Most people in the US own stocks the USA is "fixing" this by making everyone part of the owner class. Especially now with childhood investment accounts by the federal government (the "trump accounts").
> The prevailing idea here is that the US is best at everything and its model will always win. But in reality it's been in decline for a long time and it's become a pretty toxic society I don't want to see here in Europe.
If the USA is in decline you must consider Europe a failed state at this point then? Nearly every wealth inequality issue is worse in Europe then the USA. Youth unemployment has become a permanent fixture of society, your housing affordability crisis makes the USA look really good, most of your nations can't afford to keep social services at current levels and will be cutting them over the next decade, and you need to actually spend on military now that's just going to happen faster.
It's kinda funny by trying to avoid "late stage capitalism" the EU is going to force themselves into it as quality of life and global relevance continue to fade.
LGBTQ+ rights are way better covered here (with the exception of a couple countries that should really be booted out of the EU). Also really important for me.
We're doing pretty good, we will have some challenges going forward but that's always the case. Military equipment is something that we're now buying a lot from the US where prices are really high, and once we move that to European vendors we can get a lot more for the same money (this is similar to how Russia manages to have so much military power on a country with a GDP similar to Italy: they make it themselves with their own purchasing power).
The one challenge to the EU is not to fall into the austerity trap as they did in 2007 though. And we don't need so much. I don't need or want a car, a big TV, daily takeaway coffees etc. Less consumerism is also a good thing.
> And no, wealth inequality is much higher in the US
Absolute numbers don't matter as I was saying the issues caused by wealth inequality such as housing crisis are much worse in the EU.
> We also have wayyy less violent crime
Fair but I will say ours is very concentrated to specific areas / demographics so the average person rarely has to deal with that.
> LGBTQ+ rights are way better covered here (with the exception of a couple countries that should really be booted out of the EU). Also really important for me.
So they are worse?
> Military equipment is something that we're now buying a lot from the US where prices are really high, and once we move that to European vendors we can get a lot more for the same money
That's a two decade plus plan that hasn't even started and is already running into issues. Doesn't help that the EU needs weapons now not in 20 years.
> And we don't need so much. I don't need or want a car, a big TV, daily takeaway coffees etc.
It's one thing not to want it's another to not to be able to have.
It really matters which state you look at. Wealth inequality, gdp per capita, and median wage are all better in several eu members than in the US, and that still holds if you factor in housing and cpi in general. There are other states where that is really not the case. Its mostly the Scandinavian countries outperforming the us on these metrics and they are relatively low population in comparison so its kind of an odd one to make. If the goal is total gdp, who cares about the median wage, then the us/china plan does make more sense, but neither of those plans work without the other existing and cooperating.
> Having a startup in the US is a huge mess due to all the states and taxes
Not really there are literally companies as a service that take care of everything for next to nothing. It's actually kinda crazy how you can be up and running in under a week in the USA.
Has it been effective though? The EU used to have a bigger GDP than the USA in 2008 now the USA is over 50% larger. Member nations are still dragging their feet on doing much of anything in the Draghi report and it's unclear if that will ever change.
At preventing another European war? Up until very recently, pretty good. No more world wars as of yet, but 80 years has past since the last, everyone with memories of how horrible it was, are almost gone, so I guess we're building up to another one. I'm hoping that at least Europe sticks together if it gets down to it.
I'm not sure why GDP is such an important indicator to you, it's just the value of goods and services, what purpose is that supposed to serve?
USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer, education and health care gets worse, and people finding it harder and harder to find somewhere to live. So what good does a high GDP actually give you in the world today?
> USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer
People in the US may be many things but poor is not one of them. The median household income is ~$85k and the median household lives somewhere pretty inexpensive. The amount of money Americans can afford to waste on things they don't need is unmatched.
"Poor" isn't just "doesn't have N USD", purchasing power as just one example, matters so much more. But maybe it was a poor choice of words on my part, sorry.
That's what government social programs like Medicaid and SNAP/EBT are for, accounting for about 800 billion in gov spending in 2025, and a total of 1,2 Trillion the US gov spend on welfare in 2025. That's exactly the opposite of being poor. If you want to see real poverty, go to countries that don't have any government welfare programs.
In EU many workers also wouldn't be able to afford to live without taxpayer-funded government subsidies, tax credits or regulations forcing employers to not be able to pay minimum wages below a certain threshold (which is not coming out of shareholders pockets BTW but from the overall company salary budget pie, IE high earners) which also gets inflation adjusted yearly.
The lower class is always subsidised in wealthy de-industrialized western countries, since the low-skill jobs that previously could support a family, either got automated or offshored to Asia, causing a loss of worker bargaining power, so your only chance of preventing mass riots is to subsidize the lower class here and there. It's a masked UBI with extra steps.
> That's what government social programs like Medicaid and SNAP/EBT are for
Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't: People still can't afford food, healthcare, housing, and education. The programs are also being cut back on a large scale.
> The lower class is always subsidised
Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized. For example, most policy, laws, regulations, and both political parties are oriented toward serving and facilitating the wealthy, or at worst, not displeasing them. The military is sometimes used to serve large corporations, such as oil companies. Weathy people often pay a lower rate of taxes: The tax on their primary form of income, capital gains, is lower than the tax on other people's primary form of income, wages; the numbers get worse when you account for welfare taxes, which are regressive. People literally die of poverty - they are unable to afford the care they need.
>Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't
It's not as binary. It fails for some people, but it definitely works for most. There's always people slipping through the cracks of the net, even in the most generous welfare states, but that's a long stretch to claim americans are "dying of poverty" when they have an abundance of resources at their disposal to not die.
For example, if you're homeless american in a large city, you can go dumpster diving and get fresh food that's been thrown out just because it "looks ugly". If your tummy hurts, you can go to the ER and receive mandated sci-fi healthcare to not die, even if you're homeless. This is a far cry from the definition of "dying of poverty". I suggest you visit places like Russian republics, Myanmar or Nigeria if you want to see what actual dying of poverty looks like where you don't have access to free food and scifi healthcare.
The biggest problem killing americans is drug addiction and mental illnesses. Since if your brain is fried you won't be able to make much use of available free food and healthcare.
>Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized
That's always been the case since post-WW2 at least and gotten worse since Reagan. What's your suggestion to fix it? The super wealthy have too much power and influence over finance and politics, no matter who you vote for. Elected officials, on either side, will never touch them since they're in this together, so the system is working as intended, there's nothing you can fix here.
This is a commonly cited stat but it is mostly an exchange rate phenomenon that disappears when you adjust for purchase power. If you go by comparing GDP in dollars the EU recovered almost half this gap last year simply from the dollar dropping in value.
I was about to say... give dedollarization spurred by the current administration a couple more years and then compare GDP.
Being the world reserve and trade currency artificially props up the value of that currency (beyond what it would otherwise be), which has the result of artificially boosting GDP to GDP comparisons.
I mean there is a second almost if not more critical requirement which is has a big enough and liquid enough debt market to function like US treasuries.
> Also I don't see that EU as a whole is on a downward trajectory
That's an extremely contrarian take that you can't justify with EU defense did good for once in it's life. Maybe we'll see something from the EU but remember the USA and EU GDP were basically identical 10 years ago now the US is 50% bigger.
Seriously in 2008 the EU had a bigger GDP and now is a fraction of the USA and member nations have done basically nothing to fix the core issues that left them behind.
> US on the other hand - who wants to invest in or trade with them when they treat the rest of the world (including close friends) as shit.
Sadly it doesn't really matter about a "want" it's a need at this point unless people are going to cut off their arm and collapse their own economies they don't really get a choice.
Fair, but a bit slower growth than US is not a downward trajectory. Also there is currency effects involved.
Isn't US injecting a lot of loaned money into the economy in a rate that might not be sustainable long term? Their debt-to-GDP ratio is way higher than EUs?
I don’t know if you can confidently claim that the vote represented the view of the population at the time.
There was a small pro brexit margin, and loads didn’t vote. I don’t dispute the vote result, I just wondering what the result would have been if there had been higher turnout.
And the point of the purity test isn't to establish guilt. You're already declared guilty and the purity test is an attempt at finding or creating evidence of your guilt.
I don’t think you do recall correctly. Electrek has European EV sales at +33% in 2025 over 2024. It’s not possible for Norway to turn a negative in the rest of Europe into an overall positive. https://electrek.co/2025/12/11/global-ev-sales-jump-21-in-20...
reply