The effects of empire go far beyond military. The monetary dominance serves as a hidden tax on all other currencies as the US enjoys more money creation than other central banks can manage. The US prints and the world gets the inflation consequences. Plus the cultural dominance lets the US reshape the world economy, legal systems and behavior to suit the interests of US companies. And yes, there is massive political interference and an absolute fit when foreign governments don’t bend the knee.
Your big mistake here is to imply some kind of us vs them. Regular Americans are not laughing at you, they are under the same boot heel that you are. This whole system is for the benefit of maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of incredibly rich and powerful people. They don’t care about the citizenship of of the people they are exploiting. Actually, people in the EU have done a better job fighting back for more comfortable lives for all. Working class Americans are a lost cause.
And who exactly was running continental Europe before that?
meanwhile the US was pretty upset about the idea
I think the message is clear that it’s best not to upset the US.
see I can understand this logic pre 2014, but post 2014 (i.e. Crimea), absolutely not
the euros paid to putin were used to re-arm and those weapons are now being used in Ukraine
and if he wins then Eastern Europe is next in line
but yes germans saved 2% on their gas bills for 10 years
I doubt Putin is suicidal. Eastern Europe is in NATO, hence protected.
you've seen the playbook in ukraine twice now
there will be an russian speaking minority in estonia/lithuania/... that will that rebel against anti russian oppression, guerilla warfare against the authorities, then they'll hold an rigged referendum, then a decade later the Russian government will formally annex what they've effectively controlled for years
he won't send tanks across the border that will trigger Article 5
Well don't oppress them. Anyways in Ukraine Russian speakers are hardly the minority. In Baltic states however Russian speakers are true minority and do not matter much. They can't hold a referendum. Your logic does not make any sense to me.
What's this supposed to mean?
Certainly it's not referring to the portion of native speakers.
So you mean it's OK to oppress people just because they are Russian, or speak Russian? And the bad guys are those against oppression?
Long story short I am not sure NATO Eastern Europe is protected 100%. Luckily for now Putin cannot afford another front but there is already some saber rattling between Belarus and Poland and Wagner is in Belarus.
And I don’t know who did the sabotage, and I don’t know if it was on the suggestion of the US, but the winner certainly seems to be the US which has very effectively pulled Germany away from Russia and Russian energy markets.
https://gpil.jura.uni-bonn.de/2021/01/germany-rejects-u-s-sa...
It finally got its wish with the destruction of the NS2 ..
You all created us. So, you all are technically responsible for your own problems. ;)
Also, the US was bombing a couple of Middle Eastern countries then: creating the said refugees who could reach Europe on foot and/or boat, but not the American mainland .
One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone and there will be US soldiers in the border guard towers with flamethrowers. The US will welcome immigrants when it suits them and roast them when it doesn’t.
As I am in Berlin right now I’ll remind us it wouldn’t be the first time people on top of a wall had kill on sight orders.
Are you talking about Canada?
Whether all this was in some sense worth it for mysterious realpolitik greater-good reasons—I dunno. Looks pretty bad on its own, anyway. Not enough help to win—but just enough to keep the fight going forever. Doesn't make much sense to me unless the point was to accomplish exactly that (to disrupt Russian and/or Iranian interests in the area without pushing too hard? To keep Syria too distracted to mess with Israel? Destabilize Syria so it can't interfere with Iraq's fledgeling state? I have no idea what the real motivation is or was, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to have been "help the Syrian people"—if it was, we've screwed that up pretty badly)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un-idUKBRE87...
I was mostly thinking of Syria and Daesh, and had forgotten about Libya. A non-insignificant chunk of refugees headed to Europe transit through Libya - which didn't use to be the case before Gaddafi was deposed.
The US went for Syria/Assad leading the intervention and whilst France picked up it's involvement against ISIL & the like particularly after the Paris attacks it wasn't as big on it as Libya.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...
Evidence against: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
My experience with social safety nets in EU is that they have been there when I’ve needed them - when I was a poor student, when I was sick — and now that I’m in a different life phase I pay that forward
Your math makes sense at any given instant, but who is on what side changes if you view it over time
Do you have a citation for that broad brush number for what they take?
If there are 101 people, 100 making 101 sandwich per year and 1 doing nothing, and everyone needs 100 sandwiches per year, 99% are contributing more than they take. This works the other way too.
Already your argument is falling apart. Government spending goes disproportionately to children and the elderly who don't work. Workers, even low skill ones, are almost always a net positive.
whose failure? Why are Europeans the default racists? The US is not even integrated and is going through large scale migration right now that has never happened before so the success of US integration is still too early to say. What does integration look like because the US has ethnic enclaves, everyone knows that.
It's absolutely right that the US promoted demographic change to Europe who followed foot but the migrants lack the skills who arrive and I don't think this even solves the problem. It may exacerbate the demographic trap for various reasons.
And by Europeans here, I mean the EU, the govt of some individual WE countries and a small minority of vocal activist personalities who haven't got any other purpose in life. Most run of the mill folks I meet are either strongly opposed or negatively indifferent to migrants, in direct opposition of their govts.
Most countries could have just said no to migrants, like Poland, Greece and Switzerland did. But they all wanted to play the self-righteous card.
Additionally many blame the likes of Merkel for the self righteous stance unaware of the fact that she (and her Dutch partners and such) had the greatest effect on building down inflow with an agreement she started brokering with turkey well before her famous comment. On the other hand fences and hard rhetoric in Hungary or the like did not visibly affect the numbers of incoming refugees.
The Turkish agreement is meaningless - if all of Europe had been vehemently opposed to importing immigrants, immigration would have stopped at the Turkish-Syrian border. Immigration did not happen because of the Syrian war - it was a constant trend. What opened the spigot was the fall of hard regimes in North Africa such as Libya, Tunisia and North Africa (something EU biggies like France, Netherlands, Germany supported because "dictators bad!"), which led to their own borders becoming much weakened.
Third, no immigrant wants to settle in Hungary because they're immigrants, not refugees. And as immigrants, they're simply choosing the country with the best welfare. There was even an article in 2016ish I read (I'm sure there are loads) where an interviewee said that he was taking his family from Greece all the way to Sweden because the welfare benefits were better.
This sounds like post hoc justification. If you want immigrants, wouldn't you want to pick the best and brightest, rather than whoever washes up on your shore?
* speaks the local language
* is highly educated (eg. post-secondary degree)
* is young
* has expertise in an in-demand industry
than one who is missing one or more of the above? For non-refugees, you can screen for the above factors and only admit the ones who are qualified, but for refugees you can't.
And that's fine, because those jobs can either be automated, outsourced, done domestically (ie. driving yourself rather than getting delivery), or at worst case paying more. All things being equal I'd rather have a chemical engineer who can do chemical engineering and deliver pizza, than someone who can only deliver pizza.
- not all jobs can be automated
- manual laborers make less money
If you see immigrants all around you doing great, while you clean toilets and struggle to feed yourself, that breeds resentment of your government.
And sure, it's easy to say the jobs should just pay more, but that's not the reality today, and if your choice is working a shitty job or starving then that's not really a choice at all.
I would also rather have the chemical engineer, but I think it would be even better to live in a society where both the delivery driver and the chemical engineer are net positives to society.
I never claimed that refugees have no selection effects, but is that selection effect comparable to proper immigration screening?
The US has something similar with its illegal immigration from Mexico. Every politician since Clinton has pledged to stop illegal immigration but nobody actually does anything about it, because they know that that their labor is essential to the country, and replacing the illegal immigration with legal immigration is too much of a political sore point.
for example look at Hungary. immigration is very unpopular at the polls, yet now the same government that created this sentiment through endless propaganda passed laws to allow more immigration of laborers, because the new Chinese battery factories that are under construction will require a lot more unskilled labor than which is available. they try to limit any kind of anchoring, no family unification, no visa for non-working spouses, etc. but it's not clear that this will actually attract enough workers...
The statistics are clear, these are just facts.
Yeah, that sounds like 'blaming the victim'
This is not a magical solution where you bring people and the GDP magically increases
It works in the US due to a variety of factors, but I agree with you that being a bit less racist at the same time pushing them to success (read: sink or swim) helps. Oh and the US has much less tolerance for people who come with bad intent and deports a lot more
People in the South of France buy one espresso or one beer and nurse it for 2 hours while staring at these ocean.
Bathrooms are smaller and less well appointed. Hotel rooms are smaller. Steaks are smaller. Apartments are smaller. Gasoline is more expensive and cars tend to be cheaper models and smaller.
People just tend to be thriftier. No one has air conditioning. Everyone keeps their houses cold in the winter.
If we are doing anecdotes, I can do this all day. It may not be so obvious if you live in a major city, but a modest income small town American lives like a king compared to a similarly situated resident of the EU.
Downvoted for being ridiculous.
I don't know if you've visited the US but there are plenty of people who eat potato crisps and fast food for dinner because it's cheaper than fresh healthy food and they're not educated enough to know how to get around it.
The inequality in America is wild.
You clearly haven't been to the US but there are a lot of poor people here.
This is currently quite hilarious to read.
Give them one million dollar and I can guarantee you they will still drink one expresso facing the sea for 2 hours.
It is just named being French (or Latin) and has nothing to do with wealth
Time is everything in life. In many cultures, being able to spend it doing nothing or something you enjoy is the greatest sign of wealth. Poor people do not have this luxury: they do have to work to survive.
meanwhile no-one in Europe dies in medical bankruptcy or has to worry about health insurance premiums/deductibles, or daily mass shootings
I'd rather have a slightly smaller steak
We had to bail out the auto-industry during 2008 because their competitors existed in public healthcare environments. Nobody talks about it but follow the money.
Because we actually tax it properly
> cars tend to be cheaper models and smaller.
Because cars are less part of the lifestyle and SUVs haven't yet prisoner's dilemma'd us completely.
Your other anecdotes are also basically "not spending unecessarily on stuff that is bad for the climate = poor"...
Here's another factor: Europeans need to save up money for our five week vacations, do you think travel is free or something? Hint: that stuff costs way more to do regularly than AC and a redone bathroom. Pah.
Well here is an actual study that found the poorest 20% of Americans consumed more goods and services than the average people from affluent countries. Including Europe.
https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than...
This matches my anecdotal observations of everything being smaller in Europe, people owning less, and energy being so expensive.
It's also terribly USAian of you.
Btw, we need budget for more They Live glasses to distribute freely
Indeed. In my town center, on the weekends, the streets are full of Teslas, luxury cars and SUVs of the well off people from the suburbs with nice houses, coming to the city for shopping and indulgence in various forms of consumerism and showing off (mostly inherited) wealth.
Europeans are just poorer and more unequally wealthy than Americans, with fewer people owing most of the wealth, not more righteous.
Europeans are poorer but the US generally has higher inequality, whether you look at Gini, IHDI or mean versus median wealth. Especially the wealth comparison is jarring for the US (about 6:1, most of Europe is at 2:1 or 3:1).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
The data I've seen says the exact opposite.
Edit: Also my link has the Gini inequality index as the last column, where the US is literally sandwiched between Congo and Algeria, towards the bottom...
Also, in the GINI table on the wiki page, Netherlands and Sweden have more wealth inequality than the US.
Also, I find the GINI formula quite flawed as it puts India as being more equal than many EU states which I find hard to believe.
To me wealth inequality is how much of the country's wealth the top % own versus the bottom %, and at least in Germany and Austria it's pretty bad.
That's exactly what the GINI formula is, though. (Pedantry: the formula can be applied to any measurement, be it income or wealth or blueberries. We'll assume wealth.)
The reason some of those numbers look weird to you is that the most common form of wealth is house ownership. In Germany, Benelux and Scandinavia house ownership is quite low, while in Southern and Eastern Europe it is extremely high.
Who is better off? Someone who inherited a home, or purchased it relatively easily, but earns a weak salary? Or someone who must rent because he cannot afford a house, but earns a much higher salary and has more disposable income?
Poverty is relative. What use is it earning a high salary than someone from a poorer country if you can't afford to live in your richer country?
To simplify it to the absolute extreme:
- A earns 100 and pays 25 in mortgage, or even 0 if he inherited
- B earns 300 and pays 100 in rent, but a mortgage would cost him 250, or perhaps he can't get one at all
What does it even mean to ask "who is better off" here?
On a daily basis, B obviously lives better, that part is simple at least. (I personally moved from A-like to B-like quite recently.)
Now when it comes to long-term financial plans, A has a massive illiquid asset, while B has a smaller stream of liquid assets. A is more protected against financial catastrophes - he won't end up homeless, and can keep going with a minimal salary - however B does not have any assets tying him down, so he can more result move to a more prosperous area if needed. And so on.
But you look at a wealth map and it'll just tell you that A is "richer"; or you look at an income map and it'll just tell you that B is "richer".
It was kind of cool actually.
How much you can consume is also linked to how much space you have to use and store stuff. In 2015, 40% of the american households had three or more TV sets. I don't know anyone who owns three TVs here in Europe.
I'm saying no one except USians would say "I consume more than you, therefore my quality of life is higher".
I wonder how much of those are things like "credit protection fees", "check printing fees", CC anual fees (of multiple CCs) or just paying hundreds of dollars for a medical consultation even after copay, etc
> everything being smaller in Europe, people owning less
Your car does not need to be a d*ck measuring contest, and public transport usually works
but then even those go somewhere, and apparently almost all of that goes back to the US economy through underpaid semi-legal wages. (and then some of that goes back to countries where the undocumented immigrants' are from, and then that goes to pay for plane tickets, so more people can try their luck in the US.)
circle of life!
What are the numbers there? I heard of the wealth tax above €3 million, but is there more?
For a net worth of €4m, you'll pay €60k in Aragón to €22k in Vizcaya to €0 in Madrid.
So that hurts the whole FI/RE thing, but doesn't sound like it would be the primary blocker.
This is true, but understated in a crucial manner. By global standards, the greatest enduring strength of the US economy has been its ability to recover from downturns. More than anything else, that has pulled it ahead of competitors time and time again. When the early '80s financial crisis hit Japan with a lost decade, Volcker (PBUH) pulled the US out of the doldrums and back into a growth phase within three years. When the Asian financial crisis hit at the same time as the dotcom bust, the US recovered more efficiently than the erstwhile "Asian tigers". When the 2007 financial crisis went worldwide, aggressive measures by the Fed and a willingness to risk inflation restored growth faster than in Europe. When COVID hit, economies around the world dived, but even with political divisions running at their highest since 1876, the US again restored growth more quickly than almost anywhere else — now growing at competitive rates with China.
There are a variety of theories about this, but one iniquitous postulate I've heard is that the US makes it a lot easier for companies to do layoffs — not a happy proposition for those directly affected, but what could be worse for an economy than having thousands of people working on something that just isn't working? Many worker protections — for health, safety and family — have become more popular with economists recently, but when the subject of being able to fire people comes up, there is still a sort of grim understanding transmitted in whispers: paying someone who isn't making progress makes us all worse off in the long run.
Of course we can also trace the roots of some profound social malaise — including the collapse of whole cities — to the cutthroat nature of employment in America; there is no free lunch.
The problem with taking general economic lessons from the US is that the US is in a unique, and uniquely advantageous economic position.
Comparing different legal systems and different practical implementations of those systems is hard - but I think the basic claim, that there's a inverse correlation between employee's rights and economic growth, isn't visible within the EU or elsewhere.
The UK is a good example because they have aggressively reduced the safeguards for workers (between 2014-2017 it was essentially a state with no safeguards if you could not afford the employment tribunal process), and is also an example of consistent poor economic growth.
There's a big gap between the US and UK in this regard. The UK has and enforces the concept of an unfair dismissal as distinct from being fired due to discrimination. The US has the latter but not the former. In the UK you can't lay someone off if it would be unfair or if your dismissal process was unreasonable, where unreasonable can mean purely bureaucratic reasons like not following your own dismissal checklists.
In addition British employment tribunals are very worker friendly, resulting in frequent bizarre outcomes [1] like:
- "A worker who was absent for 808 shifts over a 20-year career – costing the firm an estimated £95,850 in sick pay – has won tribunal claims of unfair dismissal against his former employer." (employee won because employer didn't follow their own absence management procedures).
- "An office manager was discriminated against after she was told she was not allowed to work remotely from her son’s hospital bedside", deemed unfair because the boss "gave her views no credit" and "had a closed mind".
- "Worker unfairly dismissed for complaining about boss on Facebook, tribunal rules"
- An NHS worker who resigned won an unfair dismissal claim, because her workers had played a practical joke on her at one point and didn't like it when she complained.
- A lecturer accused of sending “aggressive” messages to colleagues was awarded £15,000 for unfair dismissal after an employment tribunal ruled there had not been a proper investigation into the allegations made against him, whilst also concluding that he had indeed sent aggressive messages.
The idea that this is a country that's "aggressively reduced safeguards for workers" will seem blinkered to the Americans on this site, who can be fired with zero notice and for any reason at all, with recourse only available if it can be proven to be sexism/racism/etc. Winning huge awards because you weren't allowed to work remotely hardly exists there.
[1] https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1747159/worker-ab...
1. I wasn't claiming that.
2. It's not silly at all. British companies were and are flouting employment laws[0].
3. If the plural of anecdote is not annecdata, what's the plural of a cherry picked, unsourced, and likely misrepresented court ruling? Fiction?
[0]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/06/14/british-employe...
>If you look at the employment protections of the UK[0], and compare them to the US[1]
I think you meant to include citations at the bottom, but I don't see them.
What you call "cut down tall poppies" others call "correcting thousands of years of aristocracy-fuelled unfairness". European wealth has much older roots. In a few centuries, Americans will likely reach a similar political point.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...
It is possible that some European countries have over corrected though.
Well, the US has become a bastion of neo-feudalism, so there's that.
We don't even have to pick the extreme outliers where affluenca officially plays a role. Someone that can spend a million on lawyers in the US will get a better outcome.
What does taxing _income_ of upper-middle class high-earners (who are probably coming somewhere from Eastern Europe and are not related to Habsburgs or something) have to do we dealing with _generational_ wealth of old-money families? In fact, descendants of well-off parents seem to do just fine. If anything they basically becoming landed gentry considering how unattainable housing has become.
also wealth generates income.
plus taxing income is easier, less transaction costs. (no need to sell the house to pay wealth tax.)
of course non of these invalidate your observation about landed gentry, absurd housing prices, etc.
So tax income types that tend to come from wealth instead. Compared with regular salary income that is heavily taxed in Europe those usually incur significantly lower tax rates (long-term capital gains tax, dividend tax, etc.).
> plus taxing income is easier, less transaction costs. (no need to sell the house to pay wealth tax.)
You are confused about how wealth taxes usually work. They are something you pay every year based on your total assets, not when you sell the assets (these are capital gains or property gains taxes).
> of course non of these invalidate your observation about landed gentry
Becoming a landed gentry is intentional end game of current asset owning classes in Europe. Let's take Sweden as a worst offender - locals sit on top of their multimillion+ property (that they either inherited with 0 inheritance tax or got with tax-deductible mortgage when prices were saner), don't pay any wealth taxes and would like immigrants to pay for their welfare state with crazy income taxes while simultaneously extracting exuberant rents from them indefinitely by making housing basically unobtainable through regular income. Mind you this isn't European-specific problem (prop 13 landed gentry says hello), but Europeans tend to have this annoying holier-then-thou attitude towards the US paired with complete lack of self-awareness.
No, I'm not completely, that's what I meant. That wealth tax can force people to sell.
Yep, sounds similar. Inheritance tax was also terminated in Hungary, and you can give unlimited value to your parents/kids tax free.
The moment I saw the article headline, I knew the comments would be full of people running defence with fuzzy claims of qualitative wellbeing.
"Yes, our economy may objectively be underperforming, but look at the Life Quality Index, invented at the University of Copenhagen, which divides the number of UNESCO sites in a country by the number of different pension schemes...
The hard truth is - less prosperity means less money for nurses, less money for teachers, less money for infrastructure. Worse health outcomes, worse educational outcomes, worse transport and logistics. A decreasing quality of life. Less prospects for children. Increasing emigration.
Europe devotes a disproportionate amount to social spending compared to the US, so it remains competitive despite its shrinking economy, but this won't continue forever. Eventually, Europe's economy will become so relatively small, that even its outsized social spending will begin to be dwarfed by the spending of US states. It's been the case for some time that Portuguese professionals are leaving to go drive trucks in the US, and now doctors in the UK are getting poached en masse by Australian states. How long until German engineers can have a better life working as taxi drivers in China?
I like Europe and I wish it would right course, but there is an aggressive myopia on this continent when it comes to how quickly the rest of the world is moving past them, and how very bad that will be for Europe in the mid-to-long term. Europe's slide into irrelevance will be a net loss for us all, but most of all for the quality of life of Europeans themselves.
See this one for Spain: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpainFIRE/ or Bogleheads Spain: https://bogleheads.es
The wealth tax also makes FIRE harder, but there are exemptions that make it more manageable.
Here is information about the wealth tax in Valencia: https://atv.gva.es/es/ipatrimoni
Let's use a married couple in Valencia with 2M euro in index funds as an example.
They get 500K allowance each to subtract from their taxable base. Subtracting the 1M total exemption for the couple, their taxable base would be 1M euro for the purposes of the wealth tax. On the remaining 1M, they'd pay 10,595.71 for the first 668,499.75, and 1.12% on the remaining 331,500.25, for an additional 3,712.80. This puts their total yearly wealth tax at 14,308.51, or about 0.7% of their total 2M portfolio.
Generally, 4% is seen as a safe withdrawal rate for a properly managed portfolio for a 30 year retirement. Subtracting 0.7%, that'd give them a 3.3% safe withdrawal rate on their 2M portfolio, which gives them after-wealth-tax money of 66K to play with. Let's say half of what you're pulling each year is taxable for capital gains. With a 20% capital gains tax, that ends up being about 60K. This is a pretty good income for Valencia.
Estimated cost of living for a family of 4 there is about 28K: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Valencia
That gives them another 32K after tax for travel, luxuries, etc. Not to mention, you also get an exemption of 300K (individual) for your primary residence. There are also some other limits on the tax like it not being able to exceed 60% of your total income.
In the US, with a withdrawal rate of 4% on the 2M and no wealth tax, you'd get 80K. After 15% capital gains on half of what you're pulling each year, 74K. Subtract $1400/month or ~$16K for good health insurance for a family of 4 and it's a basic tie, not accounting if you have to actually hit a deductible. In Spain you will just get free public healthcare if you're a citizen.
It's definitely harder to build that level of wealth because of salaries there, but I don't think it's fair to say that it's completely impossible to FIRE there.
I overestimated the tax by a lot, I misread the chart and was adding the "Cuota" (sum of previous row taxes) from 1 row below what I should have.
They only pay 3,108.51 on the first 668,499.75. This puts the total tax at about half of my estimate, so only a ~0.35% drag on their 2M portfolio.
It's a very progressive tax, basically goes up 10X for really rich folks (>10M they take 3.5% of total wealth).
https://freedomandprosperity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/...
That said, these numbers are very misleading and do not show well what a person’s life looks like in the US. By my own anecdotal estimation, in the EU low and medium income people live a better life than in the US and have more livable wages, relaxed work culture, and enjoy a strong safety net. The missing GDP growth seems to show up in the upper middle to high incomes where it is extremely hard to pull away from the pack and acquire wealth. Things like early retirement and FIRE are almost unheard of in EU countries. Stock investing seems much less common. People mostly seem focused on more conservative investments like real estate that has a lower yield and liquidity than equities. Luxury spending seems limited to small consumer outlays like fashion or travel, not large wealth building outlays like McMansions. It is really, really uncommon to hear of someone making more than 100k USD and taxes in most countries take a bigger bite. There are even significant wealth taxes in some countries. For example in some parts of Spain the wealth tax is high enough that it would be impossible to live off investments as the safe withdrawal rate is so low that you would need millions to fund a modest income.
All of this is deep in the political psyche that wants to cut down the tall poppies.