Who cares how well the businesses do? Only the wealthy in the US benefit from that. I’ll gladly swap and go to Europe where I don’t have to worry about falling into medical debt if I am unlucky.
Europe is increasingly heading in this direction too, at least it is here in the UK. The lobbiests and their stooge populists are increasingly in charge here too.
Yet you can still have a very decent middle class educated person existence with no anxiety of debt or illness. If you think you can just go to the us and be in the 1% by all means do and be happy (at the expense of the majority of others).
Otherwise stay, and enjoy social democracy’s unsung success in guaranteeing stable live to hundreds of millions by making it hard to get to the capitalistic excesses of the us.
What? The EU has super-rich, especially if you compare to the average incomes of the country rather than to the global top.
And yes, because of the tax situation these people are often not resident in the EU. London, Paris and Geneva have small neighborhoods of oil sheik families, for example. Brussels has entire neighborhoods effectively only accessible to EU appointees. Amsterdam ... and so on and so forth.
I didn’t say we didn’t have inequality or super rich people or that we’re perfect.
Yet we don’t have Musk, the Koch Brothers, Larry Ellison and swarms of fentanyl addicts folded in half in the street a few miles away from their residences.
No? Go to Paris. Start at the Notre Dame. Go North. As soon as you get off the island the first thing you'll find is the absurd-super-rich quarter. That's a little over 1.5 kilometers. Unlimited pretty fancy restaurants on the ground floor. I mean, it's gone downhill in the last 10 years, but they're all still ridiculously fancy. A great many luxury hotels, and apartments costing more in monthly rent than the president's wage on every other floor. He lives nearby, and apparently multiple ex-presidents live there. Keep going North.
You'll get to the 19th arrondissement just after passing Lafayette. Go look "under the canal" (will make sense when you get there, it's really under a bridge)
I don't believe they're fentanyl addicts, no shortage of addicts though. The main bulk are refugees (from Afghanistan, Syria, Africa, ...), most of the addicts are French, the dealers are immigrants.
And then there's the very large "are they addicts?" group. You see, it gets cold there. You know what really increases your comfort level if you have to live in the cold? Alcohol. And they definitely consume alcohol at a rate that a doctor would call addicted, but they're not really addicted. Or, if they had proper shelter they wouldn't be. Of course, alcohol really increases your comfort and increased the odds you'll freeze to death, so there's a daily round ...
(you can't really tell, but the whole camp is almost 1 kilometer long. Oh and this is one of 7 such places in the city center alone. In other words, you can start at the Notre Dame and go in basically any direction and there'll be a place like this. And the richest areas of France are right next to Notre Dame)
(btw: I've been to San Francisco too and the homeless camps in Paris are way bigger and worse than the ones in San Francisco. Way worse. Of course, I could easily have missed stuff. Oh, and obviously, while it's not impossible to freeze to death in San Francisco, I doubt it's common)
Don't worry, authorities are doing their very best to send these people away. Occasionally they succeed for a week or two, but never for very long. Half the time they essentially encourage them to go to the UK.
And this doesn't even remotely compare to the "Calais Jungle", I mean that particular camp is gone, but there's plenty new ones.
> As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better.
It's not better, it's just more attractive. The EU isn't the only country with regulations, every single other western country does, every single other first world country does.
The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
> The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
Are you finding the EU to be even remotely greed-free?
The comment does not say that EU does not have greed, rather that it recognizes this basic human tendency and puts up regulations to mitigate it where it can. The US on the other hand just lets it run rampant.
As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
The last thing CA or SF are is starved of revenue.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.
Consider that "successful" has evolved from innovating products that make our lives better to a strong focus on ad tech, surveillance, social media, and slop.
remember EU had Nokia and Skype and that was before overregulation. What happenned? Both got sold out because EU doesn't have money printer and petrodollar. EU cannot compete even if it would reduce taxes and decrease regulation because they cannot protect their best tech companies from being bought by dozen of billions of printed papers. Most even such companies are on US stock exchange because that's another different money printer.
Europe has a weak tech sector and relatively high taxes and high regulations.
As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better.
But he, feel free to tax that tech sector into oblivion. If Europe ever gets it's shit together, we would love to take over the crown.