sometimes tell people to imagine getting hit on the head with a hammer and then being unable to continue working their cushy office jobs (that could also describe my employment to some degree), and how they'd adapt, but that tends to get downvoted.
I suppose I'm actually rather fortunate to some degree; a lot of my issues could likely be resolved with a hip replacement, and I'm told the latest ones are very robust and can lead to nearly full natural function, but I haven't quite built up the courage to replace part of my skeleton with metal and plastic. As I say, I'm rather happily employed these days, but I've also been throught the odd layoff, so I know how precarious things can be.
Agreed that the Health Insurance situation (I call it Mafia) is terrible in the US. A perfect example of where we are not even close to being good let alone great. We have great doctors, hospitals, research but the middle man insurance mafia is destroying it for decades now. I honestly don't know what can be done.
I don't know if Single payer is a good solution in a country of our size but I am willing to try anything compared to what we have today.
Would have loved to live in the US but dread the idea of H1B. I find it paradoxical that living in the most free country in the world required living in servitude for a good number of years. So the investor route is the only option it seems, one which i am still considering once capital becomes available.
Servitude implies no payment and little freedom, whereas with an H1B you have often high payment and complete freedom in all ways besides your actual employer. However, your employer is still bound by all of the employment laws of the nation and state, so real abuse is quite difficult to pull off.
I don't think this is accurate. In the US, the onus of abuse reporting is on the employee. You can abuse your employee knowing that if they report you, you'll know they reported you, and can carefully torpedo their career knowing the employee has a very high bar to legally prove retaliation in court.
Abuse is possible! It’s just not common, not in the sense of “servitude” being slavery or some other kind of abominable condition. Maybe you get the shit work, maybe you work more hours, but let’s not pretend these are the salt mines.
Words have meaning. When we use 'indentured servitude' in the modern context it means that it is not easy for a h1b worker to change employers as easily as someone with residency or citizenship. This is irrefutably true.
When people cannot easily change jobs they deal with worse working conditions and worse pay. I have seen people work for the same employer for over a decade because they would have to restart their greencard process otherwise.
Servitude is subjective. For me knowing I can't fire an employer or client at will, having to rely on them for years, knowing that if they do fire me i have max one month to find a new job or lose my house and uproot my family, is servitude. I want the sweet freedom America promises from day one. However, I do respect people that put up with it and I am not belittling anyone.
There are plenty of Americans who view working for a wage like this. Sometimes due to the precarity of their situation (e.g. deindustrialization reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing and some engineering fields) but often it's part of the freedom that was glamorized by the founding myth of the country. The country was founded by businessmen, plantation owners, and independent farmers. Now we venerate small business owners, people living off rents and assets, etc. Many of them view working for a wage with revulsion.
> Now we venerate small business owners, people living off rents and assets, etc.
That would be great if it were the case. But it seems like a good portion venerates corporations and wage slavery.
> Many of them view working for a wage with revulsion.
Couldn't agree more with working for a wage being repulsive. I think the US needs to get back closer to the founding myth you mentioned, and farther from the cancer of corporations turning everyone into wage slaves. There really is no freedom in that. My stomach turns inside out thinking that I was in favour of that. What a terrible mistake. Nothing against those forced to work as such often limited by the precarity of their situation.
Unless you're from India/China, the wait times are not long to get a green card - plenty of people get it within 2 years. The real challenge is getting the labor certification stating that there is a shortage in skills you offer.
And you can always change jobs (albeit at the risk of restarting the green card process).
The immigrants I know who become US citizens know this to be true. Many of natural born citizens I grew up with either aren't aware of this reality or are misinformed about it. Many natural born US citizens don't know what makes America so special. Yes there are problems in America, but how many of those problems are the result of an apathetic, nihilistic American population and not the foundational systems America is built on?
I say the same of the UK. Maybe not the #1 best possible place to be born, but definitely in the top 10. I'm extremely lucky and privileged to have been born in the United Kingdom.
Will that still be true for people born here fifty years from now? I have my doubts.
This is one of many reasons that my head hurts when I hear people espouse anti-immigrant sentiment, often on the basis of made-up nonsense about "them" being freeloaders/tax burdens.
Immigrants are extremely valuable for a country like the U.S. You basically get a free adult that that another country paid to raise and educate. Even a poorly educated immigrant is a net positive on average. Of course, the best immigrants are illegal immigrants because they can be maximally exploited and can make minimal claims to the services they pay for with their taxes.
A large proportion of the people I know who fulminate about "illegal immigration" had relatives who came here under at best cattle-call circumstances, if not outright "illegal" ones themselves. A nontrivial portion of my generation's Boston Irish grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers did not necessarily have all their papers in order; it's just far enough back to somehow legitimate it.
Also, they're white, and that plays a role--even today there's a surprising number of undocumented Irish immigrants to the United States but nobody's out there asking for reactionary measures to that.
It's not always racism...but it is mostly ladder-pulling, and economically unrealistic ladder-pulling at that. (Ask a farmer.)
That's what shows up on the surface, but go down the rabbit hole. *Why* do they care? Is it really just a moral stand on right/wrong? I doubt that given how few Americans live a 100% law abiding life.
Or is it that they feel those immigrants are unfairly taking something from them? And if so, is that really true or just FUD?
How much of the sentiment boils down to "those illegals are taking our jobs!"? How many people who hold that sentiment would actually want & take the job being filled by one of those immigrants? If their argument is instead that the illegal immigrant labor depresses wages for that set of jobs, how many of those people are willing to pay the extra cost for the products once the company paid fair market wages?
It's a pretty massive resource and logistical problem. Plus, having very little ability of being able to filter who comes in the country is pretty dangerous.
> It's a pretty massive resource and logistical problem.
What resource and logistical problem? The US isn't a command economy, and it's not a social welfare state that extends its largess to anyone within its borders that has a pulse.
Immigrants, legal or otherwise, have to earn their keep, same as everyone else. And there are no natural shortages of... Anything in the US.
So you're comparing skilled immigrants that not only have enough money to immigrate, but also enough money to often seek higher education at 'out of state' rates, vs the average US citizen? Does that seem fair to you?
America is famous for not just having skilled immigrants though.
Despite the castigation of Latin American immigrants as un American, Hispanics are quite patriotic and successful, even the ones who's families came here without documents
> Many of natural born citizens I grew up with either aren't aware of this reality or are misinformed about it.
The natural born citizens dissatisfied with the US are generally not comparing the US to a developing country or a country with an ongoing war on their soil, which is where most immigrants come from.
Instead, they are comparing it to other developed countries and focused on specific conditions that matter to them, like housing, transportation, environment, violence, etc.
> Yes there are problems in America, but how many of those problems are the result of an apathetic, nihilistic American population and not the foundational systems America is built on?
The criticism of these problems is far from apathetic, and it's an important part of how we begin to remedy them. For example, we aren't going to wish away gun violence by ignoring it.
The biggest current threat to the US isn't this criticism, but rather the attack on its democratic foundations happening now. However even that is not coming from apathy, though its goals are very nihilistic in the short term and oligarchic and theocratic in the long term.
On top of that, when we immigrants also compare against other developed countries, we see how immigrant friendly the US is. The natural born citizens wouldn’t necessarily care about that
> we see how immigrant friendly the US is. The natural born citizens wouldn’t necessarily care about that
To the contrary, plenty do care about it in the sense of being opposed to further immigration from developing countries. "Demographic anxiety" is a term often used to describe this.
Also, both natural born citizens of recent immigrant ancestry and those natural born for many generations care because anti-immigrant sentiment is a canary for a broader xenophobic trends.
When pressed, almost everyone has an opinion on immigration policy.
> Instead, they are comparing it to other developed countries and focused on specific conditions that matter to them, like housing, transportation, environment, violence, etc.
When I hear people complain online about the US, it is very common for them to have a deep understanding of problems in the US, but very superficial understanding of problems in other developed nations. European countries also have lots of problems with housing, healthcare, the environment, racism, the rise of the far right, etc. There are some problems that are uniquely american, like mass shootings.
Being an informed citizen isn't just understanding the problems in your country. If you wan't to be a part of positive change, you need to understand what's working and what's not working in other comparable countries as well.
Indeed. It's hilarious to see some Americans claiming things are so much better in "Europe" when their entire experience consists of a few weeks as a tourist or business traveler in first-tier EU cities. Try living for a while in the places where outsiders rarely go and then tell me how great it is.
> Indeed. It's hilarious to see some Americans claiming things are so much better in "Europe" when their entire experience consists of a few weeks as a tourist or business traveler in first-tier EU cities.
Being specific in your comparison matters.
It is indeed facile to make the statement that "things are so much better in Europe". Blanket statements are usually stupid.
It's reasonable, however, to compare the efficacy of public transit of San Francisco to that of Copenhagen, or to compare the a population-wide health indicators of the US to Germany.
> It's not unreasonable, however, to compare the efficiency of public transit of San Francisco to that of Copenhagen. Comparing accessibility of population-wide health indicators of the US to Germany also makes sense.
I definitely agree that the US healthcare system sucks and should not be emulated. But I think many of its critics think healthcare is a solved problem in countries like Germany and it really isn't. Germans are not completely happy with their healthcare system and there is an effort underway to reform it currently. I think it's a better system than the US system, but it's got plenty of problems:
> In Germany, which spends more on healthcare than almost any other country in the world, hospitals are a greater concern, with this winter’s wave of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in young children triggering alarm across the country.
> Amid reports of overcrowded casualty departments and parents forced to sleep in hospital corridors or travel hundreds of kilometres for a child’s treatment, the Süddeutsche Zeitung said the country was witnessing “what it means when a system implodes … in scenes which for a long time might have seemed unimaginable”.
> In a petition to parliament titled: “Alert level red – hospitals in danger”, the German Hospital Society (DKG) again highlighted a chronic lack of staff as the main problem, noting that many hospitals had had to temporarily close casualty departments due to a lack of doctors and nurses.
> More than 23,000 posts remain unfilled in Germany’s hospitals after several years of low recruitment and recent mass resignations, particularly in intensive care and operating theatres, by staff citing a workload so extreme that some were unable to take even a short break or go to the toilet.
Additionally, the poor health outcomes in the United States are not necessarily the result of the US health care system. Many of the most important drivers of health care outcomes (exercise, nutrition, obesity, drug abuse, etc) are worse in the US.
My point isn't that the US health system is great, because it isn't great. My point is that people in the US are well informed about their own problems but generally ignorant about the problems outside the country.
It often doesn't make sense: the nicest countries in Europe won't allow you to become an immigrant there, because they're hyper xenophobic and or extremely racist. They have very tall barriers to entry that are intentional. They usually call it protecting their culture, it's really just plain old xenophobia and racism.
The nicest European countries are fragile and can't handle immigration well at all. Just ask Sweden how their next 30 or so years are starting to look. France has entirely failed for decades at integrating their immigration populations, despite their vaunted welfare state. They're very mediocre at functional integration, whereas the US is the greatest by-design melting pot in world history.
Try immigrating into affluent nations like Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway, Finland, etc. They make it far more difficult than it is to come to the US (unless you're a top tier immigrant in terms of skill/wealth). The nicest countries love to use points systems or the equivalent to keep poorer, lower skilled people out.
Canada for example is 2% black and 3% Latin American. Anyone think that's an accident? There are roughly 3/4 of a billion Latin Americans in the Americas and somehow Canada is merely 3% Latin American. The huge Latin American immigration wave the US has seen over the past 40-50 years has been nearly entirely blocked by Canada. It's by design, they're xenophobic like the Europeans are, and they do everything they can to keep poor people out.
People will say: just look how amazing Norway or Germany are. It's a nice fantasy, because good luck becoming a citizen (maybe for the privileged HN crowd there's a chance).
Japan is amazing? Yeah ok, go try becoming a citizen there. Try integrating, try becoming Japanese (you can't).
So what the hell is the point of saying: xyz is so wonderful - if they're excluding by design and won't let you join?
Gee, Stanford, MIT and Harvard are amazing, every college should be like that.
The US remains moderately accessible, most of its peers are the exact opposite.
Canada[1] is 15% Asian (India, China, etc), 4.3% Black, 1.9% arab, 1.6% latin american.
The US is 12% black, 18% latin american, 6% Asian. And let me tell you, that 12% black number isn't the product of a liberal immigration policy.
The numbers aren't actually too different, and if you were to switch the two countries' geographies, I'd expect the US latin american numbers to significantly drop, and Canada's to significantly rise.
The Canadian immigration system is actually pretty reasonable. Points for being young, for having useful skills, points for demonstrating mastery of the language, points for having relatives. And a clear process for international students studying in Canada to naturalize.
The US is the one that yanks you around by your britches, with decades-long waiting lists and visa lotteries for people who are already living and working in the country.
[1] Country-of-origin breakdown for recent immigrants to Canada[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171597/new-immigrants-c... - 32% India, 8% China, 4.3% Philipines, 3.8% Nigeria. The first European country to make the list is France, at 3.2%, followed by the US, Brazil, Iran, Korea, Pakistan, all at 2-3%.
[3] Given these numbers, I think its reasonable to hypothesize that if Canada had border proximity, and strong cultural ties to Mexico, I'm sure that it's lat-am immigration numbers might look
similar to what the US has.
> The US remains moderately accessible, most of its peers are the exact opposite.
I agree completely. But that's good and practically necessary for the US, since it is highly reliant on immigrants at all levels of skill for their labor.
Immigration even underpins the basic functioning of the healthcare system, and not just for doctors and nurses. Cleaning hospitals is a critical job for the healthcare system, and janitorial workers are 20% Latino.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't plenty that can be learned from the administration of healthcare systems elsewhere.
Germany, like the US, has a market based health insurance system organized through employers, but unlike the US, carrying insurance is required by law [1].
Furthermore, Germany has universal public coverage for medically necessary care, and controls the price of prescription drugs [2].
That doesn't make Germany's system perfect by a long shot, but it manages to achieve a much lower healthcare spend as a percentage of GDP while maintaining universal coverage for basic healthcare and even offering patients longer average hospital stays than the US does.
> Europe won't allow you to become an immigrant there, because they're hyper xenophobic and or extremely racist. [...] They usually call it protecting their culture, it's really just plain old xenophobia and racism.
> Just ask Sweden how their next 30 or so years are starting to look. France has entirely failed for decades at integrating their immigration populations, despite their vaunted welfare state.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. The way you put it, European countries are simultaneously closed to immigration and irrationally racist for being this way, and at the same time they're on doomed trajectories due to immigration. If the latter is true, that would be a non-racist justification for anti-immigration policies, but if they were as anti-immigration as you claim those faltering social conditions due to immigration wouldn't exist in the first place.
Compare immigration to France and Japan. It's clear which of these countries is actually hostile to immigrants.
Not to take sides, but there's not a contradiction there. The immigration of refugees has been a topic of discussion for some time now (Brexit). Standard immigration is still difficult in most of the EU but there has been an influx of refugees who are primarily poor.
I don't agree with the characterization that the policies are due to racism though.
> I don't agree with the characterization that the policies are due to racism though.
Right, it's a clear contradiction. If European countries were "hyper xenophobic and or extremely racist" they would be turning away and deporting those refugees. They're not doing that though, so the characterization of European countries as xenophobic and racist doesn't fit the facts.
The contradiction is between government policies and the society. Government (I am speaking of Germany which I know of, I expect France and Nordics be similar mutatis mutandis) clearly understands that they need immigrants, but the society is inherently nativist (if xenophobic is too strong of a word), and not willing to accept/integrate them.
Yea, there is a reason why net immigration between Europe and the USA heavily biases towards people moving from EU to USA and not the other way around. The USA is truly the land of opportunity. More than anywhere else you alone control your own destiny. The USA has also proven time and again that it is more economically resilient than any other economy out there. There are booms and busts, but the recovery from the busts are always strong and do not stagnate for extended periods of time.
I say this all as someone who does not live in the USA and is not an American citizen.
The USA is not perfect and has its own share of social problems (like all countries do) but people decide that the tradeoff is worth it for all the good things the USA offers.
> The USA is truly the land of opportunity. More than anywhere else you alone control your own destiny. The USA has also proven time and again that it is more economically resilient than any other economy out there. There are booms and busts, but the recovery from the busts are always strong and do not stagnate for extended periods of time.
It's not limited to economic opportunity. The US also offers people the opportunity to make the US better through our democratic process.
Is it because poor Americans can't afford to move to Europe even if they would be better off, but wealthier Europeans can emigrate to the USA where they will definitely be better off?
Well you can probably become a de facto EU permanent resident by buying a ticket on a smuggling boat. EU member states don't actually deport many undocumented immigrants regardless of what the official immigration laws say.
I have done this, its really great for me and my family. Kid goes to public school and most of our friends are locals. Would highly recommend everyone try this for a bit and make their own judgement.
> The natural born citizens dissatisfied with the US are generally not comparing the US to a developing country or a country with an ongoing war on their soil, which is where most immigrants come from.
Even as a Canadian who immigrated to the U.S. (who unfortunately lives in Canada again now), I didn't realize how good I had it until I had given up my U.S. residence
In practice they're comparing America to an idealized, fantasy version of other developed countries from 2007. They largely aren't aware of how much the US has pulled ahead since then. The UK now has a lower GDP per capital than Mississippi for example.
' any natural born US citizens don't know what makes America so special. ' Can you clearify what makes more special than e.g. Germany where I live now.
Germany is also a special country that many people would want to immigrate to for many reasons, although I have a worry about Germany. Specially demographics: if we compare the demographics between the US and Germany we see that the US has a larger number of younger people to help support its aging population whereas Germany has less. This will mean that entitlement programs in Germany will likely face a great deal of stress in the decades ahead. This is less of a problem if Germany embraces policy that encourages immigration, but it needs to enact policy that makes it friendly to external capital investment to make it attractive to foreign business and workers.
I'm an American who works quite a bit with companies in Germany.
The number of opportunities in tech and the speed with which new ones arise can't be compared.
Look at the latest trend - AI. Not only did the initial boost come from openAI (US) its adoption by the biggest tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple etc - all American and all investing Billions.
But that's not even the most 'special' aspect of the US ( I'm sure SAP will jump in big into AI ) It's the hundreds of startups that are either starting or pivoting into the trend.
Now, this doesn't mean that this latest iteration of AI will be world-changing, it could turn out to be a complete bust. But it's this constant churn, the striving to be on the cutting edge, the rise and fall of dreams that makes the US 'special'.
Thank you for your answer but none of these is very US. There are only a small parts of US which are deeply invested into AI, not all Americans striving for excellence and US is not excellent in all. Even your description I can argue also happening in China.
OK, we'll have to agree to disagree. The context here is Tech and why the US is 'special' for people who want to get ahead. You asked how it's different from Germany. My answer is that the US encourages creative destruction, and generates far more opportunities for trying new things.
I would never make the claim that the US is excellent in all. :)
Whether the same holds true for China is an interesting question. I've never worked with or visited China but I think there are differences. China certainly seems more 'innovative' when it comes to hardware, both physical infrastructure as well as manufacturing in general. Not so sure about software.
I don't think the context is tech, it was economical growth, but giving the all topic discussion, special has very broad meaning here and I like to know which one.
What you describe it is SV tech culture or start up culture in the US, which is focused on few spots. And not even all people there (e. g. Homeless people). This culture might be special but this isn't defitenly US because it is obviously not across this country.
Also I can tell you that in other countries and field of economics there is a certain sense of perfectionism or excellence e. G. In Germany or Japan or even Italy.
I guess why the Americans emphasise they are special because of economic growth is very clear: besides military there aren't many important areas where the US is good. This helps to feel "to be the best Country in the world", which is obviously wrong.
Don't forget entertainment, I always seem to hear mostly american songs being played in stores, or see American movies played in theaters when I travel to Europe.
Also food: While other countries can compete on one of their native cuisines or many a few more, the US is pumping out top tier chefs in multiple areas.
Also universities: The massive amount of investment and R&D that comes out of these schools allows them to remain top of the pack.
"t forget entertainment, I always seem to hear mostly american songs being played "
Nope. You don't get the reason why these songs are played. It's more jazz in a lift, not good music. Let me introduce into techno culture.
"Also food: While other countries can compete on one of their native cuisines or many a few more, the US is pumping out top tier chefs in multiple areas."
yThats sad about your lack of knowledge. May I introduce to this https://nerdyfoodies.com/countries-with-the-most-michelin-st...
Germany alone has more stars than the whole US
The US has enormous amounts of capital and the capital owning class aren't just sitting on their fortunes, but are actually investing in fresh blood. The US has a large, rich homogenous market making it comparatively easier to grow new businesses. The US has some of the worlds best educational institutions making it easy to find world class talent. Lastly, the entire population has democracy as a core value, so you'll never see a single person in power for longer than 8 years. There aren't many places in the world that have such a complete package.
> how many of those problems are the result of an apathetic, nihilistic American population and not the foundational systems America is built on?
"Apathetic" is not really a word I'd use to describe most Americans I know, especially the working class. "Informed but powerless" is more like it. Nihilism is the likely result of this sort of learned helplessness from a lifetime growing up in an unresponsive democracy. From the get-go, our foundational systems emphasized wealth over democracy. It was a system designed to empower a certain type and class of people, to liberate them from the English Crown's influence, but not really a democracy for all. Through our history, we've consistently encouraged wealth creation and resource exploitation/monopolization over democratic participation, and where democratic advances were made, they happened against strong headwinds and strong oppression from the wealthy. Slave owners, robber barons, industrialists, tech owners... this has never been a society friendly to the common person.
> this has never been a society friendly to the common person.
Nope, and in fact the American Dream is exactly this - it's saying that if you work hard / are lucky / have talents / have connections / have resources (the more you have the higher chances you have), you too can rise above the common person and join the ruling class of
Of course this is out of reach for most people, and for the vast majority of people, as soon as they climb out of the common class, they immediately look down upon the common people, since they are now above the peasants. This is human nature. Everyone who complains about the rich will do the same thing as the rich as soon as they become rich
Prioritizing wealth creation is probably beneficial to most people. As Adam Smith observed:
"It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is, in reality, the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy."
Not that it should come at the expense of exploitation, and Smith would likely agree. He was critical of rent seekers and slavery and was very much interested in the well being of common people.
His observation, I believe, it also applicable at a smaller scale when looking at companies. Growing companies are great to work for with lots of excitement, perks, and new opportunities, even for average or mediocre employees. Stagnant companies are difficult and melancholy, not much advancement, raises are small or non existent. Declining ones are miserable as everyone is fighting for survival.
When I talk about apathy, I look around and I see people who care more about Kim Kardashian than history, politics, or financial literacy. I look around and see people who care more about their fantasy football stats than their children's grades. I see people who would rather veg on the couch watching the same reruns over and over again instead of learning a new skill. I see ignorant ideas like America oppresses its people when in fact it's the American people who've forgotten that America enables them to be their best selves if they're strong enough to achieve it.
America was not founded for the common people. It was founded by the exceptional people who risked everything to come to this hostile continent in search of freedom from oppression. Freedom from serfdom. Freedom from debt. Freedom from religious persecution. Freedom to live how they wanted to!
America's population has forgotten its morals and what it means to be American. We are like the fat people in wall-e floating in our bubble, complaining at our minor inconveniences, and not knowing where we're going. We are fucked unless we turn this ship around.
I don't really see this though replace nihilistic with narcissistic and you may be on to something. It's not a belief in nothing, it's a belief in "I."
We are losing the ability to disagree and still keep it civil for one because of identities being so tied to the -ism of the day and no one accepting that they may be wrong about something every once in a while.
The same drive to be independent and "self-made" is becoming a weakness. It's going to an extreme where every man is an island.
We live in a world where a large subset of people have fooled themselves into believing that there's some other place without problems. If where you live has any problems, then it must be an awful place to live - so their thinking goes.
This group, for whatever reason, don't seem to weigh the pros and cons of every other place and see that most places are either hardly any better or MUCH worse.
Italy, Spain, France, and England were great for hundreds of years before the US, and they're still pretty damn good - all things considered. The odds that the US goes from the global leader for two hundred years and turns to a sh*t-hole in our lifetimes is pretty unlikely.
But somehow ~40% of the country convinces themselves this is true based on who the current president is - and, honestly, it seems like not much else.
> We live in a world where a large subset of people have fooled themselves into believing that there's some other place without problems. If where you live has any problems, then it must be an awful place to live - so their thinking goes.
This reads like a straw man. Just because some place arguably has issues that does not mean that it it just as bad as the one you're living on, or that your life won't improve your life by adopting or emulating the good examples.
Healthcare is a great example. I'm convinced that the average US citizen has absolutely no idea of the critical positive impact on quality of life and well-being that socialized healthcare has on all citizens, directly and indirectly. It goes way deeper than not risking going bankrupt for being in a car accident, or being able to treat your nagging minor health issue without having to tap a credit line. It affects things like being confident that your loved ones will have all the care they need if something bad and unfortunate happens to them, regardless of who you are ir where your career is at the moment.
> Just because some place arguably has issues that does not mean that it it just as bad as the one you're living on, or that your life won't improve your life by adopting or emulating the good examples.
Just because you adopt a change doesn't mean you'll adopt an outcome.
Proposing sweeping changes is easy - making them work is hard and prone to making things even worse instead.
> Just because you adopt a change doesn't mean you'll adopt an outcome.
You don't adopt changes. You adopt or emulate good examples. This means processes, and the goal of processes is to deliver an outcome. It's not change for the sake of change.
Also, when a nation lags behind so much in a fundamental area, just taking a step in the right direction has a major positive impact on the quality of life of those affected by it. As a good example, see Obamacare.
> Yes there are problems in America, but how many of those problems are the result of an apathetic, nihilistic American population and not the foundational systems America is built on?
Excepting refugees, AFAICT U.S. immigration policy purposely selects for people who have the ability, aspiration, and often wealth to be able to be able to successfully pass through the process.
So for any other given country, you could just as easily rephrase your question to ask whether that given country's problems are the result of apathy/nihilism/etc. of the majority of people who don't end up emigrating to the U.S.
To me that seems like a fatuous question. If you think the same, then realize it's no less fatuous than the one you asked.
Edit: Hm... maybe "fatuous" is the wrong word. To me it just seems like a very general question about human civilization masquerading as a question about a specific country's population. I think there's a name for this when it comes up in say, a debate, but I can't remember what it is.
I worked with a Filipino friend. He mentioned in the town he grew up in someone tried to open a market that competed with the other two markets in town and they burned his store down and ran him out of town. He said that's the reality in a lot of the world. Some places the means to do that aren't as overt but they still exist and are effective.
this happened in mafia-controlled areas as recently as the '80s. I dont mean this as a rebuttal, but more in support of the US being great, because after decades (or more, I dont know or care about the history of criminals) of this bs, we tackled it through RICO and a focused campaign.
But it's not the case, it sounds good on paper but it has been a long time since the USA was a good place to lift yourself up by your bootstraps, there are so many things that hold you down on the way up that do not exist in other countries (really just the medical situation alone). That said I'm very glad you're happy and it has worked out well for you.
However, my only regret was that I did not leave sooner, it did not work out for well for me on the balance, IE I did make money, but my quality of life was less than middle class people have where I live now.
Edit : loving the battle with the down and upvotes but seriously I'd rather have more back and forth with actual data.
Sources:
0. Growing up very poor in the USA, immigrating somewhere else.
On a per capita basis Gen X and Millennials in the US are now doing better than their parents at the same age[1]. A lot of studies showing the opposite use raw numbers and share of total GDP, but don't account for the wildly large size of the Baby Boom generation.
And anecdotally, pretty much anyone I know who isn't the child of a doctor or lawyer is doing better than their parents.
The statement being "but if I had to choose a country to get ahead in life with the most opportunities possible as an immigrant, US is still the country to be at".
I don't think your rebuttal addresses the data I linked at all or supports the parent point at all
Upward mobility is definitely down and the USA is no longer the world leader by some measurements. I get that won't persuade everyone but I'm happy to debate on that data instead of an unrelated discussion point even if it is interesting.
If you measure mobility by the ability to rise from the lowest quintile to the highest, yes other countries do better. But the top quintile in the US is just leaps and bounds past anywhere else. Rising from the lowest to the 4th quintile is quite common, about 1 in 10. If you look at the 2nd quintile about 35% of their children end up in the top 2 quintiles. Reaching the 4th quintile means a median income of more than $120k, which by global standards is pretty amazing.
The median income of the lowest quintile has done slightly better than inflation since 1967, but the 5th quintile has as we all know gone up precipitously. The 4th quintile has beaten inflation by something like 30k. So rising from the 1st to the 4th quintile is still quite a lot of mobility.
As far as the change over time goes, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you that social mobility used to be higher. I think part of the reasoning for that was an incredibly strong domestic economy compared to the rest of the world, as well as a lower baseline (strides in standard of living and pay get harder and harder to increase the further you increase them).
As far as the comparisons globally, they're ranking countries based on "education, access to technology, healthcare, social protection and employment opportunities" which has the implicit assumption baked in that those 5 metrics are proxies for social mobility. They might be, but why not actually measure the thing you care about? Social mobility to me means changing social classes based on income. Something like moving from a 25k/yr household to a 75k/yr household, or moving from a 75k/yr household to a 200k/yr household, maybe another jump up to 500k or a million/yr.
It seems to me that there is a much more equal distribution of incomes and outcomes in the countries you linked. That makes me think it would be much harder to go from being middle class to upper class in those countries than in the US, simply because almost everybody is part of the middle class. Thus, I think if you measured what most immigrants (and what I) actually care about when we hear about "social mobility," then the countries you mentioned would have great social mobility into the middle class, and basically no other social mobility.
Actually the data I've seen states one is way more likely to go from the bottom 20% to the top 20% in many other countries than if you were doing it in the USA.
I'm open to any counter data, but I've read these same numbers in several sources and you can tease it out of my first link.
This effectively defines social mobility as wages being compressed around the median. Small changes in income will create large changes in percentile since it is a relative measure in these cases. For countries where wages are not compressed around the median, like the US, large absolute increases in income produce small increases in percentile.
To put it another way, it is much easier to increase your income in the US but harder to increase your income ranking. I think most people would prefer to have more money than a higher ranking given a choice between the two.
So this is just moving goal posts IMO. End of day it's harder to go from the poorest to the richest. Speaking as someone that was born below the poverty line and but later was earning in the top 1% in the USA, going from sub 14k to 36k was gigantically huge...going from 50k to 250k in as short of a span didnt affect me very much, but moving to France and not worrying about medical bills or insurance companies again was a game changer ... YMMV and everyone is different
I hear this a lot for immigrants and I'm curious if you could be more specific on the advantages and opportunities you notice? Is it really a US thing, or a first world thing? Why do these opportunities not exist in other countries? It seems to me that a Canadian or UK or German citizen would have basically the same opportunities as a US citizen, but maybe I'm mistaken.
I’m Swedish and have worked a lot with / for US companies, but not lived there. I think the reason is a fundamentally egalitarian culture, where crab mentality is not encouraged and people (not just engineers) are fine with working for nerds.
Sweden is kind of the opposite, and it really decimates the opportunities available here. Perhaps not so much in quantity, but in quality.
I mean for my parents, they were discriminated against in their own country (India). Despite all the racism accusations that get thrown around, Americans are much more willing to take chances on people. And then it's very easy to raise your children well here. My parents came to this country in their mid thirties and are well off (retired, own their home, have some disposable income). My brother and I are filthy rich (own homes, multiple in the case of my brother, large investments, etc). We didn't do anything magic. We just studied fields that were high paying, which are open to everyone in this country. People often complain that there's not enough reaching out to various communities. I guarantee you there was no outreach to mine. I'm still the only person I know from my particular background in the United States. My parents were completely clueless as to college and higher education in this country. But if you just take advantage of the free resources and work hard... It's extremely easy to get ahead. I saw so many people growing up simply refuse to take the steps.
It is this particular narrative, and repeated evidence of it among specific immigrant populations, that the American left rails against. The reason is that it means it isn't "the system" it is culture and attitude that makes or breaks success.
The sad part is that, progressives used to care about culture a lot and had great success in these endeavors. We could easily solved poverty if we became okay with forced cultural change. Of course this is a hard sell in modern America. But it wasn't even just a century ago and progressives were it's biggest proponents.
I have the opposite problem: I have a US passport (only), and wish I could emigrate to a developed country that isn't so dysfunctional, militaristic, and capitalistic. (I grew up in another country, but never got a passport there because I had a US one from birth. I also spent several weeks in a few other countries -- enough to get a very basic feel for their society and services.)
The US is great if you want to "get ahead" (and manage to do so), but if you just want a peaceful, boring life, this is not the place to be. We treat our society like a zero-sum game. Between our terrible healthcare, education, school safety, infrastructure, public transportation, politics, insane housing costs, corrupt judges, stances on drugs and abortion, it really feels like a hellhole where either you're rich or you're worthless. I'd much rather prefer somewhere in Europe, especially Scandinavia, or maybe Canada or East Asia. But it's not easy to emigrate.
Even this framing is itself pretty terrible: Our GDP outpaced expectations, so that must be good, right? Hardly. That just means the rich get richer, leaving everyone else even further behind.
Life actually seemed way better for millions of working class folks during COVID, when the economy was tanking and government simply propped it up, and suddenly workers everywhere had a lot more respect and negotiation power, and unions grew for the first time in decades. It was the first time in my life I saw our society come together to work together, instead of trying to massively exploit the poor. Then a couple years after COVID and that all goes away, whether it's WFH or mass layoffs.
I would say the US only makes sense IF you are strongly competitive/entrepreneurial and libertarian, not if you are community-minded and just want to live a normal life under a functioning democratic society. "Pro-business" usually means "anti-democratic" in our society, by disproportionately empowering capital ownership rather than democratic participation and process.
My understanding -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that you typically need either wealth, higher education (masters+), or an in-demand trade in order to emigrate to another country on a skilled visa or similar. I have only a B.S., negative net worth, and no special skills except web dev (which is increasingly worthless these days). Are there other avenues to emigration that I'm missing?
Also, my partner is American and has family here. I keep trying to convince her to give foreign living a try, and she's traveled with me a bunch now, but it's still a lot to ask of someone who's only ever lived in their home country. Me, I've spent a lot of time traveling to different countries and have a pretty broad perspective to draw from. It's harder for someone who's never really done that. Still, I hope to coax her into it over time!
I know a lot of Polish people who came to the US are now going back to Poland for a better life. No doubt many have amassed some wealth from blue collar work for one or two decades and now can afford to have a better life back home, mainly raising kids peacefully and so on. It's hard for newer immigrants to make that kind of bargain in the US nowadays though, many new immigrants struggle with high rents and not being able to same much to return to their homes. Some of them are lucky and make it better but a lot of them live in the paycheck to paycheck mode with the vulnerability that if something bad hits them like hospital visit they're as good as homeless.
Portugal and Spain offer a digital nomad visa, if you can work remote. After a number of years, and other factors, you could apply for citizenship.
The Netherlands has DAFT, which take ~$5k and a business bank account (I think you also need to run a business, but freelancing web dev would count from what I've read) to get a visa, and after 5 years in country you can apply for citizenship
Spaniard here. Be careful, the brochures do not tell the whole story.
If you move to any Mediterranean country, you will feel wonderful at first because our culture is so different, but for some people it gets tiresome and unbearable after some years.
They even have a specific page on that site for software engineers. It seems like as long as you get a job offer over a certain salary threshold and meet background check requirements, you can live there. I've heard a lot of jobs there operate in English, also.
Countries that I know some of them ended up in are Germany, Portugal, and Poland. I have no recommendations myself though. I live in the States and don't plan on moving.
I'm not an immigration lawyer, but there are 193 countries in the world and some of them might be easier to move to than you think.
For example, Brexit made it harder for EU citizens to move to the UK, but it made it significantly easier for everyone else. To get a "skilled worker visa" you need 70 "points" in the new system, which you can achieve by speaking English (10 points) and getting an offer from a visa-sponsoring company (20 points) for a "skilled" job (20 points) that pays £25600 (~$31k) or more a year (20 points):
£25k/year isn't high; pretty much any tech or tech-adjacent job in the UK will pay more than that. And if you know how to do web dev then you're probably considered "high skilled", e.g. I see "Internet developer" and "Web designer" on the official list of eligible occupations:
(Incidentally, this is why it's completely deranged and insane that the current British government is constantly accused of being "anti-immigration". Has no-one looked at the actual data? Immigration to the UK has never been easier, nor have rates of immigration ever been higher than under the current government. But that's another topic entirely.)
And the UK's not the only option. My wife and I looked into this a few years ago; iirc we could meet the points requirements to move to Canada or Australia pretty easily, and we're not exceptionally "high-skilled" (we're comfortably middle class but have very normal tech/corporate jobs.)
Moving countries doesn't have to be a permanent decision either. I lived abroad for many years, then I came home, and I don't regret either move.
Anyway, I don't know you and I'm not going to tell you to up-end your life and start again in a completely new country. Obviously it's a huge decision and everyone's personal circumstances are different. All I'm saying is that it might be easier than you realise.
if you rephrase "web dev" into software development, that's often a special category of skill that makes immigration easier. If you really want to try, make an immigration official tell you your skill isn't special enough, don't prematurely disqualify yourself
'Teaching English' isn't really just about teaching English anymore. In many parts of the world (especially Asia) there are bilingual or international schools that generally have an endless demand for native English speakers who also happen to be skilled in math, computer science, or whatever else. The pay will be completely abysmal relative to Western pay, yet enough to live a vastly better life than one would be able to in the West on the Western salary.
Depending on where you go to (and what type of institution) a bachelor's alone is sufficient. The more exclusive places might require a teaching certificate, but those are easy to get and, in any case, such requirements tend to be quickly relaxed when talking about harder to fill positions, like calculus teachers. You might find you enjoy this. If you don't, it can give you the foundation to find something else you might enjoy. Many companies are also constantly looking for skilled native workers. I've friends working in everything from web design to rehab counciling.
I'm not very happy with the current state of the US to say the least, but being born American and simply natively speaking this language is just an unbelievably valuable gift that one should never take for granted. It's really a gateway to the world, even if it's one hell of a scary gateway to step through the first time.
I'm not good with kids, but teaching English to teens/young adults sounds like a really interesting idea. I'm technically somewhat bilingual too, so that might help. Good idea, thanks!
(Edit: Wait, is there an actual pathway to permanent residency/citizenship this way, or is it only a temporary work visa?)
While this of course depends on exactly where you end up moving to, and you should check the specifics there, I can say that near to everywhere seems to have pretty much the same systems in place: 5 years legal residency enables one to apply for permanent residency/citizenship after passing a series of tests, usually basic language proficiency alongside laws/culture/history of wherever you're migrating to.
Until that point you'll usually have to do something like check in with immigration once a year, dependent upon what visa (work, education, tourist, etc) that you end up on. But like another poster said, you don't really need to worry about most of this to begin with, as at most places you'll be granted a visa on arrival that'll be good for more than enough time to find a job. The most you might want to do is drop by the embassy of wherever you plant to go to. They can give you more information, and also set you up with a visa that will generally last much longer than the visa-on-arrival if desired.
I lived in Southeast Asia for a few years in my 20s - not teaching English, mainly just scraping together a living through random Internet bullshit, but I had lots of friends who taught English, and I've seen what a good springboard it can be for global travel if you want to live abroad.
But the main thing I'd say to anyone considering moving countries is that most countries aren't highly desired immigration destinations like the US or Western Europe, and thus most countries don't have strict and tightly-controlled immigration systems like Western countries do. If you want to go spend a few years in Thailand as a Westerner, it's laughably easy - just buy a flight and you'll probably figure it out once you're there, as your Western dollars/pounds/euros will go a looooong way.
(I apologize to any Thai people reading this; I know that digital nomads and other wealthy foreigners aren't universally appreciated in the countries they park up in. Am just sharing my own experience.)
I wouldn't want to live in that part of the world for the rest of my life, but the time I did spend travelling was the best thing I ever did and I have no regrets. I wrote about it here if anyone's interested:
> I have only a B.S., negative net worth, and no special skills except web dev (which is increasingly worthless these days). Are there other avenues to emigration that I'm missing?
The TN visa works in both directions - you can go work/live in Canada or Mexico. A BS is plenty; I'm not sure that "web dev" is a valid category, but you can probably find a job in either country that does qualify. And if it doesn't work out, you're just a quick plane ride home.
Getting a permanent visa (or citizenship) anywhere in the world is generally extremely difficult.
Unless you get married, how exactly would you propose an average American emigrate to Germany or Japan, for example?
There's a ton stopping someone. It's not impossible, but it can take years of work, require a change of careers, and you have to say goodbye to a lot of family and friends.
I can't speak for him, but my disability precludes me from moving to most developed countries with universal healthcare. Many countries automatically assume I would be a burden to their systems, despite the fact that my medication is ~ $5 / mo and I'm (supposedly) a skilled software developer.
With the massive increases in inflation and housing costs, the middle class and below can't really keep up. A 5% increase in earning power for them is like a few thousand dollars a year (that they have to immediately spend on housing and services), vs millions or billions for capitalists that can then reinvest in growth sectors (AI and whatnot).
As an immigrant to the US (and having lived in multiple countries before that), I definitely have a different view. It's quite interesting how often that is the case.
> We treat our society like a zero-sum game.
In my experience, Americans are some of the least zero-sum thinking people, perhaps driven by the natural geographic advantages of the country. In other parts of the world, a zero-sum attitude is the norm, not the exception. It's suffocating if you live in it. I regard this as one of America's greatest strengths.
As for some of the things you find dissatisfactory with the US:
> politics
I'm sure many people everywhere think their country has uniquely dysfunctional politics, just like how people in every city claim that their city has the worst drivers. Belgium went without a government for years. The Taiwanese parliament breaks out in fistfights every now and then.
> insane housing costs
I don't know how things are in Scandinavia, but Canada or any part of East Asia are absolutely much worse by this metric. Look up median multiples in different countries; you'll find that the US is very favorable, especially among developed countries.
A middle-class family being able to afford to own a house happens more in the US than virtually any other place.
> corrupt judges
I'm not really sure what you mean. Do you find the US judiciary to be more corrupt than in other countries?
> stances on drugs and abortion
What do you find terrible about these? Drug laws are relatively lax in general in the US, and especially in certain states. Many Asian countries punish drug users and traffickers very harshly.
On abortion, you might be surprised to find that most Western European countries are much more restrictive than the liberal American states.
> the rich get richer, leaving everyone else even further behind
The real median personal income[0] has been on a broadly upward trend. The great majority of Americans make more money than their parents; more than half of people born to parents in the bottom quintile of incomes end up in a higher quintile; and conversely, more than half of people born to parents in the top quintile end up in a lower quintile[1].
In Europe, some of the very richest have remained the very richest for literal centuries[2]. In the US, you'd be hard-pressed to find people on the Forbes 400 list whose grandparents were also on the same list.
> Life actually seemed way better for millions of working class folks during COVID, when the economy was tanking and government simply propped it up
Your argument is that life seems better when the government prints money and hands it out to people? Surely you understand that there's a very sharp limit to how far that can go.
> if you just want a peaceful, boring life, this is not the place to be
I don't know where in the US you are, but it's a huge country with very diverse lifestyles to be found. Where I live, in a midsize Southern city, my barber, who has no college education or inheritance, lives on a 10-acre property with his wife and children. Their house is very modest, but they are saving up to build a bigger one. This seems the definition of a "peaceful, boring life".
If you want this kind of life on a median or below income in some of the most desirable cities in the country, I grant you that's going to be very tough. But that is the case anywhere in the world. People constantly tread water just to get by in big, competitive cities.
> I also spent several weeks in a few other countries -- enough to get a very basic feel for their society and services
Being on vacation in a country is very different than living there.
Ultimately, different people value things differently, and you may very well find yourself happier in another country. I'm just pointing out that it's very easy to view other countries with rosy glasses, and that the view of the US as "a hellhole where either you're rich or you're wo...
In Europe, some of the very richest have remained the very richest for literal centuries
I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and zero have earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it.
How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech?
> most Western European countries are much more restrictive than the liberal American states.
Um... The most liberal European places are more restrictive than conservative states. Florida tried a fifteen week ban and that was controversial.
Meanwhile abortion is illegal, unconstitutional in fact, in Germany and only decriminalized before fifteen weeks. After that, it's only decriminalized for certain cases.
> Between our terrible healthcare, education, school safety, infrastructure, public transportation, politics, insane housing costs, corrupt judges, stances on drugs and abortion, it really feels like a hellhole where either you're rich or you're worthless.
Sigh. You're painting with a huge black and white brush.
This and being a community is not exclusive. Asian countries are some of the worst zero-sum countries, simply by virtue of resource/person, yet simultaneously being very community focused.
People behave in zero-sum way for one thing and in a community way for another.
> Life actually seemed way better for millions of working class folks during COVID, when the economy was tanking and government simply propped it up, and suddenly workers everywhere had a lot more respect and negotiation power, and unions grew for the first time in decades. It was the first time in my life I saw our society come together to work together, instead of trying to massively exploit the poor.
This is delusional. Aside from government enforced job loss, firings of people with differing views, and forcing low status occupations to continue working crazy hours and burn out, I guess labor won? Maybe? Needing unions to fight for higher wages caused by stupid economic policy is hardly a win
> if I had to choose a country to get ahead in life with the most opportunities possible as an immigrant, US is still the country to be at.
If I was to be reincarnated as a random person in a given country, I wouldn't pick the US though. Even as a skilled worker who can decide where to work, I prefer some European countries for healthcare, vacations and culture. That being said, I feel Europe is declining and it feels the US could become a better choice in the near future.
Most countries in Western Europe have the social net curse blogging them down. The high tax, high social care system only works if the country is on a good growth track. As more people turn old and retire, someone has to pay for those. With wage stagnation in most normal occupations and lack of growth, the way they have tried to tackle this is with increase in immigration, which in turn keeps wages low in low paying sectors. Also, unlike US which does integration really well, this is not true for Europe where high immigration is leading to even frictions because of lack of integration.
On top of that, tech emerging as a big industry which forms a big part of the whole economic output of a country, has led to Europe losing out to US. Although only China through thier protectionism has been safe from that.
You can see this in the commentary about UK politics, where they don't have money to fund NHS and NHS wages haven't grown which has bogged down their healthcare system. Most of the manufacturing ecosystem is completely degraded. Productivity is at a complete toss as well, as they are not even able to build high speed rail well now, which for a social net country like UK should be of paramount importance.
To combat this, they have increased taxation, either through freezing slabs or moving down tax slabs. This penalises people in high wage professions and it leads to loss of competitiveness.
You know, the US spends most of our government money on old people too (social security, medicare, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/... We just get less bang for the buck for it because our healthcare and housing are so terribly inefficient and expensive, and we don't have a strong culture of familial support.
We can't build high speed rail either -- we can't even keep our low-speed rail running well -- and our answer to expensive healthcare is typically just "let them die, we can replace them" (immigration too, except we don't have to give our immigrants anything, just wink and pretend we hate them).
At the end of the day no society has it all figured out yet, but I'd love to live in a place with social services and a less hostile democracy so that all the citizens can work together to figure out next steps, instead of being dragged kicking and screaming by the rich. It's just a more collectivist mindset, not necessarily better or more right in any way.
> You know, the US spends most of our government money on old people too (social security, medicare, etc.).
My whole point was how these issues are less of an issue for US, again comparing with UK
US has better age demographic distribution than UK
The net tax burden on an average UK person is way higher compared to US while having worse average wages. Quick googling shows per capita income tax collected in US is $15K, while in UK it is $21K
GDP per capita of UK is $46K compared to US's 70K
If even after having high taxes, a country is having problem funding social services, then that's a big issue as the high taxes are meant to take care of that. US doesn't have this issue as taxes being lower, people can use the money not spent on tax on funding the social care things for themselves.
Also, overall US is still an attractive place for high earners so it will keep on attracting people from those segments which will boost its tax revenues and lead to decline of Europe. As while western Europe might be still a good place for people on median wages or below, USA might be much better for people on the other end
> US has better age demographic distribution than UK
I can believe that. Japan's even worse off, wonder what they're gonna do...
> The net tax burden on an average UK person is way higher compared to US while having worse average wages. Quick googling shows per capita income tax collected in US is $15K, while in UK it is $21K
It's a bit trickier than that, because some of the same services (like healthcare) are still paid by the typical consumer in the US, it just doesn't show up in their taxes. $6k/year might actually just cover the premiums for a small family (what you pay the insurer before you use any services). Using that healthcare would be way more expensive.
I think a fairer comparison would be discretionary income (disposable income minus cost of living expenses like housing, healthcare, food, education), etc. Unfortunately that data isn't easy to find, and definitions differ, but without considering all of those, it's not really apples-to-apples just to look at taxation rates.
The average person is more affected by "how much money do I have left to spend after the essentials" than "am I paying the government or a private company for these essentials".
> $6k/year might actually just cover the premiums for a small family (
This is not true anywhere in the US. The lowest premiums are ~$400 per person per month for bronze level insurance.
Lowest premiums for a family of four would be ~$2k per month plus annual deductible of $5k to $10k plus annual out of pocket maximum of ~$10k to $17k (legal limit).
At least until the end of 2024, insurance premiums are capped via subsidies (either paid directly, or as tax credits). The computation of the cap is extremely complex, but basically: you do not pay more than 8.3% of your household AGI for your state's 2nd most expensive silver-level insurance plan.
This is not widely talked about. It was a part of the ACA, but there was a salary cap somewhere near 100k/yr. The cap was removed during the COVID19 pandemic, and this currently runs to the end of 2024.
I used to pay $1300/month for my wife and I (in our late 50s); I currently pay $440/month (annual income approx $120k).
Interesting, does that only apply if you buy via healthcare.gov?
I see the full $30k+ in annual premiums that my employer plus I am paying in my W-2 (box 12 code DD), which is money that could have been cash compensation.
It does not apply (by my understanding) to employer-provided insurance. It does apply to all individually provided insurance whether purchased on exchange or not.
US GDP per capita is $80,000 for 2023, not $70k. It's nearly double that of France or Britain at this point, and rapidly running away from them both. It's now more than double that of Japan.
I think you are focusing on less important things.
Europe faces three big issues: demographic crisis, energy/resources dependency, and security vulnerability. US on the other hand will have good demographic outlook for most of this century, it is energy (including renewables) and resources rich, and separated by oceans from anyone who can threaten it.
The problems of the UK and US declining industrial base is due to lack of “protectionism” as you call it. Really it’s been a de facto industrial policy of disinvestment and off shoring driven by financialization of their economies over the last ca. 45-years. Free capital flows benefit capitalists, not ordinary citizens.
And yet these countries still focus on taxing income only, meanwhile a massive mountain of growing untouchable wealth is sitting there, owned by the older generation who supposedly need to be supported with the income generated by the young.
Tax and wealth distribution needs a fundamental rethink going into the next few decades - I really don't have high hopes that the current approaches will work. As you say, they are predicated on high growth scenarios which western nations are no longer experiencing at a macro level.
People have been trying to link the two together, but I see no direct link between (good) economic growth and public social spending.
It is not because of welfare that there are less startups in Europe and it is not because of welfare that the big companies in Europe prefer to be more conservative with their spending on R&D. It's cultural. It's people being more financially conservative and risk averse.
> To combat this, they have increased taxation, either through freezing slabs or moving down tax slabs. This penalises people in high wage professions and it leads to loss of competitiveness.
I'm a relatively well paid software engineer in the UK, and I don't recognise this at all. I would be very happy to be taxed more to have a better health system. I wouldn't see this as being penalised, but something I'd vote for.
I have plenty of disposable income; if I had a bit less I'd probably spend less on buying expensive tech gadgets from American companies, investing in international shares or taking foreign holidays. It would be better for the country if that cash was diverted towards the NHS. I think overall it would make the country more prosperous. A sick workforce is an inefficient workforce.
Having a bit less cash would not make me less keen to start a company or change employer for more cash. In fact it would probably do the opposite.
We do have the money to fund the NHS. Successive Conservative governments have made the choice to defund the NHS, along with public health, and social care. And they did all of this on top of Brexit.
Europe's demographics simply cannot support the size of their social safety nets. European countries are already relying more on immigrants, but immigration from central / eastern europe is already tapped out.
That only leaves you with immigrants from beyond the EU. Most of those who have any skills are going to try to get into the US. The ones that can't are probably going to try and get residency / citizenship in canada and get in via a TN visa.
Europe is left with the remainder, and unskilled migrants from cultures which frankly have a much harder time integrating into a western one. Over the long term it's a pretty dire situation.
> European countries are already relying more on immigrants
The birth rate in the US is 1.64, the EU average is 1.53. So this is almost equally true for the US, a country historically built on the backs of immigrants.
The chickens are going to come home to roost soon enough wrt America's population growth. Lots of talk about what happens when the Boomers have fully exited the workforce, but 30+ years down the road when Millennials follow them we're going to be in a similar situation as Europe/China. My hope is that we open ourselves up more.
>Europe's demographics simply cannot support the size of their social safety nets
Neither can the US with social security, pensions and 401ks. All ponzi schemes created on infinite growth with the future generation paying off the last. The rate of pension bailouts by the Feds has been increasing even now.
There may be some part of subjectivity and pessimism involved, but here are a few things in France (and I think it applies to most European countries):
- heatlhcare isn't what it used to be. Sure, it's free but it can take months to see some doctors, or even a dentist.
- retirement: the pension system isn't good. Most people will get less than 1.5K a month, and not before 64. The effects of the various pension reforms aren't visible yet but they will increase old people poverty.
- safety: this is political and people hold strong opinions on this, but my feeling is that poverty is on the rise, there are more and more unemployed young refugees...
More speculatively, I think Europe lacks natural resources and this is going to bite us more than the US.
> The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the U.S. and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today, the report said.
> The European Union now accounts for about 18% of all global consumption spending, compared with 28% for America. Fifteen years ago, the EU and the U.S. each represented about a quarter of that total.
> Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece. Real wages in the U.S. have increased by about 6% over the same period, according to OECD data.
Now nominal value is more important on a global influence scale so the usual figures still mean a lot, but it's way more nuanced than most peopl think.
In my (albeit unusual, privileged) experience as a highly paid tech worker, vacations/healthcare are not bad in the US... I've had more vacation days, and much better access to healthcare (for a cheaper price) in the US. Also the wealth differential is astronomical.
> In my (albeit unusual, privileged) experience as a highly paid tech worker, vacations/healthcare are not bad in the US...
Healthcare and vacations in the US are often reasonable for the developed world if you are, e.g., a highly-paid tech worker or other elite worker or, in some jurisdictions, a public sector worker (especially one with many years in, for vacations)
For the other, oh, 80% of the US working population, though, that's not true.
Right, I'm just speaking for the "highly skilled" working class here.
To put it into perspective, in Germany you might make 4k/month as a highly educated, highly skilled worker with years of experience. Even if you work remote (most don't) you won't be able to find a decent small house even in the middle of nowhere below 500k.
After tax, healthcare and pension, I make 80k Euros as a highly skilled tech worker in Germany. Living expenses including rent amount up to 20k per year, so I save 60k per year. Paying off a nice house therefore takes around 10 years, which is not bad at all.
I recently visited the US and haven't been happier to be a EU citizen in a long time, tbh.
So you make 140k+ a year? That's an extremely high salary for Germany, you must be in the top 1-2% of earners in the country.
Going by levels FYI, this would put you in the 95th percentile, the equivalent in NYC would be $400,000. Which is nuts combined with your 20k/yr living expenses. When did you get your apartment, 2009?
Just for reference, converting to USD $150k be in the top 6-7% of earners in the U.S. in 2022. Taxation rates vary widely.
I budget for ⅓ off the top, living in NYC (this is an overestimate, but common practice) for a post-tax income of $100k. High income geographies are correlated with high tax rates in the U.S., too.
Anyways, all this to say that U.S. post-tax-post-benefits income is not wildly different from the E.U. Maybe the main difference is that you can work as a freelancer, expense everything, and effectively opt-out of health insurance, and take home more salary.
But if you're salaried and in tech in the top quartile of the labor market, post-tax savings is pretty much the same in western EU vs U.S. There's no 10x difference in wages, (excluding equity performance, which is not a tax/benefits policy issue).
In general, E.U. citizens I know who have come to the U.S. do it because the businesses here are more interesting and have more upside (i.e. the aforementioned equity upside component). If they're making bigger heaps of money, it's because of startup equity comp, not because of tax or benefits policies.
Look if you normalize it across all jobs yes but I'm talking about specialized jobs. The ceiling is much higher in the US and it's not even close. A doctor might hope to make 140k towards the end of their career in Germany, a new grad will make this in the US.
> But if you're salaried and in tech in the top quartile of the labor market, post-tax savings is pretty much the same in western EU vs U.S. There's no 10x difference in wages, (excluding equity performance, which is not a tax/benefits policy issue).
As someone who's worked in top companies in Germany and the US, I feel confident enough to weigh in on this. Top earners might make 200k TC in Berlin, but engineers at this caliber will earn 500k+ in NYC. And no, rent and tipping in restaurants does not take up that 300k difference.
> If they're making bigger heaps of money, it's because of startup equity comp, not because of tax or benefits policies.
They're making more money because American companies pay more money, because they make more money, they have access to more capital, they hire in a more competitive market.
Working for a Google/Meta as an L5 engineer in Europe take you in the 160-200K league. This would be 300-350K in NYC/Bay area for the same role and company. Considering living expenses and more vacation in Europe, it's not that different. A difference though is that you have many more opportunities in the US to match FAANG Salary than you have in let say France or Germany.
Ironically, these salaries are really mostly only attainable working for American companies. Some facts for anyone reading:
- 350k is like 200k net in CA
- 200k is ~110k net in Germany
- ~90k post-tax difference
- Germany: 25 days PTO min
- Meta: 25-30 days PTO min
- Google: 20 days PTO min
Considering COL differences, you'd probably save 40-50k more in the US than Germany with these numbers. Maybe it's not significant enough to lose the EU lifestyle bonuses but it's also not nothing.
>After tax, healthcare and pension, I make 80k Euros as a highly skilled tech worker in Germany.
That's insanely high post-tax salary for Germany. Most aren't making that before-tax. You're an exceptionably rare circumstance that's far from the norm.
I wouldn't call it insanely high, given that my baseline is tech jobs.
As a freelancer, you make around 800-1000$ a day working for bigger German companies, and the bar to become one is not very high from my experience on both sides of the table. For internal employees the ceiling is at around 120k for senior engineers, above that you need to go into middle management territory or be an EM equivalent.
I’m guessing it was an intuited number since the subject was an undefined standard of reasonableness that would be a matter of personal opinion and experience. Since it’s impossible to assign a definitive number to such a thing, most people would assume that that’s not what the writer is attempting to do.
I wanted to understand the reasoning behind a comment like this. There are great wiggle words (most, significant amount, etc) that let one pretend they are objective. But the GP went for a very precise number without substantiating it in any way.
> I had to choose a country to get ahead in life with the most opportunities possible as an immigrant, US is still the country to be at.
Yes, this is what the US brand sells. And for you it worked. Your sample has a survivor bias so to speak.
That aside, let's question the founding assumption: that the goal in life is to "get ahead". And that to "get ahead" the best way is to have the most opportunities. Perhaps this is why so many Americans (note: I was born, raised and live here) are unhappy, uncomfortable and unsatisfyied? That is, "getting ahead" isn't what it's cracked up to be? That after running on the rat wheel for so long and seeing so little in return, they're frustrated?
My point is, the natural born experience is not the same as the immigrant experience. To be promised something and getting little is not the same as having little and then everything is a bonus.
Yes you can get ahead here. Yes there is opportunity. The question is: how much joy and happiness will that bring? Will it last? Or is this a false construct that eventally reveals itself?
>Yes you can get ahead here. Yes there is opportunity. The question is: how much joy and happiness will that bring? Will it last? Or is this a false construct that eventally reveals itself?
I think the answer to your question depends on the person and their personality. Many people get happiness and satisfaction from achievement, and the result of their work. For example, many people get happiness from achievements in sports, others in business.
A few years ago, I was writing a lot of proposals for government work, and I was winning a lot of them, even when competing against large defense contractors. So much so that my company didn't need any more work. But I was enjoying the satisfaction of winning that I wanted to keep going. My friend (who was also partnered with me on those proposals) and I were reflecting on that, and we agreed that the validation that came with winning was what really was motivating us, more so than the money.
Will it last? Again, I think it depends on the person. I think most high achievers get long term satisfaction from what they do. Not everyone, sure. But I don't think it's a false construct because some don't.
Yes it can vary from person to person. Nonetheless, the USA consistently doesn't rate well when it comes to happiness. Why is that? A lack of achievement? If so, who's hoarding all the opportunity?
This is not a good sign, this is a problem. Because the economy is still growing so fast with interest rates as high as they are it means that the Fed is going to increase interest rates even further. This is going to make a recession a certainty in the near future.
Also, with interest rates this high and the economy steaming along. That means inflation is going to keep rising as well.
“The FOMC judges that low and stable inflation at the rate of 2 percent per year, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent with achievement of both parts of the dual mandate.”
“Over time, growth in GDP causes inflation, which if left unchecked, runs the risk of morphing into hyperinflation.
Most economists today agree that a small amount of inflation, about 2% a year, is more beneficial than detrimental to the economy.”
That still doesn't make your point. Are you saying that annual GDP growth of 4.9% is the type of rampant growth that causes inflation based on... an article on a dodgy website?
Because, it looks like you're saying all GDP growth causes hyperinflation based on an article on a dodgy website.
It's such a pity the US immigration system is as completely broken as it is. I'd _eagerly_ move there if I could, but without a randomly-assigned sponsorship I can't. I've checked other countries - in Canada or Australia I pass with flying colours, and could move there inside a few months with full right-to-work and pathway to citizenship. But not the US.
they're also aware that American Exceptionalism relies on comparing America to the most poorly run and suffocatingly authoritarian countries on the planet, and ignoring that the developed world exists at all
people are aware that the US is a great starting point to go to those other developed nations. Getting a job in the US and moving to somewhere in Western Europe is a great privilege, greater than being born somewhere else and going straight to Western Europe, greater than being born in Western Europe without inheritance
people are aware that the US could uniquely solve all of its own problems, and have all of the 21st century advances of the developed world, but it simply doesn't solve those problems and lacks consensus
try not to misunderstand what US Citizens are aware of
>but if I had to choose a country to get ahead in life with the most opportunities possible as an immigrant
The USA is pretty bad (compared to most rich / developed countries) in general at giving opportunities to the broader population. Check the studies on intergenerational mobility to see that the USA ranks pretty badly there. It's not surprising to me given the inequality of the education system and how segregated it is (in terms of social class, parent educational level, etc).
You bring an interesting point though: "as an immigrant". Maybe the USA IS pretty good at giving opportunities to certain kind of immigrants (even if it isn't for the broader population). I haven't seen any study about it, but I'm sure there are analysis.
The problem is I don't want to "get ahead" if what's behind me (all around me) is poverty, mass shootings and general unrest. I don't want to retreat to the suburbs to live well.
The nicest neighborhoods in the country are in cities and these usually come with low crime rates.
Chicago for all the shitting on it gets for it's high murder rates actually has dozens of neighborhoods that are larger than most towns, suburbs and cities, that have seen zero homicides for several years, which places them well below the national rate and makes them exceptionally safe.
And I'm not some crime apologist. Look at my post history. I'm as conservative as they come. Just following the data.
>> but if I had to choose a country to get ahead in life with the most opportunities possible as an immigrant, US is still the country to be at
I don't understand, these types of comments are relative. Which countries are we comparing? Why the US over another country, for example, Canada? France? Sweden? Japan? Thailand? Have people tried these out (I know people who have!)?
The only reason I can think of Why the US over another place is is the amount of wealth and the amount of land in the US is staggering, and the appeal of that makes people feel wealthy themselves by way of association. It's a glamorous lure.
Or is it because of less government restrictions and oversight? Which has its downsides as well.
I feel, as my primary residence, that the US is a cutthroat place to live. Those that speak well of it usually have been lucky.
- Mass shootings every damn day (one loose right now is a military firearms instructor who had a psychotic break and shot up almost 100 people)
- No universal healthcare
- No universal mental healthcare
- Millions of homeless and functionally housing-insecure people
- Crazy people in government who don't want it to function and who supported the insurrectionists
- Absurdly gerrymandered Congressional districts that put the thumb on the scale for one side
- Grotesque corruption of dark money in politics
- Supreme Court justice who pals around with and takes gifts from a billionaire, oh and sexually harassed women
- Like a third-world country, women don't have a federal right to choose what happens to their own bodies
- No meaningful climate change policy
- Massive income inequality
- An inability of the average family to purchase real estate
- A doddering old man sleepwalking the US into a new era of terrorism in 2026-2029 by taking the side of a brutal, corrupt authoritarian and an inability to apply the nuance to the Middle East conflict
Apart from mythological ideals, what specific benefit do US citizens have that British or EU Schengen citizens lack? I want to know if it's net better in say Finland or Sweden for average people because it's not very nice here.
A lot of folks forget that the US's advantages and opportunities derive directly from the fact that individual citizens have a far greater amount of freedom and power versus the government here than people do anywhere else in the world. Freedom of speech, religion, gathering, and many other things.
Those freedoms are defended by individual power. All power in the world derives from force. The benefit of private gun ownership is a much higher level of individual power and thus the ability to defend that freedom vs the continuous encroaches of government. Mass shootings are an unfortunate side effect, but one worth accepting. I'd rather have a few thousand gun related deaths a year than hundreds of thousands or millions die when a too powerful government takes power.
This is an article about economics. 9 times out of 10 when you talk to people about the US (especially on the Internet), they want to talk about politics.
The reality is that US politics is utterly fucked up, but the US economy is by far the strongest in the world, it might be the most resilient economy in all of human history, it's continually astounding how it manages to surge forward, overcome obstacles and grow. If you are a US citizen, you have access to this economy in ways that other people don't.
So let me throw out a couple examples of this.
* Energy. A shale revolution is now well underway in North America, what this translates to is energy independence and some of the cheapest oil on the planet being well within the USA's grasp. But what you will hear Americans talk about if you bring this up is the POLITICAL problem of how we can't regulate emissions and the climate apocalypse is going to cook us all. Look I'm not saying that climate change isn't a serious problem. It is. But keeping with my theme here, it's going to cook India a lot sooner than it cooks the USA. And the ECONOMIC benefits to the US of the shale revolution are enormous.
* Home-shoring. The amount of money going into rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity right now is staggering, we're in the early stages of an enormous boom and a resurgence of stuff that's made in the USA, including very high tech companies like TSMC building factories in the US. Again people want to talk about the POLITICS with China and how messy they are, but ECONOMICALLY, the US is going to benefit from a ton of manufacturing growth over the next decade.
* Demographics. In the long run, economically, China's doomed, Japan's doomed, the outlook for much of Europe is bleak because they're not having kids. The US still has kids at a somewhat decent rate and has tons of immigration. So again everyone will want to argue about the POLITICS of illegal immigration, but the fact of the matter is, ECONOMICALLY the US will benefit greatly from its demographics.
* Tech, rocket ships, you name it - in virtually all bleeding edge industries, the USA is #1 or #2.
Betting that the US economy will win (even just in a simple form like using your spare cash to buy the S&P 500 and hold it, something that billions of people in this world can't easily do), just keeps on being the right call, almost continuously since WW2.
I'm not saying the politics aren't totally fucked up. They are. I'm not saying the wealth this economy creates is distributed fairly. It's not. But especially online the discussion is way way way way way skewed towards "look how bad these awful US political problems are" meanwhile the one big advantage you have as an American is you have direct access to this unbelievable economic machine, you are actually a member of it, you can buy and sell things in it (and that is how we get to why the entrepreneurial stuff is important!).
Spot on. Immigrants are usually the most thankful and grateful because they have the perspective. I've found that second+ generation Americans tend to be the declinists and doomsdayers when it comes to the future of the USA. I'm making broad sweeping generalities here.
This is why MAGA made no sense to me. America is great already. It's not perfect and has a lot of things that need to be fixed. But MAGA is starting from behind.
Another immigrant chiming in - I love love love this country … my wife and I went from lower middle class in india to being in the 98th percentile of household income here .. and that has literally extended the lives of our loved ones back home .. my wife’s father was diagnosed with cardio vascular issues sometime ago but he decided to ignore them because he simply couldn’t afford the treatment. So when my wife and I started working in the USA , we made enough to get him treated for his issues at some of the best hospitals in India.
Unsurprisingly , my wife’s love for USA knows no bounds - she’s one of the most patriotic immigrants you’ll ever meet
I predict that things are going to be very rosy next year since 2024 is an election year. The propaganda that the economy is doing great is going to flourish (even this 5% gdp increase is artificial if you consider the amount of debt that was taken on).
After elections we will all of a sudden have troubles and talk of recessions will be back on the table.
I don't want to be the "did you even read the article?" guy, but I do recommend you all read the article or get more context about this first before posting what could be considered a economic/political "hot take". It's really a mix of optimism (like some relief from recession fears, for now) and concern (like lower personal savings rates).
Don't extrapolate too much based on a single quarter metric (albeit an important one). That's the HN way.
I look for this sort of comment bobbing in the middle of a sea of hot takes by commenters who almost certainly have not read the article, but are compelled to weigh in on what they assume it is about. "Tomorrow, these GDP numbers will be out of date, but my hot takes about the U.S. are immortal!"
The US has 3 unsurmountable advantages over everyone.
1. Natural resources
2. The American dream of entrepreneurship and immigrant success.
3. The work-is-sacred American professional-managerial class.
Stable countries decay due to 3 things. First, import pressure can ruin a nation as all its productivity gets extorted out of it by a pseudo-colonial exporter. Natural resources solve this. Second, general lethargy causes productivity to die. But the secularozed protestant work ethic keeps the gears running. Lastly, productive nations can still lose if they miss technological revolution, which can often happen overnight. But the American dream ensures that no one tries to disrupt like Americans, and the most disruptive foreigners are drawn in such that their aha-moment still occurs here.
It's honestly, perfect.
But, don't let that distract you from freeloaders who ride this wave of American productivity. The housing industry, cartelized middle men, lobbyists & bloated executives might still be net negative.
The US isn't just productive. It is productive beyond the wildest imagination of the rest of world. But, that tends to not show up in the numbers or in practice, because a just as large industry of grifters keeps it from cashing it its productivity.
The US wins, not by being more efficient or effective. But by sheer brute force.
> The US isn't just productive. It is productive beyond the wildest imagination of the rest of world.
Productivity has a specific meaning in economics, i.e. labor productivity (GDP per hours worked). What I think you are referring to here is output, i.e. GDP.
That's tricky. GDP isn't the same thing as productivity, especially in the case of somewhere like Ireland where a lot of that GDP is produced by zero workers, it passively happens by virtue of companies routing their profits through there for tax reasons.
I think the stat to look at here would be median GDP per hour worked, on a per-capita basis. Calculating the median is of course difficult, but it would account for large, person-less streams of money that passively flow through without actually being "productive" in the "creating something new" sense.
Or making it easier to do multifamily housing that's partially/mostly prefab.
Every once in a while you hear about this, apartments where you build it mostly off-site in a factory and then assemble the blocks on-site, supposed to be somewhat cheaper and much faster (for the last stage anyway), but for some reason it seems to stay experimental.
Price to income ratios are lower than / on par with most developed countries, and were not much higher than historic values until 2020, when the US executive tried to out-Europe Europe.
Healthcare, maybe. Although, breaking down US live expectancy by demographic or even just by states and comparing with the corresponding European breakdown shows that most of the worse outcomes in the US are not due to healthcare.
I think another way of looking at it is, we know how much we're wasting in healthcare. How much more effective could the economy be if we actually wrung out some efficiencies and took the profit out of keeping people alive
I would be curious how much the productivity increase from people being less sick, and the increase in personal spending and investment would offset the profits of leaches like private insurance companies
Almost everybody on HN who have been working for a few years can afford a house. You just might not be able to live in SF. Go move to Kansas and you too could afford a house.
“Going forward, the consumer’s not going to spend at the same rate, the government is not going to spend at the same rate, and businesses seem to be slowing down their spending as well,” Arone said. “This suggests this might be the peak GDP figure, at least in the next few quarters.”
These figures are from before things like student loan repayments kicked in.
If you read beyond the headline you see: consumer spending accounted for 2.7 percentage points (55.1%) of that growth, the personal savings rate plunged from 5.2% to 3.8%, credit card debt is at the highest amount ever in history and auto loans are experiencing the highest delinquency rate in 30 years.
> the personal savings rate plunged from 5.2% to 3.8%
Americans don't save - haven't for 30 years - this isn't anything new. The savings rate was only 5.2% because people were getting handed free private money as the public debt swelled.
> credit card debt is at the highest amount ever in history
It should be. Dollars are down 30% from pre-pandemic. It'll likely go much higher.
> and auto loans are experiencing the highest delinquency rate in 30 years.
Not surprised. Car prices led inflation during the pandemic, and despite that, sales went through the roof.
Americans don't plan for a rainy day. Student loan payments resumed, incomes are down (mostly because government transfers are down, not wages).
Something's got to give.
Looks like car payments were the first to go. Will they be the only thing? Who knows! Stay tuned.
This sentiment scares the crap out of me, and explains a lot of frustrations I felt through the pandemic. I've complained [0] before about feeling like I was getting screwed by making "reasonable" or even fiscally conservative choices throughout the pandemic and it's recovery. It's a topic I have complicated feelings on: I don't want my fellow citizens to be "punished" for being reckless, both because I don't like the idea of punitive reformation and because punishing basically everyone would do Bad Things to the economy, but the feeling of "something's got to give" has been hanging over me for years.
Everyone seems over-extended, but anyone who "plays it safe" just gets taken advantage of by everyone else. It feels like a microcosm of peoples' reaction to climate change in a lot of ways; we see older generations reveling in the spoils of just not caring and know that if we're going to do anything about it _we_ will have to give up luxuries they've enjoyed for years--and that there will be plenty of others who will just take up the "slack" we're creating by cutting our emissions.
Maybe I'm just projecting my own FOMO, but I see a _lot_ of the sentiment of "they got theirs, why shouldn't I get mine?" when it comes to saving money or climate change or even just post-COVID travel. There's no sense of communal responsibility or "we're all in this together."
Eloquently put! The "you should've saved more" advice is incredibly dismissive of the millions of people who realistically can't. You can't save for a rainy day when it's already raining everyday.
Interestingly, your sentiments about moral hazards in finance exactly mirror mine regarding obedience to the law.
E.g., if I'm one of the few who pays all of the taxes I'm supposed to, does that just make me a self-righteous chump?
Or is there much point in me properly disposing of household lead, fiberglass insulation, etc. when 99% of other users of the landfill ignore the rules?
> Americans don't save - haven't for 30 years - this isn't anything new.
It's also worth noting that the intuitive relationship of "savings is low, ergo times are hard" doesn't really fit the data. For example, during the bubble years prior to the '08 mortgage crisis, the savings rate declined significantly. When the crisis hit, the savings rate went up and stayed up afterwards.
Car repo rates are an extremely reliable signal for an impending economic crisis. Problem is, right now, the signal has been active for an unusually long period. Maybe it's just the previous administration's "free" money drying up?
Consumer debt to disposable income is low vs. average. It may trend up but my take is that bigger thing at play here is historically low unemployment. Good news, in other words.
I guessing we'll probably see a change on the next update, and then a bigger change in the next update after that, since student loans got unpaused at the tail end of Q3 2023.
It has been at persistently low levels for seven years years now (obviously the pandemic punched a temporary hole in employment, however the US recovered relatively quickly vs its peers). It's structural, we have a labor shortage relative to the hyper scale of the US economy overall (including its aging demographics as a supply problem). The only thing that will severely dent that context is a bad recession, a big crisis like the great recession.
Life in the US is very good. Rich country. But obviously on the decline. State capacity is low mostly because local populace is attempting to return to a world that was always fictional by stalling all development. Decline will not be arrested because local population will constantly blame billionaires and so on for failures caused by local popular policy.
SF is the bellwether: prop C and friends chased many big companies away and the tax base was beginning to erode but locals (who greatly desire the exodus of the "Bridge and Tunnel" folks continues to find new villains).
Ultimately, if you stagnate you die. And the old love to stagnate, and Americans have the curse of deifying the old while having elderly who are hopelessly selfish.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadPerhaps if they can make housing an even bigger drag, it will pull everything back in the next few quarters. But we are not there quite yet.
How does kicking out the US army improve GDP?
Which sanctions are causing the problem?
Which US wars are impeding growth?
The economy seems to be a black box. Understanding how to turn the knobs is so much guesswork. At least it appears that way.
Sanctions on Russia and the US refusal to allow Europe to buy cheap energy from Russia.
> Which US wars are impeding growth?
The US proxy war in Ukraine. The upcoming proxy war in Taiwan.
> - Emancipate both politically and economically
Is Ukraine free when the US is meddling in its internal politics and orchestrating coups to protect ‘American influence’? Where is the freedom and riches you promise in all the countries the US has bombed over the past 60 years?
Protecting ‘American influence’ = an unending payday for the corrupt military-industrial complex monopolies and nothing more.
You just proved my point about US imperialism and "protecting its interest" around the globe is the main economic hindrance for both Europe, and the rest of the world.
You can't be rich if you are under the control of an evil empire. Even if you claim that being colonized is for their own good, the US is still an evil empire, since all empires are evil by definition.
That is a narrative that is majorly rejected outside of Russia. Inside Russia, this is taken on faith, because, well, its Russia.
Of course, invading and occupying parts of a country isn't considered as imperialism in Russia itself if its the one doing it, because..well..its Russia.
Europeans passed laws to cut it off. Nothing American did. Europeans don't want to fund the guns that will be used by Russians when they decide who to invade next.
You kick out US army to gain independence, to grow up, to sit down as a major player.
I mean, it's going to be a lot of expenses, but it's the crucial first step if EU wants its own independent policies.
That said, just my personal opinion. I could be wrong. Maybe it's perfectly fine to have someone else's army on your soil. Maybe you already have independent policies but just happen to agree to the other side more or less. I'm not of EU or US citizen so I could be wrong.
The EU makes the explicit choice to live under the US security umbrella, not form a competitor power to the US, and gradually get rich.
Get rich quick schemes, as ever, lead to disaster.
Do you really think that the US will wage war against Europe if they refuse to keep the US army on its soil and pay for protection? You mean they won't just leave peacefully and let the Europeans take care of themselves?
I don't think so, US is a democracy. That would be illegal.
Or maybe, just maybe, US will find a passing explanation why it is a good idea to start a war against Europe.
Then, you turn around and say " look at how much killing religion/ideology/etc has done" but at the end of the day it pales in comparison to the kills the military industrial complex has racked up and you defend because a guy with the opposite political affiliation than you can't ever be right. But hey, think of the GDP.
Also the EU countries don't get to be part of NATO I guess without an American base or two there. When shit starts rocking...who are those EU countries going to come ah knocking to? and oh its ah rocking!
Now, how we spend it is up for debate. But I’d be careful about throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Why does your government push Europe to pay more for the military? Why would that interest you? Why don't you just move out your army and stop caring about Europe?
> The Ukraine conflict at least seems to have woken some Europeans up to the fact that they need to contribute equally to NATO instead of just relying on the US.
So the Ukraine conflict pushed Europeans to do more of what the USA wants them to do? It looks like it was beneficial to the US, after all. Pure luck that it started so suddenly :)
> But there doesn't seem to be much of an appetite in Europe for trading social spending for defense spending. It's more fun to dunk on American healthcare and pretend that Putin just really wants to be buddies.
I think your army should just stop "protecting" those evil and condescending Europeans. Just leave Europe and let them suffer for their choices.
Not your continent, not your damn business.
That sound like "Inflation" to you? Steak is still $8/lb but my sugar free soda is suddenly twice as expensive
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S
If people took 100% of the government deficit spending and left it in a savings account, it wouldn't count towards GDP. But clearly that's not happening.
I don't understand what you're arguing here. Is your claim that most of that government deficit was not spent in the domestic economy (therefore stimulating GDP growth)?
This is as % of GDP, but it's a good stand-in for inflation. Deficits are going down since 2020.
I don't think there is any growth in US that Europeans have to be jealous of. Any "growth" is just more wealth for billionaires, at a high cost to individuals.
Health spending accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy [1]. Between 2000 to 2020 health expenditure tripled from 1.4 trillion to 4 trillion, at a 4.2% annual growth rate. This is projected to accelerate, grow at 5.3% and reach 6.8 trillion by 2030. [3]
It is mostly health-care, which grows faster than the economy. Then higher rents, high cost of food, the numbers go up! Almost all sectors are monopolies/oligopolies with pricing power, they can extract more and more. Of course, the numbers will go up. But I doubt anybody is happier.
Family health insurance through work now costs $24,000 a year (note: this is just insurance, not the total cost!). Job-based health insurance are up 7% from last year: https://www.foxbusiness.com/healthcare/family-health-insuran...
A lot of new construction is hospitals. I have two new hospitals coming up where I live, in a one mile radius.
[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/health/health-spending-set-to-outpace-g...
[3] https://www.cms.gov/files/document/nhe-projections-forecast-...
Here in Spain health spending is so high that you have to pray to the gods to see a GP. Usually you end up having to go to the ER for any kind of problem because there are no appointments available for weeks.
Food and rent have skyrocketed these years. The official inflation numbers are a joke, they are like... 5%? When food has gone up in average by at least 50%.
Not sure about insurance.
My experience in being able to see q Europe seeing a GP is way better than in the USA but I know this varies by where you live (even inside the USA)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268826/health-expenditur...
Instead of trying to explain away official statistics by talking about things you see on your drive to work, consider updating your priors instead.
Here's what they think. Telling everyone to eat some charts while they're getting squeezed is not going to go over well.
For example, having an appendicitis in US increases the GDP by $10K but in most of Europe it barely moves the needle, thus Europeans lag in GDP metrics for the same healthcare.
Fresh, healthy produce as standart? Maybe good for people but destroys the GDP statistics. If Europeans embraced the idea that healthy stuff is for the rich and charge for it accordingly, they too can extract much more numbers from the tomatoes and have nicer GDP.
So the situation with the US is that, their spendings on healthcare is gigantic percentage of their GDP and Germany is a distant second with the rest of the Europe and the world trailing behind. US also doesn't have much to show for that spending, all the health and longevity metrics are worse than Europe. The defence is usually that Americans are paying for R&D and UK, Europe and the 3rd world are freeloaders. The counterargument is that, US relies heavily on immigrant researches that were trained in those countries those they foot some of the bill for the R&D and non-trivial costs of the healthcare in US is in administrative costs and not drug or machinery that was R&D'ed in US.
So we can argue over the issue all they long but the fact remains that there's lots of accounting differences so it's not possible to compare GDP number to GDP number and if you compare other metrics about the output of that GDP, the USA lags quite a bit behind countries with much lower GDP or GDP per capita.
US of course has it's own unique strengths, making it the dominant country of the world.
It changes substantially, when PPP is used China surpasses the US with a significant margin.
There’s only so many luxury bags and apparel that can be sold. Europe needs to come to grips with their risk adverse investing culture because there’s a great pool of talent there. But it isn’t being utilized well.
The US government is running a deficit that is equivalent of the GDP of Spain, while Americans life expectation is similar to third world countries. I don't see this as wealth generation.
The US choses to have too many suburbs which incurs a huge cost to maintain so many streets, and typical US states are completely brankrupt, so federal government needs to constantly save and help (like Biden's Build Back Better campaign and infrastructure package).
Because of this, US will always have a huge GDP that will just keep growing, but whether this is really better for the citizens, I have my own fair of questions.
It's very cheap to get some running shoes and go running and stay healthy, but some countries think they need protein powers, gatorade and Crossfit gyms in order to maintain a "healthy" lifestyle, maybe even take some testosterone, that all become GDP numbers, that's why GDP is a useless metric when comparing countries.
And the Yemen conflict is nearing a negotiated end. Soon you can stop worrying about Belgian economic support for Saudi war crimes.
Meanwhile in Yemen the UN says fighting has subsided[0] and Iran and Saudi Arabia have begun rehabilitation of relations[1]. Comparing a frozen conflict in its negotiated end stages to an active war with thousands of casualties a week and hundreds of missile strikes on cities each month screams complete ignorance of the war you pretend to care about.
[0] https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15347.doc.htm
[1] https://apnews.com/article/saudi-arabia-yemen-war-peace-talk...
Who said that? Please learn to read.
I'm curious what aspects of inflation you think are not covered by CPI. I see lots of pessimism from people that is not because of their own experience or any numbers that they can point to, and I'm always curious why. For me, it's housing. I want to move to a bigger house but there's almost nothing on the market, and the very few houses in the market at absolutely astronomical prices relative to mortgage cost.
There's no good way to force down housing costs without signaling to sellers that the prices are simply too high (because no one can afford the mortgage).
There are costs associated with making it more difficult to move, of course, but the pessimism about being unable to afford loans is the very thing driving down inflation; so I actually consider that mood on the ground to be a positive signal for the economy.
The prices aren't too high the dollars are worth too little beacuse there are too many of them. Stop making more and prices will stabilize.
There were way too many dollars when mortgage rates were at 2-3%, not at current mortgage rates there are very few dollars for buying homes.
This is less a monetary inflation of prices and more structural and supply related. Whoever said that "inflation is always a monetary phenomenon" was a religious nut, IMHO.
> Whoever said that "inflation is always a monetary phenomenon" was a religious nut, IMHO.
Yes, I'm sure you have many more qualifications than a Nobel Prize winner.
This results in an illiquid housing market where people can not move as frequently at they would like.
Most people now have super low mortgage rates, and could not afford to switch to a comparable home, because sticker prices have barely budged. This leads to a very tiny inventory of homes.
However, part do the reason that prices are staying high is that we are still under supplied on homes, and interest rates being high also means that construction starts will be way down, keeping those sticker prices higher for longer.
CPI does include food, fuel, and housing costs (though housing lags very significantly for a few reasons).
The totally subjective hedonic quality adjustment (sure food is more expensive but iPads have more ram!), also this knife only ever seems to cut one way, enshittification doesn't have a inflationary effect like you would expect.
Owner imputed rent as opposed to looking at what consumers actually pay.
The basket of goods is unrealistic, most households don't have teams of economists putting their shopping list together in order to maximally limit inflation.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Quality adjustment is only active for a few basket items, and their contribution to the overall cpi is minimal. All the extra food inflation that's supposedly happening isn't being held back by faster iPads.
>Owner imputed rent as opposed to looking at what consumers actually pay.
Most Americans are homeowners. For them, they don't pay any rent. Pretending that they pay market rent has no relation to what their actual expenses are. How do you propose we capture their expenses?
>The basket of goods is unrealistic, most households don't have teams of economists putting their shopping list together in order to maximally limit inflation.
Here's the basket the bls uses: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2022.htm
What specific parts do you think is "unrealistic", and what values would you use instead?
Edit to add: the table above is from Walmart grocery. We buy meat and most fruits and vegetables elsewhere, so except for the frozen fish, this list excludes most protein. If you just eat Costco rotisserie chicken, you would not have noticed a price increase.
PS to the edit: besides removing duplicates the list above is a raw combination of food items on two receipts without exclusions.
Compare this: https://www.rabato.com/us/shoprite/weekly-ad/LEipqw
To this: https://www.rabato.com/us/shoprite/weekly-ad/KZiQw3p
You can see if you are not particular about brand, you can actually find CHEAPER items today in some cases.
Overall, yes things are up. But they are not up 50%.
You asked for receipts, I gave you a literal transcript of my receipts at no cost to you with actual prices that showed a 47.5% increase in our grocery bill over the past two years. I showed you mine, you show me yours. Show me how you're not spending around 50% more than two years ago for equivalent products. Those two receipts are reasonably representative of the things we buy at Walmart and cover most food groups.
We typically buy the cheapest brand, usually private label store brands, except when there is a noticeable difference in quality. I took many brands off for brevity, but 12 of the 28 were Walmart brands and 5 were commodity vegetables. If a local chain grocer has a better price, we buy it there, but typically a week's worth of groceries cannot be found by just buying weekly specials.
The very reason I know where my receipts are and could make the list so quickly was because we are ruthless about keeping cost-of-living low, track prices religiously, and avoid spending money on higher priced equivalents within reasonable limits (there might be a cheaper price on widget foo across town, but if the transportation cost to get it is higher, then I cannot realize the cheaper price).
I could reduce my standards even further and replace all of it with boxed macaroni[0], but even that has increased 35% in the last 19 months[1] (the earliest price I can find, about 44% increase extrapolated to 24 months). (Target's store brand Mac & Cheese is only up 18%, but still more expensive than Walmart.)
0 - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Walmart-Great-Value-Original-Maca... 1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220325010216/https://www.walma...
No, I'm saying you need to compare like items, not specific brands. Don't misrepresent what I'm saying, it is rude.
Walmart still sells organic milk for $5.98. You can get 8 packs of yogurt for $4 still. I can't find something for his breaded fish, but I guess that's not a luxury item. :(
I can't find a cheaper equivalent for the frozen fillets[0]. There are differently breaded fillets for cheaper (23.8¢/oz vs 29¢/oz, wheat vs. corn), but they are still around 120% more than we paid for the ones we like in 2021. If I substitute those for this particular example receipt, the increase is _only_ 42.7%.
My point wasn't that I can't reduce my standard of living to live more cheaply. My point was that food prices have risen dramatically in the past two years. If I had already started on the cheapest foods and had nowhere lower to go, my prices would still have risen by approximately the same amount.
For fun, however, I went through and replaced each item with the cheapest equivalent at Walmart, including cases (like the fillets) where I would consider a decrease in my quality of life. That still leaves me at 32.8% increase in cost. And I'm eating soggy fillets, yogurt that tastes like aspartame, have to doll up my cornbread with extra ingredients, etc., etc.
If your cost of food has only gone up 20% since 2021, consider yourself lucky. That certainly isn't the case in our area. CPI says it's only gone up 14.3% in that same time period.
I'm not saying you need to eat worse food, I'm saying prices of things fluctuate, and not everyone's grocery bill looks like yours. Being realistic, if you're upset that yogurt has gone up so much, don't buy it. Or, do buy it, but realize that not everything has gone up 35%. It's not true. 15-20% is the average.
Do the same with mortgages. In October 2021 a 15-year fixed rate mortgage was 2.55%. Right now it's 7.59%. What product can I replace if I need to move today vs. then? I'd have to go back one month to get 100% increase for gas, but September 2021 gas was 2.36 vs. 4.61 average September 2023, 95% change. What can I substitute for fuel?
Food? So many items are insane. Costco popcorn. I buy that all the time for my kids. Pre-pandemic it was about $9 (maybe 10). Now it's $16/17.
Bag of chips? $5-6 for less
My healthcare premiums went up 20% last year- I don't even want to look what it's going to cost next year.
>CPI does include food, fuel, and housing costs
You can say that all you want, but however they are doing it just doesn't translate to reality for most people.
Ok, then let's look at my local Safeway. Shit is OUTRAGEOUS. If you don't think groceries haven't gone up 30/40/50% then apparently you don't look at any prices while you shop.
Look here: https://www.rabato.com/us/shoprite/weekly-ad/LEipqw
And here: https://www.rabato.com/us/shoprite/weekly-ad/KZiQw3p
Things are not 50%. Some items, some brands, yes. But you can always cherry-pick anything, always.
Chicken is actually CHEAPER today. Crazy (but that was covid supply chain issues I guess, so now I'm cherry-picking)
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...
Buy other popcorn. Or buy a different snack. That is how things work.
1. Source? A quick search suggests not.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre....
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-capital-gains-not-included-in-...
2. If this were true, shouldn't we be seeing meteoric rise and fall in gdp during the pandemic, when the s&p 500 grew 40% within the span of less than 2 years?
The numbers I see coming out about the state of the economy just seem more and more out of sync with reality on the ground. Legit 5% GDP growth should mean a booming economy with people feeling good, yet people are struggling to cover their basic needs and pessimism seems high. I work remote so I see this in both the bubble of the tech world and in the "real world" outside of tech
I agree that GDP is a poor measure of “on the ground” experience, but not sure what that has to do with deficit spending.
the main argument that the economy is doing well is that "the labor market is strong" and unemployment is low, but how many jobs are tied to government deficit spending via contracts or direct employment? If that spending is cut back, I'd imagine the jobs numbers will quickly start to decline
0 - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-budget-deficit-jumps-23-...
That's really the key thing. What level is sustainable? I've come around to the idea that the main danger of deficit spending is inflation (because of the idea that government debt is private sector wealth).
The big levers the government have access to are spending and taxes. The first adds wealth, the second subtracts. In this way, government debt is really nothing like household debt that you and I have.
I personally don’t buy it. When other country’s start divesting from US treasury ties, the party will be over. Already prices are rising faster than income. What did Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina, Venezuela, etc. do wrong, that the US is doing right?
Think about Carland, a country that makes lots of nice cars, and largely sells them to the US. Imagine the US decides to print a bunch of money, weakening our currency relative to Carland's. Carland's cars now cost more for Americans to buy. This might sound nice at first (for a Carlandian car peddler), but in reality what's going to happen is less cars are going to be sold, and your cars are likely to become less competitive than those from other countries. So the Carland government has a major incentive to try to weaken their own currency, and start doing exactly that. So other countries effectively end up absorbing much of our inflation, helping to greatly minimize the impact of any given batch of money-printing.
So if the USD hits a point where we're no longer able to effectively export our inflation, the result's not going to just be inflation. That's a SHTF moment, because it means we'll have reached a point where we're inflating so much that other countries simply can't afford to absorb it without or imperiling their own economies, or have become okay with not exporting much to the US. Given how extremely dependent we are on imports, this is going to be a catastrophe.
Beyond this there are lots of self-feedback effects to consider, especially with borrowing, but this post is already long enough!
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation&source...
But if it's actually providing a boost to economic growth, it also means the debt isn't actually unsustainable. If you boost economic growth this year by 0.1%, and afterward it returns to previous growth rates, then the economy will stay 0.1% larger than it otherwise would have been perpetually. If your interest rates are comparable to the base line economic growth (true now, last decade they have been lower), and you take a twenty-year view, then taking on 5% of GDP in debt to generate a one off 1% growth boost to the economy is a no-brainer. The real issue is to understand when the government (vis a vis the private sector) actually can spend money to generate genuine extra growth, and when it cannot (e.g. if it only shifts growth that would happen anyway forward you would expect growth to dip after the initial boost, but that would be true whether the deficit spending stops or not).
The argument against debt is often not based in economic sense or sound science (remember the debacle when a widely cited study on the problems with high debt turned out to be based on an Excel mistake?). In my view, it's based on an aversion to the government having too much spending power. After all, a version of the argument, above was used by conservatives to sell tax cuts that were supposed to pay for themselves. They didn't because the tax cuts did not actually generate growth, they merely redistributed wealth to the top. For deficit spending, the evidence that it can boost economic growth is much more robust.
The real debt crisis will hit once countries start to seriously shrink...
Or it would've been placed in the reverse REPO facility at delicious interest rates paid straight from the printing press. A lot of COVID spending was sanitized this way, without it inflation would've been much higher. And this money has started to get back into the economy.
There are all kinds of reasons why this figure might be politically influenced. The reality on the ground is we've had to make significant cuts to our standard of living just to maintain spending flat even with wage increases. The wage increases have been on the order of 3% per year and not tracking with inflation for both my wife and I.
What are those numbers?
So when you talk about numbers “you see coming out” you’re at least a year out of date.
I’m assuming you’re going to just start saying “the numbers aren’t real man”. But in that case why talk about the “numbers you see coming out”.
> I’m assuming you’re going to just start saying “the numbers aren’t real man”.
Nice way to prove you are arguing in partisan favor and not discussing anything in good faith.
Core inflation doesn’t include housing and fuel. But fuel is down 10% from its peak last year and the median home price in July 2023 was 2% below the median price in July 2022.
Inflation is going down, wages are going up.
You can’t argue that “the numbers coming out” are showing the opposite because they aren’t.
This is why the numbers are largely useless at gauging public sentiment. Nobody cares that this quarter the rate of inflation has slowed. They care that chicken breasts cost double what it should. They care that a Ford Mustang GT can cost $50k when they were pretty sure they were $30k. They care that fast food costs as much as a sit down restaraunt should and the sit down costs as much as a nice one should.
Now you can all explain that with numbers and reports but sentiment doesn't care about that. Public opinion is an inherently irrational thing. But it is still incredibly important because elections are decided by it. It doesn't matter if GDP is positive and inflation is good right now if everyone thinks we are in a recession and the prices of everything are too damn high. You will get voted out. I'm not sure why this is a hard concept to grasp.
Are you saying people are expecting CPI deflation? I don't think that's accurate, and it's also definitely not gonna happen.
A chipotle burrito with carne asada steak and guac is now $17
Amy’s frozen pizza was $6.99 and is now $10 (don’t buy it any more, I’ll be dammed if I spend 10 bucks on frozen pizza)
I looked up the price for Amy's Vegan Supreme pizza at my local Kroger, in-stock for $7.99. No sales tax on that item, so just that price.
Because they're two different concepts. Public sentiment is generally a lagging indicator on the economy. People will think we're still in a high even after the economy has started to falter. And people will still think times are bad even after the economy starts to come back.
You are correct that public sentiment is on what people vote. That doesn't mean they are accurately assessing the economy.
Someone’s belief was causing them to invent numbers coming out to justify that belief.
EDIT: I don't necessarily disagree, but it's important to not let general sentiment get in the way. Sentiment is often a lagging indicator.
Here's the basket that the bls uses for cpi: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2022.htm
What specific issues do you have with it?
We just raised GDP by $2 trillion!
For the question you're interested in, you'd want to look at other measures like the deficit as a share of GDP. Which is trending badly in large part due to lower revenues (variety of non-ideological reasons).
https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is...
The latter would fall into the bucket of government handouts to the bottom cause inflation, would it not?
If you're skipping the monetary interaction and saying "it's not the handout, it's the greed", then I'd like to point out that companies have been behaving the same way forever (trying to maximize profits), yet inflation has been low for a decade.
That corporations would take advantage of poor people having more money to spend is intended behavior, and something that needs to be accounted for in functional monetary policy.
This isn't true. Companies only started to maximize profits under shareholder value recently. Corporations originally were thought to have a responsibility to society at large, thus with things like pensions being provided to their employees.
Additionally, the small handouts to the poor are much more dwarfed by handouts to the employers at the time. Which made it baffling that large employers then raised prices anyways, when they already got the vast majority of covid relief money. No, it is pure greed.
The human condition is to endeavour. Even with free money the majority of folk will work, or do something to improve their situation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S
So isn't the situation today exactly the same as four years ago, before Covid, under a Republican administration?
Yet somehow I never heard this argument that GDP growth is a function of the deficit back in 2019.
However, to make things simpler assume you don't have cash, for example, because you are unemployed.
So, if you are making the mortgage payments using the credit card and the total CC payments this year alone are 8% of the value of the house, you can see problem.
Eventually, the debt becomes due, and no amount of house will repay the incurred debt.
So the relationship is, you may buy any house (assets) that grows in any amount, but if your CC hole is growing faster, you are actually worse than you started out.
Financing and even currency issuance depends on trust.
I can get a 0% from family and friends if i needed for far more my net worth. With connections I could also get counterfeit and pass it around.
It comes down to the fraud triangle: opportunity, incentive, rationalization.
The government may have more leeway to commit fraud than an individual. But the comparison is still apt, the fraud is the same, whether its a house being paid with CC or GPD with govt bonds. Ignore that at your own peril
Conversely, the US government has also spent the last 40+ years abusing the fallacy that loaning money is completely different than spending, which has grotesquely distorted the financial industry and the housing market. So the sooner we shove off these misguided notions, like that the government's balance sheet is anything like a private balance sheet (and even worse, that the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is somehow distinct from the government's!), the better. Modern Monetary Theory is more in line with the actually-conservative Austrian School than the hybrid catastrophe of the past four decades.
But that's just like you demanding to have a 0% CC from a financial institution. If you are Bezos, you may be able to swing that.
But that demand only follows your credit rating. You can demand 0%, but that doesnt mean you will get it. If Bezos is suddenly bankrupt, bet he's not getting the same CC, or even any CC.
Making the bet that the USG can set rates as they please forever just because they have for 12 years is just saying "I'm a turkey and life is good, this nice farmer feeds me every day!"
Thanksgiving always comes.
Thanksgiving will always arrive but the government is not going to be the turkey with its debts, in this case, it could be a global stagflation. The US government can always make good on however many debt it has as long as it is denoted in US dollars.
If the government spends more, it should cause more work, which should lead to higher GDP.
This is one simple way to look at it.
If the government is spending more, but GDP isn't growing by the same, it might be a sign that the governments expenditures are wasted.
Now, I'm not saying that's happened, but it could be. Government spending is historically the most likely to be wasteful, in comparison to individual/retail/business spending.
I have "opinions", but if you are interested in this topic, rather than me dumping it here, it can be worth reading up a bit on GDP, then googling around for GDP criticisms. I think there's a sense in which it measures something useful, but it isn't measuring what people think it is and what the media sort of pushes it as meaning; it is correlated to the health of an economy but it is by no means a measure of the health of the economy, and the fact government expenditures are simply straight-up added to the GDP has such an obvious way for the government to manipulate the numbers that I can't hardly even call it an exploit. Whether they are doing that, I'll leave that to the reader to decide.
Another relatively obvious issue is that the GDP number waved around in the popular press is generally not adjusted for inflation. That's not just the US GDP in 2023, it's any GDP the press will talk about, anywhere and anytime, so I'm not trying to make any stealth political point here. It's something to be aware of in any context a "GDP" comes up, look to see if it's inflation-adjusted or not. Such measures exist and more serious economists definitely use them. The wikipedia page I linked to above has a wide variety of other interesting definitions and that's still a Wikipedia overview itself, of course, not the fullness of econometrics.
The more they spend, the more others earn, leads to higher GDP.
A one time expense of 8% GDP for a 4% growth is great. That means it would get paid back in two years, or faster if you consider compounding.
The problem is determining if the 8% spending is related to the 4% growth (and how much.
Another way to to frame the whole topic is that the US government spends %40 of GDP in taxes, plus another 8% borrowed, per year. Even this could be a good deal, but it comes down to how much of the growth is causes by govt spending, which types of spending, and if the growth is permanent.
Not quite. The payback time will depend on the growth in government revenues, which should be correlated to GDP growth, but a fraction of it.
The purpose of the government isnt grow, it is to serve the people
It will never default because it can just create the credit. That’s what the Federal Reserve did with its zero interest rate policy. It distorts the economy, and the economy can shrink and be torn apart, but the government can always pay its debt by simply printing the money.
The real problem lies with private debt, and that's what's actually leading to a default. When people default on their debt, they end up forfeiting property to the creditors. What we’re seeing now is a large scale transfer of property such houses and cars that people had bought, and so on, that they can no longer keep making payments on. this results in a transfer of income from the 90% to the 10%.
The wealth transfer means that the working majority is pushed ever further to the margins. US is already in a situation where around half the population has no meaningful savings.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/03/americans-are-saving-less-in...
Having no savings puts people in a position where they're not able to absorb further unexpected expenses. This is what's making the economy so fragile.
Take social security for example. You can print money to repay all the money borrowed from the fund, but in doing so, you have debased the currency it pays out.
If a retiree is owed 100$, you pay it with printed money, so in theory they are made whole, but it no longer has the same purchasing power. It is a rug pull for the retiree.
You can expand the money supply and amounts in circulation without inflation in the exact case where you expand the value goods and services in equal measure.
Even then, the purchasing power of currency holders is less than the counterfactual where the money supply was not expanded and you had deflation as a result.
Money drop a million printed dollars on each consumer, and prices will skyrocket.
Are you trying to tell me that the expansion of the money supply in Venezuela has no direct relation to inflation.
This is exactly what happens when the government expand the money supply to repay debt. It send out social security checks, pay workers, and buys goods. This puts money directly in the hands of consumers.
You even agreed we are talking about an increase in the money in circulation. Are you walking that back and saying that money in circulation doesn't give consumers more money? The creditor of Government debt Is citizen consumers with benefit obligations.
What about Venezuela? Consumers don't have more currency there either?
Not really, because most government debt isn't consumer debt. US isn't increasing money supply to pay for social security or to pay workers. It's increasing things like military contracts for large corporations.
> You even agreed we are talking about an increase in the money in circulation. Are you walking that back and saying that money in circulation doesn't give consumers more money? The creditor of Government debt Is citizen consumers with benefit obligations.
I'm not walking anything back. I'm saying that the currency that's being created isn't going to the hands of regular people. This is obvious from the fact that majority of the working population can't even afford to live on the salaries they make forcing them to take on debt to buy essentials
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jaw-dropping-stats-state-cred...
> What about Venezuela? Consumers don't have more currency there either?
Venezuela is under a brutal blockade by the US, and that's the actual source of most of the problems there.
You are confusing the debt owner, and where the money was spent. The governments make create internal debt for a military contract, but the debt is held either by the public (e.g bonds), or intragovernmental ( e.g. borrowed from the social security fund) When these get paid back, they go into circulation.
Besides, Most government spending goes to salaries and benefits.
If what you claim was happening then we wouldn't be seeing this happening. If money went to salaries and benefits, then workers wouldn't be under water financially the way they are right now.
The irony is off the charts.
The percentages don't appear comparable here. They also don't allow for future multiplier effects from the spending.
No agenda, just holding that sentence up to a little scrutiny.
Not that comparing those two numbers is at all meaningful.
That 8% debt would generate 4% more economic output this year, next year, the year after, the year after that, etc...
If your 8% debt only generates 0.5% of extra growth once, and then we get back to a baseline 3.5% growth, the additional economic output will equal the debt in 16 years and continue generating economic output afterwards.
But it's also completely unclear why, as a government, you should care about the ratio of debt to growth. The two numbers are of an entirely different nature. That economic output corresponds to things produced by the economy. The 8% debt corresponds only to who has control of which money pile (in particular, it includes the promise that the government will redirect a large chunk of money to the lenders in the future, which you might or might not find problematic). It doesn't take anything away from the total sum. So by shuffling money around, you have created real economic output. That's great!
But, that doesn't mean the the economy overall is seeing growth so we can hold all three things can be true.
Like this: https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-perso... TL;DR: 71% say economy is bad and 51% say it's getting worse, while for 60% people in the same poll their personal financial situation is just fine. There are many similar polls, all point to the same thing.
Also, economic growth in U.S. is now mostly concentrated in lower income groups. It seems that high middle class (statistical one, i.e. top 10-20% of population - "people just out of poverty" if you look at it honestly), are on the losing side now. Hard numbers are hard to come by but once the tax season is over we will see them next year.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-i...
There are fewer homeless than before 2008, which was a period of economic boom.
Besides regional differences, it’s also the case that more and more economic activity is being captured by fewer and fewer people. So, if the richest billionaires grow their stash fast enough, the rest of the country will probably feel less dynamic.
I think a lot of people feel bad about the economy because they are told to feel bad about the economy.
Which, if your job is hiring people, might be the case because wages are going up for those on the lower end.
Perhaps you're a pessimist.
People will never “feel good” about the US economy again.
Making everything about everything is an extremely effective way to paralyze any potential improvements. It’s unhelpful and exactly what I’d do if I wanted nothing to change.
Also it isn’t largely accurate, so the fact that they feel it is disconnected from reality, which is kind of my point anyway. For some it’s probably true, nothing is ever 100% good, but for the vast majority of people who feel that way they’re a) not helpless but indeed complicit based on their voting (or lack thereof) and purchasing choices and b) their lives are indeed improving even if they refuse to accept that.
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/16/life-expectancy-educated-ad...
Their lives are literally shorter. How do you think that data makes them feel?
I get that the privileged are too isolated to understand the issues facing the unprivileged these days; it seems like yet another self-reinforcing doom-loop that will eventually lead to some sort of national breakup/collapse. At which point the GDP will probably fall and then there may be some concern. I've never been much of an optimist though; maybe everything will just work out somehow.
Further, to conflate "many people are generally unhappy" with "the economy and choices related to the economy are what is making many people unhappy" is unhelpful. The economy can be doing well (the subject of this submission), and people can, separately, be struggling for non-economic reasons. It's unhelpful, however, to constantly bring it up when it's irrelevant, such as right now.
To pick an extreme to illustrate the point: if GDP shoots up 100%(!) but it's all a dozen people trading with each other a whole lot and everyone else is now impoverished, is that better? GDP is better! GDP/capita is better, too! But the economy is definitely worse.
Another exaggerated example to illustrate the point: if GDP is outpacing consumer inflation—let's say 4% growth in a quarter, and 2% inflation in the same—but only because we've made the "basket of goods" to calculate inflation qualitatively worse, and meanwhile several important things that aren't part of that basket have gone up 1,000% and everyone rightly reports feeling poorer—is the economy doing well?
Maybe everyone is miserable because they’re newly aware of the violence and injustice in the world generally. How is that useful when trying to understand the state of the economy specifically? It’s important to understand how people feel as a society, but this isn’t supposed to be that. How do you filter out the “noise”?
We can’t really use “vibes” to determine if interest rates should go back down, for example. That would be disastrous.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/site...
The economy suddenly was awesome once a Republican was back in office, according to Republicans. Just turned on a dime.
You act like people would finally be happy if inflation were just under some number. No. People will just find the next thing to be miserable about. That’s how people are now.
This is not exactly true. They raised their prices, but they have a permanent 30% off coupon on their app.
God I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.
People radically misreport this stuff for political reasons. "The economy is doing well" numbers will change radically in a week when a different party takes the White House, typically in a purely partisan fashion [1]. The economy didn't get better in that week, it's just that people "feel" differently about things when their preferred (resp. disfavored) candidate takes office.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1609/consumer-views-economy.asp...
"But gas prices are low" so whatever apparently.
How much deficit did we add last year? The year before? OK, two years ago means they are Covid numbers, so... five years ago?
How much did the economy grow in those years?
I'm not sure that you can say anything as simple as "the growth is because of the deficit". I suspect (but I don't currently have the numbers) that there have been lots of years when the US ran a large deficit and did not grow.
Because growth likely means inflation in this case, so that causes uncertainty.
The fact of the matter is the feelings of public are the feelings of the rich propagandists who, on principle, don’t want a leftist in power, regardless of whether he’s good for the economy or not.
People care about the job market, the cost of living, direction effects of inflation on buying goods and services. When people say they economy sucks they mean they can't buy a car right now because the bank will only give them an ass interest rate even with great credit and the price of groceries has skyrocketed.
I've believed for awhile now the stock market has been a poor measure of the economy because its become decoupled from the "real" economy, ie: the things I listed above.
Maybe "All Economics are Local" too.
Obviously neither of those are true in a general sense - but the local situation is what feels most important.
With regards to grocery prices, what does corporate greed have to do with the president?
As for the car, the FED has a big hand in interest rates, and yeah, Biden did choose to re-nominate Powell, but Powell was originally appointed by Trump, so I don't know how voters can really say the republican would have done better.
The American economy is bad for people under a certain line, yes. The question is why does the media always overplay the economy when Republicans are in power and downplay it when Democrats are?
As one example the meat packing industry has become highly consolidated, squeezing both farmers and consumers while extracting massive profits. But across the entire economy many industries have become highly consolidated and subsequently raised their profit margins to the detriment of everyone but shareholders.
The media obviously wasn't talking about this when they were talking about how good the stock market was under Trump...
Most people aren't extracting the root causes to high prices. They watch the news, hear there is inflation and go to the store and see prices are high. Even if they had an inclination to, that kind of economic education is not standard. The population at large is very ignorant to how the economy works. They blame the prices on inflation and companies looking to gouge prices know this and take advantage of it.
But, corporate greed and monopolies have a lot to do with the president. At least Teddy Roosevelt thought it did. And he did something about it. It's not unreasonable to ask why Biden doesn't. There was a point, brief as it may have been where it at least seemed like our institutions cared more about how the economy effected the common man.
>The American economy is bad for people under a certain line, yes. The question is why does the media always overplay the economy when Republicans are in power and downplay it when Democrats are?
I should have made this more clear in my first post. But my core point is, public sentiment doesn't care about economic reports. It cares about tangible every day things like prices of goods and interest rates. It doesn't care nor understand the root causes. It blames the guy in charge. For better or worse POTUS is always to blame for the current state of the economy. It comes with the job. Instead of saying the public is stupid, I think its more productive to accept it and work out how best to deal with it.
And I don't think they downplay for republicans and exaggerate for democrats. The large media corps are selling a product and outrage helps. The kind of outrage the sells best depends on a lot of things. When trump was president, it was effective to just sell him as the outrage product. Biden is a much more dour and boring person. You have to focus on other things than the personality at the top. Before 9/11, Bush was getting attacked for the economy. He presided over the dot com bust. But with GWOT most criticism for him switched to that. The 2008 recession happened while Obama was in office and had long since left the news cycle by the time he left so duh.
The large majority of people are doing well. When people say the economy sucks they are largely not talking about their own economic situation. Most people believe that they, personally, are doing well, but that some nebulous "the economy" is doing badly. We have a nation of thriving people who believe everything is falling apart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/opinion/economy-inflation...
People don't think of inflation quarter to quarter or even FY to FY. They think of it in terms of what they are calibrated to think "normal" prices are. For most people that's going to be pre-pandemic. Since prices have not returned to pre-pandemic levels the economy is bad. Especially so since their wages haven't gone up comparably to match. This is why the numbers are largely useless at gauging public sentiment. Nobody cares that this quarter the rate of inflation has slowed. They care that chicken breasts cost double what it should. They care that a Ford Mustang GT can cost $50k when they were pretty sure they were $30k. They care that fast food costs as much as a sit down restaraunt should and the sit down costs as much as a nice one should.
Now you can all explain that with numbers and reports but sentiment doesn't care about that. Public opinion is an inherently irrational thing. But it is still incredibly important because elections are decided by it. It doesn't matter if GDP is positive and inflation is good right now if everyone thinks we are in a recession and the prices of everything are too damn high. You will get voted out. I'm not sure why this is a hard concept to grasp.
The economic data indicates that average income has gone up more than prices have since the start of the pandemic. If you look at Real Personal Income (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI) it's up 5% relative to the end of 2019.
And if you think inflation is way higher than is being adjusted for, you're simply wrong. The MSRP for a 2023 Mustang GT is $38,345 (https://www.kbb.com/ford/mustang/2023/). The 2020 was $38,320 (https://www.kbb.com/ford/mustang/2020/). The price of Chicken Breast is up 38%, not 100% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FF1101).
Yes, public opinion is irrational, but the more obvious political question is why public opinion is so wrong now, when often it is not so pessimistic about the economy.
In 2020 I could get Mustang GT for $8k off MSRP. In 2023 Mustang GT MSRP is $42,495 and there is only $500 off.
https://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/models/gt-fastback/
To that I would say there is likely a problem with average. I didn't see a break down of the data in your link, but admittedly its my lunch break and I didn't have the time to really dig for it either. But its entirely possible that some groups saw an outsized growth in wages while others didn't.
>The MSRP for a 2023 Mustang GT is $38,345
The MSRP of a Mustang GT is $42k before options https://shop.ford.com/configure/mustang/model/customize/ecob... The GT Premium is $47k
You think the average income is being computed incorrectly? Or that there is just a lot of variance so many people are worse off? It is true that wage increases have been uneven, but they are actually much larger at the low end -- this is why you see the most inflation in low-wage service-heavy categories like restaurants.
Is it public opinion being irrational or governments around the world playing games with "basket of goods", "core" inflation and other bullshit designed to convince their citizens to trust magic math formulas instead of their own eyes?
Good luck gaslighting the working class into believing their day to day situation is something it's not. "Don't believe your lying eyes. Your grocery bills and rent and gas and car and healthcare didn't go up, and you're closer to owning a house than before! It's the bad people telling you otherwise. Trust Us. Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad."
I'm obviously only looking at a small part of the overall US, but if we're going to go by what we as individuals see the numbers I'm personally seeing largely match the trends I see from the BLS.
Feelings are more present and real. It's a mistake to expect that anyone will ignore their feelings. The question is how to get upstream of those feelings.
I had a big anger problem when I was a kid - my dad told me that if someone can make you angry, they control you. It's hard to tell someone they are being controlled while they are angry though.
Sometimes people are happy to be angry because it makes the world simpler. All I have to do is be angry, and this guy will fix things for me. And maybe that guy fixes things, or fixes one thing, but later things get worse again, because just being angry and trusting someone to fix things doesn't work.
Humans are very smart animals, but the world is very complicated.
A common and easily mocked media meme. On the New York Times Pitchbot humor account, an hour ago: "We're not in a recession. So why does it feel like we are?"
Debtors really don't care about the deficit. There's not a lot of places to park large quantities of cash. Even if the US Treasury was offering a measly 1% most bond buyers would still take that over any higher yielding riskier debt. It still confounds the typical US taxpayer that other countries buy our sovereign debt because that is how they insure their currency.
The numbers are meaningless, even if they are accurate, which I sincerely doubt. GDP is up 5%? My salary hasn't gone up 5%, but my grocery bill has gone up way more than 5%. Health insurance costs went up more than 5%. Maybe all those increases in prices are boosting GDP, but wages aren't keeping up. Maybe the numbers are hand-waving nonsense.
People know whether they are doing okay or not. GDP is a blunt instrument metric of little value except as a broad comparison. But noting that it "happens during a Democrat presidency" is quite telling.
If you're in the top 1-2% of income earners you feel things differently, this is understood.
So while your math is good, it's not meaningful. I find it very weird the lengths people will go to in trying to make one-off metrics reflect a different reality than what is very clear from people's experiences.
But job switchers (rightly) give themselves the credit for their salary boost. OTOH the government gets the blame for inflation and job loss. It's a crap job, you get blamed for the bad stuff, but don't get credit for the good stuff.
Suggesting that people job-hop is insane. Most workers cannot do this for a multitude of reasons, and most jobs are fungible. It's a very keyboard-warrior way to look at the economy, which is like getting advice on which car to buy from hedge fund managers.
Have you talked to low-wage workers? They switch jobs a lot. Long-term job stability is actually more of a corporate white-collar phenomenon.
In any event, others disagree with your chart: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
edit to add: switching jobs does not mean higher wages, especially for low-wage jobs.
That's literally the point of adjusting for inflation. You can of course pick the fastest growing components of the CPI (housing is already a huge component) and complain that we're not outpacing the fastest growing component, but that's arbitrary.
> In any event, others disagree with your chart: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
That chart looks at wages rather than income, e.g. excluding healthcare contributions. You can argue that we shouldn't count healthcare because it's gotten way more expensive for no real increase in quality (which is true!). But healthcare is a huge and rapidly growing component of CPI which we are using to deflate wages -- you can't have your cake and eat it too by excluding healthcare payments from compensation but including it in your deflator.
Also that chart just seems to be wrong (they don't actually show the source or data). You can do the comparison yourself easily enough -- take the average hourly wages (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003) and use FRED's graph editor to compare to a deflator (e.g. CPI -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL). This is up ~10% since 2008. It's not massive but it's not nothing -- and remember the caveat above that this is an underestimate.
And re: switching jobs for low-wage workers -- either they are getting big raises or getting big pay increases from switching jobs, or the BLS is massively wrong. Which is it?
These are the good times that the government should use pay to pay off debt by taxing more and spending less.
I don't put much stock in your feelings about the economy. My feeling is, I see people shopping at the mall, I see them filling the bars, and I see them buying new cars. The problem some people may be having is that they over-extended themselves and now owe too much. For example, while their real wages have actually gone up, they may have underestimated how much inflation would erode the real value of their nominal wage increases (I did this, in fact). So they took out loans they thought would be easy to pay, at interest rates that were higher than they were used to, and found that they had made the wrong bet. The disatisfaction, imo, is all about disappointed expectations, not the actual living conditions people have. I got a 20k raise, but now it feels more like a 12k raise, and meanwhile I took out a loan for a kitchen remodel.
Yes, I am fortunate enough to earn a middle-class income for my family. I grew up poor in a poor neighborhood with a lot of crime. Sometimes you can climb the ladder.
Obviously, the US government deficit spending is somewhat better than building dynamite statues (but only somewhat) and we can expect some degree of returns, but I highly doubt that the spending is efficient enough to outpace raising debts and the crowding out effect of the private sector.
Is it so hard to believe that people's negativity is often not about hard numbers and facts?
The US deficit spending this year is 6.6% of GDP. Last year the deficit spending of $1.4 Trillion was 5.5% of GDP. In other words, if there were no growth except that caused by government deficit spending, and that government spending was a wash - $1 of government spending for $1 of economic growth - you'd expect an annualized GDP growth of 1.1%.
Further, GDP growth fueled by deficit spending is still legit GDP growth, the same way that taking out a loan to remodel your home still creates a legitimate growth in your home's value. That remodeling may not have been the optimal investment, it might not even be a profitable investment, but it still is an investment.
That feels like a super bold claim that needs a lot of justification. Sorry I won’t just go with the hokey household metaphor.
you can pay someone to dig ditches for no reason. then pay to fill them back. both count as legit GDP growth, even if the value of either action is $0
If a government takes out a loan to build a $100 million bridge, is that bridge any different from a $100 million bridge that was funded by taking money out of the coffers?
Medicare and social security aren't bad things, but funding them with debt is pure consumption rather than a long term investment in US growth and productivity.
These two are often lumped together, though are quite different. SS deficit can be fixed with slight increase of retirement age and slight payout reduction and slight contribution increase. Medical spend is completely broken and unfixable without going after the medical cartels.
More to the point though, if you spend $20k keeping grandma alive, is she any less alive because that $20k was loaned versus pulled out of her mattress?
GDP is not a measure of how optimally money is being spent, it's just a measure of how much economic activity is going on.
In that case, the $1.7 Trillion deficit is 6.1% of GDP, so actually a half-percent lower than your calculations.
The higher interest rates haven't had time to dig into corporations yet, but the consumer really is faltering (e.g: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/10/21/ame...)
Once the consumer buckles and spending drops then the GDP should drop, pulling the US into a recession, that should cause rounds of severe across-the-board layoffs (not just isolated to tech) which then cause housing to buckle. And at some point commercial real estate should detonate as the loans there hit their maturity dates and roll over.
Remember: the nation's largest propaganda machine is dedicated to making people believe the economy is in shambles, because a booming economy fueled by government spending in green energy and protecting families falsifies their ideology.
A quick look through the last 8 quarters shows it's slightly biased in favor of revising upward (comparing advanced vs. second estimates).
They shouldn't be worried about losing some % of net worth in the stock market and/or increased union activity. They should be worried about civil unrest.
There's no free bread and the commoners are getting fed up with the circus.
What specifically are the rich nervous about? Outside of complete economic collapse they've got far less to worry about than everyone else. If they're worried about economic collapse they're essentially worried about becoming like the rest of us... not anything worth advocating for here.
gdp-numbers are basically just mirroring inflation. It is not growth if it decimates companies market caps.
Would love to have somebody explain it to me, how this big growth number has made anybody wealthier in inflation-adjusted-terms.
I don't know. If you assume rich people hold assets that are vulnerable performance wise to the exposure of equities, rich people are currently taking a bath given that the S&P is basically flat (except for dividend reinvestment) past 30 months (SPY was $411.49 on Apr 9, 2021, today it is $412.55)
Having cash and taking advantage of treasuries and other loans is providing pretty solid returns as well.
The rich people’s accountants have this covered for the most part, I think they will be fine.
I look at Spain's labor market and I see a country that is massively failing: Triple the unemployment rate. People out of college there, with good majors, that end up making far less than what they'd to at McDonalds in the US. Young adults can't afford housing either, but not because they have massive student debt, or high healthcare costs, or extreme housing prices, but because salaries are pretty sad. My brother does bioinformatics and has a Ph.D, and he'd make 4x what he does, today, doing the same job in the massive, booming metropolis that is... St Louis, Missouri. He lives with our retired mother, and they can barely make ends meet.
Ultimately the higher growth advantage for the US is long lasting too: If your GDP growth is 0.5% higher than your neighbor, every single year, compound interest makes the difference very stark after a few decades... and a place like Spain already starts 30% poorer.
So yes, I'd still argue that the US is ahead in many areas. The riskiest issue is the difficulty of reforms: Good luck reforming higher education or healthcare, even though other countries have working systems that are better. But even though all it takes to see the advantages of change is to look a little bit, progress seems very difficult, as there's just so much money and power on the line in keeping the status quo. But that might be the theme of the last couple of decades in all democracies: Unwillingness to reform in the face of dysfunction.
I'd also add that the US is a fabulous place to live if you make a solid income (say, 10-20% above median), but a pretty shitty place to live if you do not.
But at some point, I don't know if it is the narrator or someone in the story, but they say something to the effect of: "Everyone wants to be king of the hill, but there aren't enough hills to go around. The US is particularly great at creating more hills."
"Everyone wants to be the king of the hill. That's international. But the number of aspiring kings always dwarfs the number of available hills. So in this country, we build more hills. We're geniuses, in fact, at building more hills."
If you want to live in a world subjected by a king or some fool on a hill, go ahead. I don’t pretend like you’re anything other than a peasant.
This is impossible, because in this scenario, someone will get weapons and will forcefully take over and rule everyone else. This is just how human nature works
I don’t see people getting weapons and taking over people in the streets, do you?
In this context, good luck showing how they are anything but particularly well armed and organized gangs.
That's because we've built some very large hills to prevent this - notably powerful governments with militaries and police forces. Lack of hills is essentially anarchy, where all of a sudden the strongest now become the ruler
The only way a person can absolutely reject authority is to live alone in wild territory (since managed territory is ruled by governing authorities). This scheme works until another person decides they want to live in the wilderness and happen to choose the exact same spot of woods as you, which is statistically probable since some geographic locations are more desirous than others. At that point, you will either find a way to coexist with this person or attempt to push them out. If you try to push them out, you're saying you're the ruler of the territory, so that option contradicts the objective of rejecting authority, for how can you say you reject authority and then become authority without being a hypocrite?
So, the only viable option is to coexist. Over time, more people who reject authority arrive, and you must coexist with them or pack your bags for somewhere else, which you really don't want to do. Presumably, you'll work the land in some way to provide for your own sustenance. One day, your neighbor accuses you of killing their livestock overnight. You obviously didn't, and you tell them that, but they just don't believe you because they know they saw you on their land the previous night. At this point, you're frustrated because you're innocent but can't demonstrate it, and the other people who reject authority like yourself are unable to decide who to listen to because neither one of you has more authority than the other. Someone comes up with the idea of writing down a common set of life principles and rules for dispute arbitration, so both legal and judicial systems are born. Down the line, someone decides to ignore the arbitration outcome, and the community decides that arbitration outcomes must be respected, so enforcement systems are created. At that point, everyone living in that spot of wild territory have created a government under the rule of law.
The point of all this is, at some level, we are all ruled by something, be it a single human or a government. Are you primarily taking issue with monarchy? If so, absolute monarchy exists in only a handful of places in the world, with most monarchies being constitutional monarchies which delegate much political authority to democratically-elected individuals. And yes, some people like trusting that the rulers will do a good job. If that makes them peasants, so be it, but consider that even the people in the wilderness community must hope that their government under the rule of law will be successful. If they aren't rooting for its success and actively work against it, the rule of law will eventually collapse.
You talk about absolute marquee like you don’t sell yourself to it every day when you walk into work.
Yes, this is what America is built on. American culture is winner take all, and we generally want to be the winner.
We don't deride his success, we deride the fact that he acts like a child on social media
I am not the person you are replying to, but I assure you that “I” never wanted to be a on top of anything. I don’t want celebrity or wealth. I want to be left alone most of all, and having just enough to achieve it.
Just telling you this so that your horizons of what people want open up a tad and you don’t assume that everyone around you is a different looking copy of you.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
Because the US government has a money printer and an insatiable appetite for debt. The day will come for us, our kids, or our grandkids where it catches up to us.
I guess it is possible that maybe in a generation or two Europe, Russia, China can fix their problems, get a solid working class and challenge the US.
But it really feels like the entire planet is sinking right now and the US is the best of the worst.
Maybe we need some aliens or something.
I don't think your non-sequitur bears even a passing resemblance to the subject.
I think the whole point of the thread you're replying on is mentioning the individualism and personal freedom that's the US's cultural basis, and that has a profound impact on the well-being of those who feel the need to be the best of what they do, regardless if what that might be.
A while ago I stumbled upon an Instagram account of a middle-age man who had a bunch of videos of him juggling random stuff in his back yard, and he made it his point to stress that he was the best at what he did and he made a whole career out of it. Such a random thing, and I'm sure there weren't that many competitors for the title of best pillow juggler, but that fit definitely the description of someone making his own hill to be its king.
Edit: and also, I feel like there's bigger and smaller examples of similar equally or moreso populous jurisdictions that are quite safe and peaceful to the extent that I feel like its gotta be the god and its gotta be the guns.
If I sort this table by rate (and exclude a small territory), the US is 5th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Still though particularly in places like Appalachia or rougher cities, its terrifying. America is realky liberty or death with few in-betweens
I left states several years ago and regretted that decision ever since.
Edit: I'm rate-limited so to answer the apparent question everyone has: I live in Texas; it's not exactly friendly regarding Medicaid, but I don't know what it takes to qualify.
https://www.keranews.org/health-wellness/2023-08-16/medicaid...
One got a full CAT Scan and a full neurological consult, and a EEG due to a history of seizures, all for free and within a week.
https://millerestateandelderlaw.com/medicaid-out-of-pocket-c...
Seems can vary by state too
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/cost-sharing/out-pocket-co...
It's not hard to imagine these same states make the bureaucracy of obtaining low income healthcare benefits arbitrary, difficult to navigate, and counter-productive as way to 'prove' government healthcare doesn't work.
People have this fantasy that the social safety net takes care of people that can't take care of themselves, but that's really not the case. It is extremely easy to lose benefits and hard to get them in the first place for various services, with very long waiting lists for some things.
I suppose I'm actually rather fortunate to some degree; a lot of my issues could likely be resolved with a hip replacement, and I'm told the latest ones are very robust and can lead to nearly full natural function, but I haven't quite built up the courage to replace part of my skeleton with metal and plastic. As I say, I'm rather happily employed these days, but I've also been throught the odd layoff, so I know how precarious things can be.
I don't know if Single payer is a good solution in a country of our size but I am willing to try anything compared to what we have today.
Abuse is possible! It’s just not common, not in the sense of “servitude” being slavery or some other kind of abominable condition. Maybe you get the shit work, maybe you work more hours, but let’s not pretend these are the salt mines.
When people cannot easily change jobs they deal with worse working conditions and worse pay. I have seen people work for the same employer for over a decade because they would have to restart their greencard process otherwise.
As long as you didn't leave the country, nobody cared.
Don't take my word for it, check with your immigration lawyer.
That would be great if it were the case. But it seems like a good portion venerates corporations and wage slavery.
> Many of them view working for a wage with revulsion.
Couldn't agree more with working for a wage being repulsive. I think the US needs to get back closer to the founding myth you mentioned, and farther from the cancer of corporations turning everyone into wage slaves. There really is no freedom in that. My stomach turns inside out thinking that I was in favour of that. What a terrible mistake. Nothing against those forced to work as such often limited by the precarity of their situation.
And you can always change jobs (albeit at the risk of restarting the green card process).
Trends matter. I think the US is today the best place in the world to be born in.
I have far less certainty for americans 2 generations away
Will that still be true for people born here fifty years from now? I have my doubts.
Also, they're white, and that plays a role--even today there's a surprising number of undocumented Irish immigrants to the United States but nobody's out there asking for reactionary measures to that.
It's not always racism...but it is mostly ladder-pulling, and economically unrealistic ladder-pulling at that. (Ask a farmer.)
Or is it that they feel those immigrants are unfairly taking something from them? And if so, is that really true or just FUD?
How much of the sentiment boils down to "those illegals are taking our jobs!"? How many people who hold that sentiment would actually want & take the job being filled by one of those immigrants? If their argument is instead that the illegal immigrant labor depresses wages for that set of jobs, how many of those people are willing to pay the extra cost for the products once the company paid fair market wages?
https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-migrant-crisis-explained...
What resource and logistical problem? The US isn't a command economy, and it's not a social welfare state that extends its largess to anyone within its borders that has a pulse.
Immigrants, legal or otherwise, have to earn their keep, same as everyone else. And there are no natural shortages of... Anything in the US.
Despite the castigation of Latin American immigrants as un American, Hispanics are quite patriotic and successful, even the ones who's families came here without documents
The natural born citizens dissatisfied with the US are generally not comparing the US to a developing country or a country with an ongoing war on their soil, which is where most immigrants come from.
Instead, they are comparing it to other developed countries and focused on specific conditions that matter to them, like housing, transportation, environment, violence, etc.
> Yes there are problems in America, but how many of those problems are the result of an apathetic, nihilistic American population and not the foundational systems America is built on?
The criticism of these problems is far from apathetic, and it's an important part of how we begin to remedy them. For example, we aren't going to wish away gun violence by ignoring it.
The biggest current threat to the US isn't this criticism, but rather the attack on its democratic foundations happening now. However even that is not coming from apathy, though its goals are very nihilistic in the short term and oligarchic and theocratic in the long term.
To the contrary, plenty do care about it in the sense of being opposed to further immigration from developing countries. "Demographic anxiety" is a term often used to describe this.
Also, both natural born citizens of recent immigrant ancestry and those natural born for many generations care because anti-immigrant sentiment is a canary for a broader xenophobic trends.
When pressed, almost everyone has an opinion on immigration policy.
When I hear people complain online about the US, it is very common for them to have a deep understanding of problems in the US, but very superficial understanding of problems in other developed nations. European countries also have lots of problems with housing, healthcare, the environment, racism, the rise of the far right, etc. There are some problems that are uniquely american, like mass shootings.
Being an informed citizen isn't just understanding the problems in your country. If you wan't to be a part of positive change, you need to understand what's working and what's not working in other comparable countries as well.
Being specific in your comparison matters.
It is indeed facile to make the statement that "things are so much better in Europe". Blanket statements are usually stupid.
It's reasonable, however, to compare the efficacy of public transit of San Francisco to that of Copenhagen, or to compare the a population-wide health indicators of the US to Germany.
I definitely agree that the US healthcare system sucks and should not be emulated. But I think many of its critics think healthcare is a solved problem in countries like Germany and it really isn't. Germans are not completely happy with their healthcare system and there is an effort underway to reform it currently. I think it's a better system than the US system, but it's got plenty of problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/14/a-ticking-ti...
> In Germany, which spends more on healthcare than almost any other country in the world, hospitals are a greater concern, with this winter’s wave of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in young children triggering alarm across the country.
> Amid reports of overcrowded casualty departments and parents forced to sleep in hospital corridors or travel hundreds of kilometres for a child’s treatment, the Süddeutsche Zeitung said the country was witnessing “what it means when a system implodes … in scenes which for a long time might have seemed unimaginable”.
> In a petition to parliament titled: “Alert level red – hospitals in danger”, the German Hospital Society (DKG) again highlighted a chronic lack of staff as the main problem, noting that many hospitals had had to temporarily close casualty departments due to a lack of doctors and nurses.
> More than 23,000 posts remain unfilled in Germany’s hospitals after several years of low recruitment and recent mass resignations, particularly in intensive care and operating theatres, by staff citing a workload so extreme that some were unable to take even a short break or go to the toilet.
Additionally, the poor health outcomes in the United States are not necessarily the result of the US health care system. Many of the most important drivers of health care outcomes (exercise, nutrition, obesity, drug abuse, etc) are worse in the US.
My point isn't that the US health system is great, because it isn't great. My point is that people in the US are well informed about their own problems but generally ignorant about the problems outside the country.
The nicest European countries are fragile and can't handle immigration well at all. Just ask Sweden how their next 30 or so years are starting to look. France has entirely failed for decades at integrating their immigration populations, despite their vaunted welfare state. They're very mediocre at functional integration, whereas the US is the greatest by-design melting pot in world history.
Try immigrating into affluent nations like Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway, Finland, etc. They make it far more difficult than it is to come to the US (unless you're a top tier immigrant in terms of skill/wealth). The nicest countries love to use points systems or the equivalent to keep poorer, lower skilled people out.
Canada for example is 2% black and 3% Latin American. Anyone think that's an accident? There are roughly 3/4 of a billion Latin Americans in the Americas and somehow Canada is merely 3% Latin American. The huge Latin American immigration wave the US has seen over the past 40-50 years has been nearly entirely blocked by Canada. It's by design, they're xenophobic like the Europeans are, and they do everything they can to keep poor people out.
People will say: just look how amazing Norway or Germany are. It's a nice fantasy, because good luck becoming a citizen (maybe for the privileged HN crowd there's a chance).
Japan is amazing? Yeah ok, go try becoming a citizen there. Try integrating, try becoming Japanese (you can't).
So what the hell is the point of saying: xyz is so wonderful - if they're excluding by design and won't let you join?
Gee, Stanford, MIT and Harvard are amazing, every college should be like that.
The US remains moderately accessible, most of its peers are the exact opposite.
The US is 12% black, 18% latin american, 6% Asian. And let me tell you, that 12% black number isn't the product of a liberal immigration policy.
The numbers aren't actually too different, and if you were to switch the two countries' geographies, I'd expect the US latin american numbers to significantly drop, and Canada's to significantly rise.
The Canadian immigration system is actually pretty reasonable. Points for being young, for having useful skills, points for demonstrating mastery of the language, points for having relatives. And a clear process for international students studying in Canada to naturalize.
The US is the one that yanks you around by your britches, with decades-long waiting lists and visa lotteries for people who are already living and working in the country.
[1] Country-of-origin breakdown for recent immigrants to Canada[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171597/new-immigrants-c... - 32% India, 8% China, 4.3% Philipines, 3.8% Nigeria. The first European country to make the list is France, at 3.2%, followed by the US, Brazil, Iran, Korea, Pakistan, all at 2-3%.
[2] Similar breakdown for the US - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested.... - 14% Mexico[3], 13% India, 7% China, 4% Phillipines, 3% Dominican Republic.
[3] Given these numbers, I think its reasonable to hypothesize that if Canada had border proximity, and strong cultural ties to Mexico, I'm sure that it's lat-am immigration numbers might look similar to what the US has.
I agree completely. But that's good and practically necessary for the US, since it is highly reliant on immigrants at all levels of skill for their labor.
Immigration even underpins the basic functioning of the healthcare system, and not just for doctors and nurses. Cleaning hospitals is a critical job for the healthcare system, and janitorial workers are 20% Latino.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't plenty that can be learned from the administration of healthcare systems elsewhere.
Germany, like the US, has a market based health insurance system organized through employers, but unlike the US, carrying insurance is required by law [1].
Furthermore, Germany has universal public coverage for medically necessary care, and controls the price of prescription drugs [2].
That doesn't make Germany's system perfect by a long shot, but it manages to achieve a much lower healthcare spend as a percentage of GDP while maintaining universal coverage for basic healthcare and even offering patients longer average hospital stays than the US does.
1. https://sites.gsu.edu/gsuglobalhealth/2021/02/15/competition...
2. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
> Just ask Sweden how their next 30 or so years are starting to look. France has entirely failed for decades at integrating their immigration populations, despite their vaunted welfare state.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. The way you put it, European countries are simultaneously closed to immigration and irrationally racist for being this way, and at the same time they're on doomed trajectories due to immigration. If the latter is true, that would be a non-racist justification for anti-immigration policies, but if they were as anti-immigration as you claim those faltering social conditions due to immigration wouldn't exist in the first place.
Compare immigration to France and Japan. It's clear which of these countries is actually hostile to immigrants.
I don't agree with the characterization that the policies are due to racism though.
Right, it's a clear contradiction. If European countries were "hyper xenophobic and or extremely racist" they would be turning away and deporting those refugees. They're not doing that though, so the characterization of European countries as xenophobic and racist doesn't fit the facts.
I say this all as someone who does not live in the USA and is not an American citizen.
The USA is not perfect and has its own share of social problems (like all countries do) but people decide that the tradeoff is worth it for all the good things the USA offers.
It's not limited to economic opportunity. The US also offers people the opportunity to make the US better through our democratic process.
Countries with extensive social programs for the poor typically aren't the easiest places to immigrate.
That's kind of what "can't afford" means.
Even as a Canadian who immigrated to the U.S. (who unfortunately lives in Canada again now), I didn't realize how good I had it until I had given up my U.S. residence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
The US is one of the most attractive places for capital in the world, which encourages a great deal of immigration to the US.
The number of opportunities in tech and the speed with which new ones arise can't be compared.
Look at the latest trend - AI. Not only did the initial boost come from openAI (US) its adoption by the biggest tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple etc - all American and all investing Billions.
But that's not even the most 'special' aspect of the US ( I'm sure SAP will jump in big into AI ) It's the hundreds of startups that are either starting or pivoting into the trend.
Now, this doesn't mean that this latest iteration of AI will be world-changing, it could turn out to be a complete bust. But it's this constant churn, the striving to be on the cutting edge, the rise and fall of dreams that makes the US 'special'.
I would never make the claim that the US is excellent in all. :)
Whether the same holds true for China is an interesting question. I've never worked with or visited China but I think there are differences. China certainly seems more 'innovative' when it comes to hardware, both physical infrastructure as well as manufacturing in general. Not so sure about software.
What you describe it is SV tech culture or start up culture in the US, which is focused on few spots. And not even all people there (e. g. Homeless people). This culture might be special but this isn't defitenly US because it is obviously not across this country.
Also I can tell you that in other countries and field of economics there is a certain sense of perfectionism or excellence e. G. In Germany or Japan or even Italy.
I guess why the Americans emphasise they are special because of economic growth is very clear: besides military there aren't many important areas where the US is good. This helps to feel "to be the best Country in the world", which is obviously wrong.
Also food: While other countries can compete on one of their native cuisines or many a few more, the US is pumping out top tier chefs in multiple areas.
Also universities: The massive amount of investment and R&D that comes out of these schools allows them to remain top of the pack.
Nope. You don't get the reason why these songs are played. It's more jazz in a lift, not good music. Let me introduce into techno culture.
"Also food: While other countries can compete on one of their native cuisines or many a few more, the US is pumping out top tier chefs in multiple areas." yThats sad about your lack of knowledge. May I introduce to this https://nerdyfoodies.com/countries-with-the-most-michelin-st... Germany alone has more stars than the whole US
"Apathetic" is not really a word I'd use to describe most Americans I know, especially the working class. "Informed but powerless" is more like it. Nihilism is the likely result of this sort of learned helplessness from a lifetime growing up in an unresponsive democracy. From the get-go, our foundational systems emphasized wealth over democracy. It was a system designed to empower a certain type and class of people, to liberate them from the English Crown's influence, but not really a democracy for all. Through our history, we've consistently encouraged wealth creation and resource exploitation/monopolization over democratic participation, and where democratic advances were made, they happened against strong headwinds and strong oppression from the wealthy. Slave owners, robber barons, industrialists, tech owners... this has never been a society friendly to the common person.
Nope, and in fact the American Dream is exactly this - it's saying that if you work hard / are lucky / have talents / have connections / have resources (the more you have the higher chances you have), you too can rise above the common person and join the ruling class of
> Slave owners, robber barons, industrialists, tech owners
Of course this is out of reach for most people, and for the vast majority of people, as soon as they climb out of the common class, they immediately look down upon the common people, since they are now above the peasants. This is human nature. Everyone who complains about the rich will do the same thing as the rich as soon as they become rich
> are lucky / have talents / have connections / have resources
The more of these you have, the higher your odds of success. Just hard work on its own, like you see, is not necessarily enough
— Thomas Jefferson
"It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is, in reality, the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy."
Not that it should come at the expense of exploitation, and Smith would likely agree. He was critical of rent seekers and slavery and was very much interested in the well being of common people.
His observation, I believe, it also applicable at a smaller scale when looking at companies. Growing companies are great to work for with lots of excitement, perks, and new opportunities, even for average or mediocre employees. Stagnant companies are difficult and melancholy, not much advancement, raises are small or non existent. Declining ones are miserable as everyone is fighting for survival.
America was not founded for the common people. It was founded by the exceptional people who risked everything to come to this hostile continent in search of freedom from oppression. Freedom from serfdom. Freedom from debt. Freedom from religious persecution. Freedom to live how they wanted to!
America's population has forgotten its morals and what it means to be American. We are like the fat people in wall-e floating in our bubble, complaining at our minor inconveniences, and not knowing where we're going. We are fucked unless we turn this ship around.
I don't really see this though replace nihilistic with narcissistic and you may be on to something. It's not a belief in nothing, it's a belief in "I."
We are losing the ability to disagree and still keep it civil for one because of identities being so tied to the -ism of the day and no one accepting that they may be wrong about something every once in a while.
The same drive to be independent and "self-made" is becoming a weakness. It's going to an extreme where every man is an island.
We live in a world where a large subset of people have fooled themselves into believing that there's some other place without problems. If where you live has any problems, then it must be an awful place to live - so their thinking goes.
This group, for whatever reason, don't seem to weigh the pros and cons of every other place and see that most places are either hardly any better or MUCH worse.
Italy, Spain, France, and England were great for hundreds of years before the US, and they're still pretty damn good - all things considered. The odds that the US goes from the global leader for two hundred years and turns to a sh*t-hole in our lifetimes is pretty unlikely.
But somehow ~40% of the country convinces themselves this is true based on who the current president is - and, honestly, it seems like not much else.
This reads like a straw man. Just because some place arguably has issues that does not mean that it it just as bad as the one you're living on, or that your life won't improve your life by adopting or emulating the good examples.
Healthcare is a great example. I'm convinced that the average US citizen has absolutely no idea of the critical positive impact on quality of life and well-being that socialized healthcare has on all citizens, directly and indirectly. It goes way deeper than not risking going bankrupt for being in a car accident, or being able to treat your nagging minor health issue without having to tap a credit line. It affects things like being confident that your loved ones will have all the care they need if something bad and unfortunate happens to them, regardless of who you are ir where your career is at the moment.
Just because you adopt a change doesn't mean you'll adopt an outcome.
Proposing sweeping changes is easy - making them work is hard and prone to making things even worse instead.
The US has the worse outcomes for the amount of money its Healthcare industry funnels in.
You don't adopt changes. You adopt or emulate good examples. This means processes, and the goal of processes is to deliver an outcome. It's not change for the sake of change.
Also, when a nation lags behind so much in a fundamental area, just taking a step in the right direction has a major positive impact on the quality of life of those affected by it. As a good example, see Obamacare.
Excepting refugees, AFAICT U.S. immigration policy purposely selects for people who have the ability, aspiration, and often wealth to be able to be able to successfully pass through the process.
So for any other given country, you could just as easily rephrase your question to ask whether that given country's problems are the result of apathy/nihilism/etc. of the majority of people who don't end up emigrating to the U.S.
To me that seems like a fatuous question. If you think the same, then realize it's no less fatuous than the one you asked.
Edit: Hm... maybe "fatuous" is the wrong word. To me it just seems like a very general question about human civilization masquerading as a question about a specific country's population. I think there's a name for this when it comes up in say, a debate, but I can't remember what it is.
However, my only regret was that I did not leave sooner, it did not work out for well for me on the balance, IE I did make money, but my quality of life was less than middle class people have where I live now.
Edit : loving the battle with the down and upvotes but seriously I'd rather have more back and forth with actual data.
Sources:
0. Growing up very poor in the USA, immigrating somewhere else.
1. The change over time https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-decline-of-upward-mobil...
2. Comparisons globally https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/social-mo...
And anecdotally, pretty much anyone I know who isn't the child of a doctor or lawyer is doing better than their parents.
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/millennials-just-wealthy-pare...
I don't think your rebuttal addresses the data I linked at all or supports the parent point at all
Upward mobility is definitely down and the USA is no longer the world leader by some measurements. I get that won't persuade everyone but I'm happy to debate on that data instead of an unrelated discussion point even if it is interesting.
The median income of the lowest quintile has done slightly better than inflation since 1967, but the 5th quintile has as we all know gone up precipitously. The 4th quintile has beaten inflation by something like 30k. So rising from the 1st to the 4th quintile is still quite a lot of mobility.
As far as the comparisons globally, they're ranking countries based on "education, access to technology, healthcare, social protection and employment opportunities" which has the implicit assumption baked in that those 5 metrics are proxies for social mobility. They might be, but why not actually measure the thing you care about? Social mobility to me means changing social classes based on income. Something like moving from a 25k/yr household to a 75k/yr household, or moving from a 75k/yr household to a 200k/yr household, maybe another jump up to 500k or a million/yr.
It seems to me that there is a much more equal distribution of incomes and outcomes in the countries you linked. That makes me think it would be much harder to go from being middle class to upper class in those countries than in the US, simply because almost everybody is part of the middle class. Thus, I think if you measured what most immigrants (and what I) actually care about when we hear about "social mobility," then the countries you mentioned would have great social mobility into the middle class, and basically no other social mobility.
Actually the data I've seen states one is way more likely to go from the bottom 20% to the top 20% in many other countries than if you were doing it in the USA.
I'm open to any counter data, but I've read these same numbers in several sources and you can tease it out of my first link.
To put it another way, it is much easier to increase your income in the US but harder to increase your income ranking. I think most people would prefer to have more money than a higher ranking given a choice between the two.
Sweden is kind of the opposite, and it really decimates the opportunities available here. Perhaps not so much in quantity, but in quality.
The US is great if you want to "get ahead" (and manage to do so), but if you just want a peaceful, boring life, this is not the place to be. We treat our society like a zero-sum game. Between our terrible healthcare, education, school safety, infrastructure, public transportation, politics, insane housing costs, corrupt judges, stances on drugs and abortion, it really feels like a hellhole where either you're rich or you're worthless. I'd much rather prefer somewhere in Europe, especially Scandinavia, or maybe Canada or East Asia. But it's not easy to emigrate.
Even this framing is itself pretty terrible: Our GDP outpaced expectations, so that must be good, right? Hardly. That just means the rich get richer, leaving everyone else even further behind.
Life actually seemed way better for millions of working class folks during COVID, when the economy was tanking and government simply propped it up, and suddenly workers everywhere had a lot more respect and negotiation power, and unions grew for the first time in decades. It was the first time in my life I saw our society come together to work together, instead of trying to massively exploit the poor. Then a couple years after COVID and that all goes away, whether it's WFH or mass layoffs.
I would say the US only makes sense IF you are strongly competitive/entrepreneurial and libertarian, not if you are community-minded and just want to live a normal life under a functioning democratic society. "Pro-business" usually means "anti-democratic" in our society, by disproportionately empowering capital ownership rather than democratic participation and process.
What's stopping you?
Also, my partner is American and has family here. I keep trying to convince her to give foreign living a try, and she's traveled with me a bunch now, but it's still a lot to ask of someone who's only ever lived in their home country. Me, I've spent a lot of time traveling to different countries and have a pretty broad perspective to draw from. It's harder for someone who's never really done that. Still, I hope to coax her into it over time!
The Netherlands has DAFT, which take ~$5k and a business bank account (I think you also need to run a business, but freelancing web dev would count from what I've read) to get a visa, and after 5 years in country you can apply for citizenship
If you move to any Mediterranean country, you will feel wonderful at first because our culture is so different, but for some people it gets tiresome and unbearable after some years.
Here you will find some more commentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiVV5udK_NM
They even have a specific page on that site for software engineers. It seems like as long as you get a job offer over a certain salary threshold and meet background check requirements, you can live there. I've heard a lot of jobs there operate in English, also.
For example, Brexit made it harder for EU citizens to move to the UK, but it made it significantly easier for everyone else. To get a "skilled worker visa" you need 70 "points" in the new system, which you can achieve by speaking English (10 points) and getting an offer from a visa-sponsoring company (20 points) for a "skilled" job (20 points) that pays £25600 (~$31k) or more a year (20 points):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-points-based-i...
£25k/year isn't high; pretty much any tech or tech-adjacent job in the UK will pay more than that. And if you know how to do web dev then you're probably considered "high skilled", e.g. I see "Internet developer" and "Web designer" on the official list of eligible occupations:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-vi...
(Incidentally, this is why it's completely deranged and insane that the current British government is constantly accused of being "anti-immigration". Has no-one looked at the actual data? Immigration to the UK has never been easier, nor have rates of immigration ever been higher than under the current government. But that's another topic entirely.)
And the UK's not the only option. My wife and I looked into this a few years ago; iirc we could meet the points requirements to move to Canada or Australia pretty easily, and we're not exceptionally "high-skilled" (we're comfortably middle class but have very normal tech/corporate jobs.)
Moving countries doesn't have to be a permanent decision either. I lived abroad for many years, then I came home, and I don't regret either move.
Anyway, I don't know you and I'm not going to tell you to up-end your life and start again in a completely new country. Obviously it's a huge decision and everyone's personal circumstances are different. All I'm saying is that it might be easier than you realise.
I don't know that I'd want to live in the UK, but this makes me more hopeful about the possibility of moving elsewhere. Thank you.
Depending on where you go to (and what type of institution) a bachelor's alone is sufficient. The more exclusive places might require a teaching certificate, but those are easy to get and, in any case, such requirements tend to be quickly relaxed when talking about harder to fill positions, like calculus teachers. You might find you enjoy this. If you don't, it can give you the foundation to find something else you might enjoy. Many companies are also constantly looking for skilled native workers. I've friends working in everything from web design to rehab counciling.
I'm not very happy with the current state of the US to say the least, but being born American and simply natively speaking this language is just an unbelievably valuable gift that one should never take for granted. It's really a gateway to the world, even if it's one hell of a scary gateway to step through the first time.
(Edit: Wait, is there an actual pathway to permanent residency/citizenship this way, or is it only a temporary work visa?)
Until that point you'll usually have to do something like check in with immigration once a year, dependent upon what visa (work, education, tourist, etc) that you end up on. But like another poster said, you don't really need to worry about most of this to begin with, as at most places you'll be granted a visa on arrival that'll be good for more than enough time to find a job. The most you might want to do is drop by the embassy of wherever you plant to go to. They can give you more information, and also set you up with a visa that will generally last much longer than the visa-on-arrival if desired.
But the main thing I'd say to anyone considering moving countries is that most countries aren't highly desired immigration destinations like the US or Western Europe, and thus most countries don't have strict and tightly-controlled immigration systems like Western countries do. If you want to go spend a few years in Thailand as a Westerner, it's laughably easy - just buy a flight and you'll probably figure it out once you're there, as your Western dollars/pounds/euros will go a looooong way.
(I apologize to any Thai people reading this; I know that digital nomads and other wealthy foreigners aren't universally appreciated in the countries they park up in. Am just sharing my own experience.)
I wouldn't want to live in that part of the world for the rest of my life, but the time I did spend travelling was the best thing I ever did and I have no regrets. I wrote about it here if anyone's interested:
https://blackshaw.substack.com/p/digital-nomad
The TN visa works in both directions - you can go work/live in Canada or Mexico. A BS is plenty; I'm not sure that "web dev" is a valid category, but you can probably find a job in either country that does qualify. And if it doesn't work out, you're just a quick plane ride home.
Unless you get married, how exactly would you propose an average American emigrate to Germany or Japan, for example?
There's a ton stopping someone. It's not impossible, but it can take years of work, require a change of careers, and you have to say goodbye to a lot of family and friends.
Why does it necessarily mean that?
Data from 2020, but it's probably not changed much: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
2023 graph: https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/202... (from https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/202...)
With the massive increases in inflation and housing costs, the middle class and below can't really keep up. A 5% increase in earning power for them is like a few thousand dollars a year (that they have to immediately spend on housing and services), vs millions or billions for capitalists that can then reinvest in growth sectors (AI and whatnot).
> We treat our society like a zero-sum game.
In my experience, Americans are some of the least zero-sum thinking people, perhaps driven by the natural geographic advantages of the country. In other parts of the world, a zero-sum attitude is the norm, not the exception. It's suffocating if you live in it. I regard this as one of America's greatest strengths.
As for some of the things you find dissatisfactory with the US:
> politics
I'm sure many people everywhere think their country has uniquely dysfunctional politics, just like how people in every city claim that their city has the worst drivers. Belgium went without a government for years. The Taiwanese parliament breaks out in fistfights every now and then.
> insane housing costs
I don't know how things are in Scandinavia, but Canada or any part of East Asia are absolutely much worse by this metric. Look up median multiples in different countries; you'll find that the US is very favorable, especially among developed countries.
A middle-class family being able to afford to own a house happens more in the US than virtually any other place.
> corrupt judges
I'm not really sure what you mean. Do you find the US judiciary to be more corrupt than in other countries?
> stances on drugs and abortion
What do you find terrible about these? Drug laws are relatively lax in general in the US, and especially in certain states. Many Asian countries punish drug users and traffickers very harshly.
On abortion, you might be surprised to find that most Western European countries are much more restrictive than the liberal American states.
> the rich get richer, leaving everyone else even further behind
The real median personal income[0] has been on a broadly upward trend. The great majority of Americans make more money than their parents; more than half of people born to parents in the bottom quintile of incomes end up in a higher quintile; and conversely, more than half of people born to parents in the top quintile end up in a lower quintile[1].
In Europe, some of the very richest have remained the very richest for literal centuries[2]. In the US, you'd be hard-pressed to find people on the Forbes 400 list whose grandparents were also on the same list.
> Life actually seemed way better for millions of working class folks during COVID, when the economy was tanking and government simply propped it up
Your argument is that life seems better when the government prints money and hands it out to people? Surely you understand that there's a very sharp limit to how far that can go.
> if you just want a peaceful, boring life, this is not the place to be
I don't know where in the US you are, but it's a huge country with very diverse lifestyles to be found. Where I live, in a midsize Southern city, my barber, who has no college education or inheritance, lives on a 10-acre property with his wife and children. Their house is very modest, but they are saving up to build a bigger one. This seems the definition of a "peaceful, boring life".
If you want this kind of life on a median or below income in some of the most desirable cities in the country, I grant you that's going to be very tough. But that is the case anywhere in the world. People constantly tread water just to get by in big, competitive cities.
> I also spent several weeks in a few other countries -- enough to get a very basic feel for their society and services
Being on vacation in a country is very different than living there.
Ultimately, different people value things differently, and you may very well find yourself happier in another country. I'm just pointing out that it's very easy to view other countries with rosy glasses, and that the view of the US as "a hellhole where either you're rich or you're wo...
I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and zero have earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it.
How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech?
Um... The most liberal European places are more restrictive than conservative states. Florida tried a fifteen week ban and that was controversial.
Meanwhile abortion is illegal, unconstitutional in fact, in Germany and only decriminalized before fifteen weeks. After that, it's only decriminalized for certain cases.
Sigh. You're painting with a huge black and white brush.
This and being a community is not exclusive. Asian countries are some of the worst zero-sum countries, simply by virtue of resource/person, yet simultaneously being very community focused.
People behave in zero-sum way for one thing and in a community way for another.
This is delusional. Aside from government enforced job loss, firings of people with differing views, and forcing low status occupations to continue working crazy hours and burn out, I guess labor won? Maybe? Needing unions to fight for higher wages caused by stupid economic policy is hardly a win
If I was to be reincarnated as a random person in a given country, I wouldn't pick the US though. Even as a skilled worker who can decide where to work, I prefer some European countries for healthcare, vacations and culture. That being said, I feel Europe is declining and it feels the US could become a better choice in the near future.
On top of that, tech emerging as a big industry which forms a big part of the whole economic output of a country, has led to Europe losing out to US. Although only China through thier protectionism has been safe from that.
You can see this in the commentary about UK politics, where they don't have money to fund NHS and NHS wages haven't grown which has bogged down their healthcare system. Most of the manufacturing ecosystem is completely degraded. Productivity is at a complete toss as well, as they are not even able to build high speed rail well now, which for a social net country like UK should be of paramount importance.
To combat this, they have increased taxation, either through freezing slabs or moving down tax slabs. This penalises people in high wage professions and it leads to loss of competitiveness.
We can't build high speed rail either -- we can't even keep our low-speed rail running well -- and our answer to expensive healthcare is typically just "let them die, we can replace them" (immigration too, except we don't have to give our immigrants anything, just wink and pretend we hate them).
At the end of the day no society has it all figured out yet, but I'd love to live in a place with social services and a less hostile democracy so that all the citizens can work together to figure out next steps, instead of being dragged kicking and screaming by the rich. It's just a more collectivist mindset, not necessarily better or more right in any way.
My whole point was how these issues are less of an issue for US, again comparing with UK
US has better age demographic distribution than UK
The net tax burden on an average UK person is way higher compared to US while having worse average wages. Quick googling shows per capita income tax collected in US is $15K, while in UK it is $21K
GDP per capita of UK is $46K compared to US's 70K
If even after having high taxes, a country is having problem funding social services, then that's a big issue as the high taxes are meant to take care of that. US doesn't have this issue as taxes being lower, people can use the money not spent on tax on funding the social care things for themselves.
Also, overall US is still an attractive place for high earners so it will keep on attracting people from those segments which will boost its tax revenues and lead to decline of Europe. As while western Europe might be still a good place for people on median wages or below, USA might be much better for people on the other end
I can believe that. Japan's even worse off, wonder what they're gonna do...
> The net tax burden on an average UK person is way higher compared to US while having worse average wages. Quick googling shows per capita income tax collected in US is $15K, while in UK it is $21K
It's a bit trickier than that, because some of the same services (like healthcare) are still paid by the typical consumer in the US, it just doesn't show up in their taxes. $6k/year might actually just cover the premiums for a small family (what you pay the insurer before you use any services). Using that healthcare would be way more expensive.
I think a fairer comparison would be discretionary income (disposable income minus cost of living expenses like housing, healthcare, food, education), etc. Unfortunately that data isn't easy to find, and definitions differ, but without considering all of those, it's not really apples-to-apples just to look at taxation rates.
The average person is more affected by "how much money do I have left to spend after the essentials" than "am I paying the government or a private company for these essentials".
This is not true anywhere in the US. The lowest premiums are ~$400 per person per month for bronze level insurance.
Lowest premiums for a family of four would be ~$2k per month plus annual deductible of $5k to $10k plus annual out of pocket maximum of ~$10k to $17k (legal limit).
At least until the end of 2024, insurance premiums are capped via subsidies (either paid directly, or as tax credits). The computation of the cap is extremely complex, but basically: you do not pay more than 8.3% of your household AGI for your state's 2nd most expensive silver-level insurance plan.
This is not widely talked about. It was a part of the ACA, but there was a salary cap somewhere near 100k/yr. The cap was removed during the COVID19 pandemic, and this currently runs to the end of 2024.
I used to pay $1300/month for my wife and I (in our late 50s); I currently pay $440/month (annual income approx $120k).
I see the full $30k+ in annual premiums that my employer plus I am paying in my W-2 (box 12 code DD), which is money that could have been cash compensation.
Europe faces three big issues: demographic crisis, energy/resources dependency, and security vulnerability. US on the other hand will have good demographic outlook for most of this century, it is energy (including renewables) and resources rich, and separated by oceans from anyone who can threaten it.
High speed rail? Non-factor in a bigger picture.
Tax and wealth distribution needs a fundamental rethink going into the next few decades - I really don't have high hopes that the current approaches will work. As you say, they are predicated on high growth scenarios which western nations are no longer experiencing at a macro level.
It is not because of welfare that there are less startups in Europe and it is not because of welfare that the big companies in Europe prefer to be more conservative with their spending on R&D. It's cultural. It's people being more financially conservative and risk averse.
I'm a relatively well paid software engineer in the UK, and I don't recognise this at all. I would be very happy to be taxed more to have a better health system. I wouldn't see this as being penalised, but something I'd vote for.
I have plenty of disposable income; if I had a bit less I'd probably spend less on buying expensive tech gadgets from American companies, investing in international shares or taking foreign holidays. It would be better for the country if that cash was diverted towards the NHS. I think overall it would make the country more prosperous. A sick workforce is an inefficient workforce.
Having a bit less cash would not make me less keen to start a company or change employer for more cash. In fact it would probably do the opposite.
We do have the money to fund the NHS. Successive Conservative governments have made the choice to defund the NHS, along with public health, and social care. And they did all of this on top of Brexit.
That only leaves you with immigrants from beyond the EU. Most of those who have any skills are going to try to get into the US. The ones that can't are probably going to try and get residency / citizenship in canada and get in via a TN visa.
Europe is left with the remainder, and unskilled migrants from cultures which frankly have a much harder time integrating into a western one. Over the long term it's a pretty dire situation.
The birth rate in the US is 1.64, the EU average is 1.53. So this is almost equally true for the US, a country historically built on the backs of immigrants.
Neither can the US with social security, pensions and 401ks. All ponzi schemes created on infinite growth with the future generation paying off the last. The rate of pension bailouts by the Feds has been increasing even now.
- heatlhcare isn't what it used to be. Sure, it's free but it can take months to see some doctors, or even a dentist.
- retirement: the pension system isn't good. Most people will get less than 1.5K a month, and not before 64. The effects of the various pension reforms aren't visible yet but they will increase old people poverty.
- safety: this is political and people hold strong opinions on this, but my feeling is that poverty is on the rise, there are more and more unemployed young refugees...
More speculatively, I think Europe lacks natural resources and this is going to bite us more than the US.
https://archive.ph/dqbDH
> The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the U.S. and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today, the report said.
> The European Union now accounts for about 18% of all global consumption spending, compared with 28% for America. Fifteen years ago, the EU and the U.S. each represented about a quarter of that total.
> Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece. Real wages in the U.S. have increased by about 6% over the same period, according to OECD data.
Keep in mind a lot of this is exchange rates. If you look at GDP PPP, while falling slightly behind, the EU has mostly kept up with the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.KD?locat...
Now nominal value is more important on a global influence scale so the usual figures still mean a lot, but it's way more nuanced than most peopl think.
Healthcare and vacations in the US are often reasonable for the developed world if you are, e.g., a highly-paid tech worker or other elite worker or, in some jurisdictions, a public sector worker (especially one with many years in, for vacations)
For the other, oh, 80% of the US working population, though, that's not true.
To put it into perspective, in Germany you might make 4k/month as a highly educated, highly skilled worker with years of experience. Even if you work remote (most don't) you won't be able to find a decent small house even in the middle of nowhere below 500k.
I recently visited the US and haven't been happier to be a EU citizen in a long time, tbh.
Going by levels FYI, this would put you in the 95th percentile, the equivalent in NYC would be $400,000. Which is nuts combined with your 20k/yr living expenses. When did you get your apartment, 2009?
He said he made 80k Euros ($84.5k) and save 60k euros from that. Where do you get 140k+?
I budget for ⅓ off the top, living in NYC (this is an overestimate, but common practice) for a post-tax income of $100k. High income geographies are correlated with high tax rates in the U.S., too.
Anyways, all this to say that U.S. post-tax-post-benefits income is not wildly different from the E.U. Maybe the main difference is that you can work as a freelancer, expense everything, and effectively opt-out of health insurance, and take home more salary.
But if you're salaried and in tech in the top quartile of the labor market, post-tax savings is pretty much the same in western EU vs U.S. There's no 10x difference in wages, (excluding equity performance, which is not a tax/benefits policy issue).
In general, E.U. citizens I know who have come to the U.S. do it because the businesses here are more interesting and have more upside (i.e. the aforementioned equity upside component). If they're making bigger heaps of money, it's because of startup equity comp, not because of tax or benefits policies.
> But if you're salaried and in tech in the top quartile of the labor market, post-tax savings is pretty much the same in western EU vs U.S. There's no 10x difference in wages, (excluding equity performance, which is not a tax/benefits policy issue).
As someone who's worked in top companies in Germany and the US, I feel confident enough to weigh in on this. Top earners might make 200k TC in Berlin, but engineers at this caliber will earn 500k+ in NYC. And no, rent and tipping in restaurants does not take up that 300k difference.
> If they're making bigger heaps of money, it's because of startup equity comp, not because of tax or benefits policies.
They're making more money because American companies pay more money, because they make more money, they have access to more capital, they hire in a more competitive market.
- 350k is like 200k net in CA
- 200k is ~110k net in Germany
- ~90k post-tax difference
- Germany: 25 days PTO min
- Meta: 25-30 days PTO min
- Google: 20 days PTO min
Considering COL differences, you'd probably save 40-50k more in the US than Germany with these numbers. Maybe it's not significant enough to lose the EU lifestyle bonuses but it's also not nothing.
That's insanely high post-tax salary for Germany. Most aren't making that before-tax. You're an exceptionably rare circumstance that's far from the norm.
As a freelancer, you make around 800-1000$ a day working for bigger German companies, and the bar to become one is not very high from my experience on both sides of the table. For internal employees the ceiling is at around 120k for senior engineers, above that you need to go into middle management territory or be an EM equivalent.
Yes, this is what the US brand sells. And for you it worked. Your sample has a survivor bias so to speak.
That aside, let's question the founding assumption: that the goal in life is to "get ahead". And that to "get ahead" the best way is to have the most opportunities. Perhaps this is why so many Americans (note: I was born, raised and live here) are unhappy, uncomfortable and unsatisfyied? That is, "getting ahead" isn't what it's cracked up to be? That after running on the rat wheel for so long and seeing so little in return, they're frustrated?
My point is, the natural born experience is not the same as the immigrant experience. To be promised something and getting little is not the same as having little and then everything is a bonus.
Yes you can get ahead here. Yes there is opportunity. The question is: how much joy and happiness will that bring? Will it last? Or is this a false construct that eventally reveals itself?
I think the answer to your question depends on the person and their personality. Many people get happiness and satisfaction from achievement, and the result of their work. For example, many people get happiness from achievements in sports, others in business.
A few years ago, I was writing a lot of proposals for government work, and I was winning a lot of them, even when competing against large defense contractors. So much so that my company didn't need any more work. But I was enjoying the satisfaction of winning that I wanted to keep going. My friend (who was also partnered with me on those proposals) and I were reflecting on that, and we agreed that the validation that came with winning was what really was motivating us, more so than the money.
Will it last? Again, I think it depends on the person. I think most high achievers get long term satisfaction from what they do. Not everyone, sure. But I don't think it's a false construct because some don't.
Also, with interest rates this high and the economy steaming along. That means inflation is going to keep rising as well.
None of that says too much GDP growth by itself means higher rates.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/monetary-polic...
“Over time, growth in GDP causes inflation, which if left unchecked, runs the risk of morphing into hyperinflation. Most economists today agree that a small amount of inflation, about 2% a year, is more beneficial than detrimental to the economy.”
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/06/gdpinflation.asp
Because, it looks like you're saying all GDP growth causes hyperinflation based on an article on a dodgy website.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2019/05/01/does-eco...
they're also aware that American Exceptionalism relies on comparing America to the most poorly run and suffocatingly authoritarian countries on the planet, and ignoring that the developed world exists at all
people are aware that the US is a great starting point to go to those other developed nations. Getting a job in the US and moving to somewhere in Western Europe is a great privilege, greater than being born somewhere else and going straight to Western Europe, greater than being born in Western Europe without inheritance
people are aware that the US could uniquely solve all of its own problems, and have all of the 21st century advances of the developed world, but it simply doesn't solve those problems and lacks consensus
try not to misunderstand what US Citizens are aware of
The USA is pretty bad (compared to most rich / developed countries) in general at giving opportunities to the broader population. Check the studies on intergenerational mobility to see that the USA ranks pretty badly there. It's not surprising to me given the inequality of the education system and how segregated it is (in terms of social class, parent educational level, etc).
You bring an interesting point though: "as an immigrant". Maybe the USA IS pretty good at giving opportunities to certain kind of immigrants (even if it isn't for the broader population). I haven't seen any study about it, but I'm sure there are analysis.
You can go from the lowest to the 2nd highest quintile in the US and be better off than the lowest to the highest in Canada.
Chicago for all the shitting on it gets for it's high murder rates actually has dozens of neighborhoods that are larger than most towns, suburbs and cities, that have seen zero homicides for several years, which places them well below the national rate and makes them exceptionally safe.
And I'm not some crime apologist. Look at my post history. I'm as conservative as they come. Just following the data.
I don't understand, these types of comments are relative. Which countries are we comparing? Why the US over another country, for example, Canada? France? Sweden? Japan? Thailand? Have people tried these out (I know people who have!)?
The only reason I can think of Why the US over another place is is the amount of wealth and the amount of land in the US is staggering, and the appeal of that makes people feel wealthy themselves by way of association. It's a glamorous lure.
Or is it because of less government restrictions and oversight? Which has its downsides as well.
I feel, as my primary residence, that the US is a cutthroat place to live. Those that speak well of it usually have been lucky.
- No universal healthcare
- No universal mental healthcare
- Millions of homeless and functionally housing-insecure people
- Crazy people in government who don't want it to function and who supported the insurrectionists
- Absurdly gerrymandered Congressional districts that put the thumb on the scale for one side
- Grotesque corruption of dark money in politics
- Supreme Court justice who pals around with and takes gifts from a billionaire, oh and sexually harassed women
- Like a third-world country, women don't have a federal right to choose what happens to their own bodies
- No meaningful climate change policy
- Massive income inequality
- An inability of the average family to purchase real estate
- A doddering old man sleepwalking the US into a new era of terrorism in 2026-2029 by taking the side of a brutal, corrupt authoritarian and an inability to apply the nuance to the Middle East conflict
Apart from mythological ideals, what specific benefit do US citizens have that British or EU Schengen citizens lack? I want to know if it's net better in say Finland or Sweden for average people because it's not very nice here.
Those freedoms are defended by individual power. All power in the world derives from force. The benefit of private gun ownership is a much higher level of individual power and thus the ability to defend that freedom vs the continuous encroaches of government. Mass shootings are an unfortunate side effect, but one worth accepting. I'd rather have a few thousand gun related deaths a year than hundreds of thousands or millions die when a too powerful government takes power.
The reality is that US politics is utterly fucked up, but the US economy is by far the strongest in the world, it might be the most resilient economy in all of human history, it's continually astounding how it manages to surge forward, overcome obstacles and grow. If you are a US citizen, you have access to this economy in ways that other people don't.
So let me throw out a couple examples of this.
* Energy. A shale revolution is now well underway in North America, what this translates to is energy independence and some of the cheapest oil on the planet being well within the USA's grasp. But what you will hear Americans talk about if you bring this up is the POLITICAL problem of how we can't regulate emissions and the climate apocalypse is going to cook us all. Look I'm not saying that climate change isn't a serious problem. It is. But keeping with my theme here, it's going to cook India a lot sooner than it cooks the USA. And the ECONOMIC benefits to the US of the shale revolution are enormous.
* Home-shoring. The amount of money going into rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity right now is staggering, we're in the early stages of an enormous boom and a resurgence of stuff that's made in the USA, including very high tech companies like TSMC building factories in the US. Again people want to talk about the POLITICS with China and how messy they are, but ECONOMICALLY, the US is going to benefit from a ton of manufacturing growth over the next decade.
* Demographics. In the long run, economically, China's doomed, Japan's doomed, the outlook for much of Europe is bleak because they're not having kids. The US still has kids at a somewhat decent rate and has tons of immigration. So again everyone will want to argue about the POLITICS of illegal immigration, but the fact of the matter is, ECONOMICALLY the US will benefit greatly from its demographics.
* Tech, rocket ships, you name it - in virtually all bleeding edge industries, the USA is #1 or #2.
Betting that the US economy will win (even just in a simple form like using your spare cash to buy the S&P 500 and hold it, something that billions of people in this world can't easily do), just keeps on being the right call, almost continuously since WW2.
I'm not saying the politics aren't totally fucked up. They are. I'm not saying the wealth this economy creates is distributed fairly. It's not. But especially online the discussion is way way way way way skewed towards "look how bad these awful US political problems are" meanwhile the one big advantage you have as an American is you have direct access to this unbelievable economic machine, you are actually a member of it, you can buy and sell things in it (and that is how we get to why the entrepreneurial stuff is important!).
This is why MAGA made no sense to me. America is great already. It's not perfect and has a lot of things that need to be fixed. But MAGA is starting from behind.
Unsurprisingly , my wife’s love for USA knows no bounds - she’s one of the most patriotic immigrants you’ll ever meet
After elections we will all of a sudden have troubles and talk of recessions will be back on the table.
Don't extrapolate too much based on a single quarter metric (albeit an important one). That's the HN way.
What if we extrapolate based on the last 3 quarters?
Though we should account for a likely re-evaluation down 10% based on other recent quarters.
1. Natural resources
2. The American dream of entrepreneurship and immigrant success.
3. The work-is-sacred American professional-managerial class.
Stable countries decay due to 3 things. First, import pressure can ruin a nation as all its productivity gets extorted out of it by a pseudo-colonial exporter. Natural resources solve this. Second, general lethargy causes productivity to die. But the secularozed protestant work ethic keeps the gears running. Lastly, productive nations can still lose if they miss technological revolution, which can often happen overnight. But the American dream ensures that no one tries to disrupt like Americans, and the most disruptive foreigners are drawn in such that their aha-moment still occurs here.
It's honestly, perfect.
But, don't let that distract you from freeloaders who ride this wave of American productivity. The housing industry, cartelized middle men, lobbyists & bloated executives might still be net negative.
The US isn't just productive. It is productive beyond the wildest imagination of the rest of world. But, that tends to not show up in the numbers or in practice, because a just as large industry of grifters keeps it from cashing it its productivity.
The US wins, not by being more efficient or effective. But by sheer brute force.
Oh yes it does.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/04/13/from-strength-...
People just ignore the numbers.
Productivity has a specific meaning in economics, i.e. labor productivity (GDP per hours worked). What I think you are referring to here is output, i.e. GDP.
You can learn more about this here and see the latest country data: https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
I’d love to read a deep dive on how those numbers came to be.
Google creates Google Ireland to hold their IP, then Google Ireland "charges" Google Germany.
The problem is, that GDP doesn't stay in Ireland. It flows to the US.
I think the stat to look at here would be median GDP per hour worked, on a per-capita basis. Calculating the median is of course difficult, but it would account for large, person-less streams of money that passively flow through without actually being "productive" in the "creating something new" sense.
A big part of this is more lower skill workers in construction. Controlled immigration would be a great start.
Every once in a while you hear about this, apartments where you build it mostly off-site in a factory and then assemble the blocks on-site, supposed to be somewhat cheaper and much faster (for the last stage anyway), but for some reason it seems to stay experimental.
The quality tends to be lower, the floorplans are very limited, and there isn't much of a price advantage vs building on site.
Healthcare, maybe. Although, breaking down US live expectancy by demographic or even just by states and comparing with the corresponding European breakdown shows that most of the worse outcomes in the US are not due to healthcare.
I would be curious how much the productivity increase from people being less sick, and the increase in personal spending and investment would offset the profits of leaches like private insurance companies
Affordability is far, far worse.
Like, you can expect to straight up own a house during your lifetime without inheriting it or striking it rich.
Classic video by a legend we lost far too early- https://youtu.be/ILn85WKo0Qk?si=83X9ptWPH2ZpHsp3
Yes yes, airplanes, missiles, etc. but the impact of this physical distance cannot be overstated.
“Going forward, the consumer’s not going to spend at the same rate, the government is not going to spend at the same rate, and businesses seem to be slowing down their spending as well,” Arone said. “This suggests this might be the peak GDP figure, at least in the next few quarters.”
These figures are from before things like student loan repayments kicked in.
Americans don't save - haven't for 30 years - this isn't anything new. The savings rate was only 5.2% because people were getting handed free private money as the public debt swelled.
> credit card debt is at the highest amount ever in history
It should be. Dollars are down 30% from pre-pandemic. It'll likely go much higher.
> and auto loans are experiencing the highest delinquency rate in 30 years.
Not surprised. Car prices led inflation during the pandemic, and despite that, sales went through the roof.
Americans don't plan for a rainy day. Student loan payments resumed, incomes are down (mostly because government transfers are down, not wages).
Something's got to give.
Looks like car payments were the first to go. Will they be the only thing? Who knows! Stay tuned.
This sentiment scares the crap out of me, and explains a lot of frustrations I felt through the pandemic. I've complained [0] before about feeling like I was getting screwed by making "reasonable" or even fiscally conservative choices throughout the pandemic and it's recovery. It's a topic I have complicated feelings on: I don't want my fellow citizens to be "punished" for being reckless, both because I don't like the idea of punitive reformation and because punishing basically everyone would do Bad Things to the economy, but the feeling of "something's got to give" has been hanging over me for years.
Everyone seems over-extended, but anyone who "plays it safe" just gets taken advantage of by everyone else. It feels like a microcosm of peoples' reaction to climate change in a lot of ways; we see older generations reveling in the spoils of just not caring and know that if we're going to do anything about it _we_ will have to give up luxuries they've enjoyed for years--and that there will be plenty of others who will just take up the "slack" we're creating by cutting our emissions.
Maybe I'm just projecting my own FOMO, but I see a _lot_ of the sentiment of "they got theirs, why shouldn't I get mine?" when it comes to saving money or climate change or even just post-COVID travel. There's no sense of communal responsibility or "we're all in this together."
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35265201
However, if it starts to shrink - and you're leveraged to your neck in debt - buckle up.
E.g., if I'm one of the few who pays all of the taxes I'm supposed to, does that just make me a self-righteous chump?
Or is there much point in me properly disposing of household lead, fiberglass insulation, etc. when 99% of other users of the landfill ignore the rules?
It's also worth noting that the intuitive relationship of "savings is low, ergo times are hard" doesn't really fit the data. For example, during the bubble years prior to the '08 mortgage crisis, the savings rate declined significantly. When the crisis hit, the savings rate went up and stayed up afterwards.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
Car repo rates are an extremely reliable signal for an impending economic crisis. Problem is, right now, the signal has been active for an unusually long period. Maybe it's just the previous administration's "free" money drying up?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
Inflation adjusted?
SF is the bellwether: prop C and friends chased many big companies away and the tax base was beginning to erode but locals (who greatly desire the exodus of the "Bridge and Tunnel" folks continues to find new villains).
Ultimately, if you stagnate you die. And the old love to stagnate, and Americans have the curse of deifying the old while having elderly who are hopelessly selfish.
SF is not stagnating by any measure.