Steps for growth are easy:
- Emancipate both politically and economically
- Kick US army out of Europe.
- Stop following US economic policies (sanctions, restrictions, ...)
- Stop supporting and fighting US wars
- tax US companies at a fair tax rate
- ...
- Profit
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.
Taiwan is too far away from the place I live, so I didn't bother to check, but it may as well be the same, except for the coup part.
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.
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.
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!
Perhaps 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.
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)?
That sound like "Inflation" to you? Steak is still $8/lb but my sugar free soda is suddenly twice as expensive
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.