It isn’t that we wouldn’t like to live better but the rich won’t let us. We work for their companies but they don’t share their profits with us like they did years ago. The rich want to have the best of everything and want us to be their servants. So until we can change that and make the rich pay their fair share we will never get to the life we deserve.
Right. We ran him out of office and mocked his ethics and honesty! He was a nerdy not Clinton cool, but cool brings misbehavior and now, Trump corruption! I don't like extremes, but I'll take a nerd over tyranny any day. I love my country and its democracy, warts and all. I criticize it vehemently to force it and us to live up to the best we and it can be!
In the Trump universe, Gordon Gekko is the good guy… as long as he supports Trump… which he probably would. He might be head of the Treasury department.
I’d like to offer a contrasting opinion: “the rich” are not a single, distinct entity, but a collection of individuals with an income (or assets) above a certain defined threshold. We should appreciate those, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Reid Hoffman who are willing to share some of their wealth with the rest of us, while criticizing and forcing out of political power the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen.
Nah. The problem is great wealth itself, how it's accumulated, or inherited, and how little it's taxed. You mention billionaires sharing - there shouldn't be billionaires. There shouldn't be wealth even approaching a billion. Problem solved.
>Nah. The problem is great wealth itself, how it's accumulated, or inherited, and how little it's taxed.<
Nah. This is wrong. Europe has produced some perfectly spectacular fortunes. Bernard Arnault is worth over $150 billion. Sweden supposedly has more billionaires per capita than the United States.
But European voters opt for robust, effective safety nets and high quality public services. They maintain such societies despite the fact that they indeed allow for the existence of plutocrats, and have plenty of wealth concentrated in the hands of the super-rich.
(Mainly Europe does this by broad-based taxation, including VATs, payroll taxes and income taxation policies that aren't shy about making the "merely upper middle class" pay fairly substantial sums. In America, by contrast, Everybody Knows we'll have a national meltdown if professionals earning under $400K are required to pay more.)
I've lived in Sweden since 1983, I'm quite familiar with it.
You appear to be making a point about the political feasibility of taxing the rich more in the US. This may well be impossible, now or in any near term realistic scenario. However, my response was to a commenter apparently assuming that we need billionaires, we just need to distinguish nice ones that give a portion of their wealth away from those who give nothing or little. I maintain that no model or version of capitalism needs to tolerate billionaires, or even great sub-billion concentrations of personal wealth, or even extreme wealth inequality at all. The numbers can always be discussed, but theoretically as well on the basis of 20th and 21st century evidence, their is clearly nothing essential about personal wealth at that level. If the electorate is inclined, or more likely persuaded, to tolerate it, fine, but defending it as economically essential or otherwise justified strikes me as pretty silly. They have PR people and their political servants to spin those tales, we don't need to carry that water ourselves.
>I maintain that no model or version of capitalism needs to tolerate billionaires<
It's nice to maintain things, but it's not at all clear that a country would be better off without the kinds of incentives in place that, among other outcomes, produce a fair number of great fortunes. Like Sweden. And the US. Also, unless you can somehow convince all rich countries to outlaw billionaires at the same time, you're going to have a situation where some countries still allow them, which will inevitably lead to capital flight.
Fortunately, the country you live in is pretty sensible about such things:
I like pstokk's point that accumulating billions is not *necessary*, and I think that greed elevated to a positive virtue is part of the problem. We don't need to "outlaw" the accumulation of wealth, but we need to change the tax structure so that the wealthy compensate society by contributing back, not just "providing jobs." The captains of industry find a Trump government agreeable because it is dedicated to removing safety and environmental rules that require them to take some social responsibility for their mess.
Pstokk- very good reply. At the minimum societies should provide income floors, below which no one allowed to drop. Used to work for a democrat party presidential candidate that advocated that, but this was fifty years ago and he was branded a socialist for his heresy even by other Democrats. That's the minimum a floor but we should have a fairly low ceiling too.
There you have it Mike. Ceilings and floors. There is a difficult, but more accurate name for that you speak of, that has been - I think overly complicated, and by design, ignored for nearly 50 years in this country, and that I think is the "standard of living" and a more accurately factored and defined data set to define "it." Cost of living hasn't been a reliable definition, and has been intentionally skewed politically, yet touted as the whole of a model and academics keep pushing it out there as some granite boulder of entire truth, but it's not - *and pathetically inadequate and a bigger source of growing structural resentment among those "feeling and living the lies" of any hope to attain any semblance of a mythical "American Dream" for the greater of our masses and they are no longer buying into what they live and see as the 'smoke' that academics keep trying to blow up their tails. Neo-conservatives, extremists, and the christian nationalist coalitions convinced them of that, and that it's 'all' entirely the fault of the tone deaf neoliberals and academics. I dare you to convince them otherwise; But that's the actual task at hand that those of some level of comfort shy away from like the plague. That level of comfort is precisely the standard of living, which has fallen precipitously over 50 years. The practical seeming 'wise one' that can be pointed to was Ross Perot, who foretold the nation that we were entering a "Race to the Bottom" - he was correct and a majority feels and lives it, wondering "So, how's that American dream workin' out for ya' now" ? The far right extremists had a convenient and correct "feeling" answer for them. Academics I find, repeat this error over and over again in the course of 'human affairs' and causes me to think of one of my very favorite idioms of all times, spoken for one, by Rabindranath Tagore who said "A mind all logic is like the knife all blade; It makes bleed the hand that wields it." Best paraphrasing I can recall off hand. I could also apply that axiom to any notion of economics - that is strictly a discipline of numbers, digits, and charting of theoretical models; It's not. There is some measure of politics within the art of it. Art in the sense of the medical 'arts' and medicine as a 'practice' and not a model of perfection. Anyway that would be more than enough of moi'. If you did, thanks for your indulgence.
The electorate in in the US is far more inclined to tolerate billionaires than socialists. The reasons are many, from racial divisions and cultural differences to the sheer size and wealth of natural resources that makes it harder to impose/get people to agree to limits. The lack of hereditary class/aristocracy has long meant that ordinary working people can indulge in the fantasy of becoming rich someday, ridiculous as that may sound to the educated upper middle class.
Taxation of inheritance and at 50% over $500,00 net year-over-year is how handling this shifted wealth from bottom to top could be implemented. I propose that Task Forces gathered to study and discuss and propose solutions is wildly needed for all the major problems currently neglected (environment; health - medical/mental; education and training to meet the AI effects; etc. etc).
Studying, researching these issues and having the top minds report and offer suggestions would be a good start. Then their ideas are taken with an open mind to town halls were everyone gets to mold the final draft of where we go from here! This would be a good, unifying effort, rather than all this fighting and chaos! We all need to decide and act accordingly that we will not allow tyranny in our country -- we will not live under a dictator no matter how entertaining his nonsense can be!
That’s really not the problem any more…to start with, we need to work more on basics, on people being able to relate to one another and get out of the warring tribes paradigm that dominates politics. Even if you knew exactly what to do, if people don’t trust you, if they think you are part of demonic force coming to take what little control over their lives they currently have, you will get shut down. Trust is the most basic building block of social order, and we have let it get shredded by social media and political polarization.
what we need is fewer billionaires and more millionaires. If wealth were more evenly distributed, there would be more visions made manifest by more philanthropists and of course, we would still tax those millionaires to pay for needed social services like schools and medicine.
Piketty has the data on this. Capitalism is more stable with steeply progressive income tax rates combined with modest tax rates on wealth. Even the capitalists would be better off.
Yes, and the billionaires that remain should be prohibited from making political donations. But, really, we shouldn't have any at all. They do far more harm than good. They don't need the money in any reasonable sense of need. They just want to climb the Fortune leaderboard of the richest people on the planet. And they believe that their ability to make their billions is proof that they should be calling all the shots.
Have any of the billionaires explained why they need tax cuts, or how they justify having the workers and retirees, school children and veterans, who are already living from check to check? Can they share with us their secret for being able to sleep at night and live with themselves?
I’m curious what Prof. Krugman would say about this. He supports a heavily expanded American welfare state (and higher taxes on the very rich, especially billionaires), but a 100% wealth tax on assets over $1 billion?
Even if you ignored that the vast majority of billionaire net worth is in illiquid holdings like stocks, even if you ignored the suppressive effect on innovation by centimillionaires, how would you actually enforce that, logistically?
Historically, the top income tax rate in the US was much higher than it is now. The current tax rate on the ultra-rich is ridiculously low. That needs to be changed. This is not just an issue about fairness, it's also about political power. The Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision made it legal to flood our electoral system with "dark money" that now controls our electoral system. This situation must change if we expect to have a functioning democracy.
Another poster pointed out that Elvis Presley was in the top tax bracket, 95%at the time. Even young people have heard of Elvis, so this might make an impression on them, that higher tax rates were once accepted as normal.
This is just a canard. Almost no one paid those elevated marginal tax rates of the past because of how the tax system actually worked. Reagan supposedly cut all these taxes and the Federal percent of taxes taken in GDP hardly changed because of the loopholes that were closed.
Worth noting though, the highest tax rate tended to fall on ball players or pop stars who came into sudden wealth without the education or background to know about the need for lawyers and accountants. There were always tax shelters and whatnot that allowed people who knew what they were doing to avoid getting hit with the highest marginal rates. Still, overall rates were higher prior to Reagan…I when Mitt Romney ran for president and released his tax forms, he was paying an effective rate of around 15%. When his father George Romney (also a wealthy man) ran for president in the 70s, he was apparently paying an effective tax rate around 30%.
100% wealth tax over 100 million would be better. 100% income tax over 20 million.
You seem concerned about innovation. Do you have any evidence that centimillionaires are especially interested in or good at promoting innovation, individually? Or that they are better at funding it than say, funds or banks that make corporate investment decisions? Or for that matter better than governmental investment decisions in basic research? I suspect that the ultra-rich have bamboozled you a bit about how essential they are to making sure innovation happens, or that capitalism works well.
Any kind of wealth holding can be converted to liquidity if you must pay taxes.
Unless you take the definition of “rich” down into what in most places would be considered upper middle class, there simply isn’t enough extra money there to make a difference. Remember that roughly half of Americans don’t pay any income tax because they make too little. The current tax burden already falls differentially on folks with higher incomes.
Granted, the US is currently somewhat undertaxed by the standards of the developed world—where the average is about 33%-34% of income. However, moving to a taxation level consistent with the social safety net I think many people here would like to see is going to require a sacrifice from almost everyone. There isn’t a free lunch available here.
Taxation does not consist solely of the income tax on wages, though we are schooled to think it is the only tax that matters. We need higher taxation of capital gains and other forms of accumulated wealth. The argument for improving the safety net depends on the view that we actually get something of value, like a more stable society, for our taxes. Not just a "sacrifice."
I’m not saying they’re essential and unique in innovative capacity, just that money gained from a system where producing goods or services that people want is correlated with it.
Again, Krugman (and I) support higher taxes on the rich, but I suspect your absolute maximum would worsen, not better, the living standards of the median American.
Our system is set up to award graspy behavior right now. Europe has regulations regarding corporate governance and a VAT. US agencies have been bipolar for years, and regulations are meant to not be enforced half the time depending on who the executive is and the whims of the Parties. Our country is a walking donut, with a big whole in the middle where the center should be. While homes become unaffordable our infrastructure is left to fall apart, not because of wealth but because of bad regulation and preferential planning. I don't think we can become Holland, but we certainly can do better. CEOs have been working for themselves and not their customers for a long time; their compensation goes up even faster than service and the quality of life goes down. Unions combat the industries they need to thrive, and block necessary improvements in manufacture in favor of expensive manual labor, while politicians sell phony protectionism for votes. , That behavior gets a pass, but we get the satisfaction being cruel to the immigrant motel maid and laborer instead. If there is a cabal of rich folks, they should be more concerned than everyone else about improving this situation, because they have more to lose. Doubling down on corrupt behavior will not deliver an answer they (or I) would want.
Again pstokk- makes good points. I argue above somewhere that innovation is likely to go away, at least not so long as we're divided into competitive nation states.
"...how would you actually enforce that, logistically?"
Since the Republicans have always made it their goal to under fund the IRS, we can't even enforce the current laws.
When Biden tried to increase agents, my Republican Senator Deb Fischer wrote, "80,000 IRS agents are out to get you!" Right, Senator -- maybe they're out to get you?
He did increase agents, and tax collection increased afterward. Now DOGE has cut those new hires (probationary!) and thousands more, with more firings planned. So revenue will go down this year and in the future.
Laurence - I strongly disagree with your supposition that higher taxes support "a heavily expanded American welfare state". America is a very large, diverse society, and to function properly, societies need infrastructure and rules, and ways of enforcing them and to provide for the population so that we maintain our society. I'm not lecturing, Laurence, because I'm certain that you understand this, but if you look at all the programs being cut because 'we're strongly in debt' (which isn't as simple as a single household operating on one or two incomes) it's clear that those aren't 'welfare'. Most of those programs are what has gotten the U.S. to it's position of prominence in the world, which we are now ceding to China, Europe, etc. We can debate how we handle the poor, the homeless, the underprivileged, but in now way is a billionaire paying their fair share, expanding a welfare state.
If you're saying that expanding help to the poor eventually lifts everyone up, then yes, I hear you and it makes a ton of sense. I'll never understand how a nation purportedly so steeped in "Christianity" can be so cruel to those less fortunate. Maybe that's just me.
Finally, trying to deal with such complex subjects in a 'reply bubble' such as this is a disservice to trying to solve the issues of the day. Chris Hayes has a great book out "The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became The Worlds' Most Endangered Resource". The title speaks volumes, but you need to pay attention, read and digest what he's saying.
Laurence- you make some good points but I don't think we need fear a loss of innovation. Humans are hardwired for that and we would become a crowd of listless Eloi.
We can restrict the number of billionaires and multi-millionaires through taxation. And we can restrict the number of billionaires who make their fortune by choosing rich parents with an inheritance tax. But the effort to totally eliminate billionaires doesn't seem worth any potential gain. I'm okay with people building obscenely large fortunes as long as we tax them enough to support everyone in comfort.
The problem is that they don’t have enough money to support everyone in comfort Europeans support their welfare state with very high taxes on middle class people.
But we seldom see the Europeans fleeing here to get out from under their higher tax burdens. The ones that do are usually the oligarchs. We Americans live in a rude and barbarous land economically speaking, but it has for all of that allowed us to do some good things.
It is entirely possible for a single individual to be primarily responsible for creating a billion dollars worth of value. If you can provide $10 worth of value to 100 million people, that's a billion dollars, and the United States alone has 300 million people.
I don't think it's a failure of any kind if Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, or JK Rowling have become billionaires. What they've made is worth a lot more than that.
As for people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos who get rich because they started and owned a business that became huge, well, the market capitalization of Amazon is nearly two *trillion* dollars. Jeff Bezos owns about nine percent of that; I don't know how you want to divide the credit between everyone that's ever worked for Amazon for creating that much value, but even a small percent of two trillion can still be a heck of a lot of money.
An employee doesn't get their marginal product, but the price required to ensure their employment. Above that you are talking about quasi rent, and it is a power struggle between consumer surplus and producer surplus. I' m on the side of consumer surplus in this battle. Besides don' t make the error of confusing price and value. Water and diamonds.
Yes. Remember marginal benefit, though: when you have almost no water, getting a little bit more water is extremely valuable. When you already have a lot of water, getting a little bit more isn't.
For heaven's sake, to take your cap off and tug your forelock in gratitude when His Grace tosses a guinea from his saddlebag as he canters by...can you grovel any more? Tax the rich as I am taxed, then we'll talk.
Mark Twain, (I believe) said in the USA, the poor think of themselves as temporarily inconvenienced Millionaires. (Keep taxes low for when i regain my lands and titles.)
Thank you for making a nuanced reply. In social media comments running more than a few sentences are in a definite minority. Most commenters take, for simple brevity concerns, very simplistic responses- boo/hurrah ethics. Smith is good and Jones is bad or generalizations like all x are y. Some commenters feel that vehemence or profanity are the proper carriers of their sentiment.
No, not all rich people are bad and want to enslave us; not all people who oppose autocracies are good; not all people desire to live affluent lives and not all people think having lots of material possessions and enjoying libertarian paradises of personal freedom is the acme of human existence. Reality is muddled and messy, uncomfortably so but this social media world really doesn't reward long comments like this one. TLDR
Just reading The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolfe. It’s very good. He does offer some other good ideas for addressing inequality besides taxing wealth, although he endorses that, and he’s nobody’s idea of a communist. A couple of things - reducing the length of copyright (Dean Baker also writes about this), changing rules around intellectual property, capital control agreements such as the agreement Janet Yellen negotiated before Trump was elected, which he scrapped, reforming executive pay, less emphasis on shareholder value. Lots more. It’s worth reading. Not finished yet.
Yeah, no. Billionaires should be taxed out of existence. Wealth should be redistributed to the public for universal healthcare, four-day work week, 1 year paid maternity/paternity leave, 6 weeks yearly vacation, free daycare. Instead, our president and his billionaire cronies dream of a techno-feudalism dystopia where we’ll live in company towns (Elon’s building one!) as modern day serfs.
We’ll disagree on that and that’s fine. My view is that your proposal sounds far better in ideal than in practice, and that the logistics of the government doing this would not leave us better — and likely worse — than most of our European (former?) allies struggling with persistent debt and stagnation. The most aggressive wealth tax in the EU pales in comparison to your own, and applies to a far lower threshold.
“The most aggressive wealth tax in the EU pales in comparison to your own, and applies to a far lower threshold.”
I don’t have a wealth tax so there’s no comparison. Likewise to the non-existent “threshold.”
Sounds like you are suggesting that we can’t have what other G7 social democracies manage because,
1) It can’t be done in practice (⁉️even though they ALL do it and our economy is bigger than theirs)
2) “It would not leave us better… than our allies…” (no one’s asking to be better off than our allies. The goal is to have what other rich countries have proven is possible to provide)
3) it would cause insurmountable debt and stagnation (tax cuts for the wealthy cause every-increasing debt. Universal healthcare has been shown repeatedly to be more efficient and cheaper than for-profit healthcare).
It can be done if the people want it done. Get rid of billionaires & we don’t have to worry which ones are nice and which ones are nasty. I don’t TRUST any of them. In the US, Power rightfully belongs to the people—not the oligarchs.
Well, which of those other G7 countries come even close to having a “no billionaires” tax policy? And how would you do it without an extremely high wealth tax, far greater than anything that exists in the world right now?
I don’t suggest we or any other nation adopt a ”no billionaires“ policy. I want for Americans to have what other G7 nations have. We don’t even have to have a “wealth tax,” although I’m not opposed to that per se. They just need to start paying like how the 99% of us are paying. And that goes for corporations too, many of which pay $0 or even negative taxes. They got the money, their CEOs don’t need such lavish compensation, they’ll still be rich f#ckers even after giving more to Uncle Sam.
Ok. I agree, but I also propose that the shift of wealth from the bottom to the top that has occurred in the U.S. over what the last 30 +/- years is unsustainable in a free democracy. And, the elites know it, and only Warren Buffet has spoken out against it. Go figure! His life is based on ideas of enduring and sustainability, and most others are short term focused, and play the "long" and the "short" simultaneously suggesting their only value and ethic is $$$$. And, that is exactly what we see today eroding our democracy, its institutions and now attacking its economic base.
George Soros took government money and used it to pay protestors and agitators, he has paid for fake indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples from other areas to go to reserve land in Canada that wanted to have development such as pipelines and cause a big scene infringing on their right to decide what happens in their lands. Bill Gates puts profits first and regularly pushes vaccines in 3rd world countries which don’t trust him and he wants to patent seed to have control of the food system. (Your choice in hero philanthropists is bizarre and off balance). The media is very controlled in America and only wants to promote certain changes that is why there is such division. If there isn’t money in it for a lobbyist group 🤷♀️ forget it, too much corruption. If there was less governmental corruption and wasteful spending America would be better off then most of Europe. You need better drug treatment centres and resources for your homeless, better education, and to stop letting big pharma set the agenda, how many natural cures are buried? And how much artificial crap are willing to let them feed you? European font allow most of the chemical in the good they eat real food and it’s one of the reasons there oberstes are way lower.
Just heard snippets of the "Meet the Press" interview with the orange turd billionaire. Never thought I would hear an American president bragging about policies that sound like those I heard about from former Soviet-bloc country residents!
Only a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc I was engaged in a discussion during a long car ride through Hungary in which my Hungarian business colleagues recounted how they had waited over 10 years in order to buy a car in Soviet-bloc Hungary. Similarly, a student I met in Slovakia was over the moon that they now were able to buy jeans. Was reminded of these very conversations when I heard the orange turd billionaire say that children in the country he governs only need two dolls or 5 pencils.
The billionaire President and his GOP are giving Americans a Soviet-style economy.
Spare yourself the rest of the interview, especially if you know anything at all about how finance and economic work. It was painful to listen to him spout blatant nonsense. For example he really does seem to think imposing steep tariffs will reduce inflation and that closing the trade deficit will automatically spur GDP growth and foreign investment. How does this man hold a Wharton MBA?
I don't think he has an MBA. That was Dubya (Harvard), but apparently Daddy Trump managed to get U Penn to give Donny a BS degree with the name Wharton on it and he has played that for all it's worth.
I’ve believed this all along. They will start selling the National parks as soon as this tariff outage calms a little so they can get the minerals. The oligarchs will buy, and I’ll be surprised if some of them aren’t Russian. An immigrant friend of mine who came from Russia after Glasnost says the shortages that are coming remind her of those times. She couldn’t buy milk for her newborn. Forget formula.
@Data Driven—your personal anecdote about Soviet-bloc Hungarians waiting over ten years to buy a car reminds me of a joke my father liked to tell; funny enough but we’re headed towards this endgame in the US, too:
A man walks into his local Transport Ministry office to order his new car. The bureaucrat behind the counter dutifully records all the information, then announces, “Comrade, your new car will be ready for pickup five years from next Thursday.” The customer quickly retorts, “Morning or afternoon?” The official replies, “Comrade, what difference does it make; it’s five years from now!” And the customer says, “Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.”
Your father's joke sounds like the backend of my own discussion with my Soviet-bloc Hungarian colleagues -- after hearing the story about waiting for the car, my U.S. colleague asked whether they had been able to choose the car color! I laughed so hard the tears were just streaming down my face!
I'm not willing to "let" middle class and poor Republican voters off the hook here. The 99% could overcome the 1% if the vast majority of us voted to do so. The problem is, we don't do so nationally.
Republican voter opposition to even such mild healthcare reforn as the ACA was often based on an opposition to "socialism" and fearmongering based on that term. Even if people like Elon weren't able to attempt to control politicians thanks to decisions like Cifizens United, IMO we'd still have some of the same problems.
IMO, there are two longstanding historical problems we still have yet to vanquish that prevent the US from moving toward a more equitable and prosperous socisty. One's slavery/racism, and the other's the incorrect belief in "rugged individualism."
Part of that belief in individualism has, at least since Reagan arrived in DC in 1980, morphed into selfishness and a "Why should you have/get something I don't?"
On a personal level, Americans willingness to help each other I don't think has necessarily diminished. But our willingness to help each other through government and taxes reached its height with JFK and LBJ, and died with Americans rejection of Jimmy Carter and embrace of Reagan and the "me!" decade of the 80s.
Really good post. Especially the last paragraph. The area I grew up in is very Trumpy today. Those folks aren't selfish though. They would drop everything to help someone in need whether they are Democrat, Republican, communist, atheist, gay, straight, furry, any category you can think of... but it's bc they are neighbors and friends and their kids are friends and they share the same community. But you're right, almost none of them want to do this through the govt. That's where they see what's "theirs" going to someone they consider "undeserving."
At best, what you’re seeing is a childish version of citizenship, where people are happy to behave with decency within their local tribe, but choose not to think beyond that. I suspect you might be choosing to ignore some of the darker views of your neighbours too - have any of them been bothered by the deportations without due process, for example?
In any case, across the USA the pattern is the same. People are free to choose candidates who would try to improve their lives in meaningful ways (e.g. better healthcare, which in the USA is too expensive and cut off/poor quality for many people). But instead they chose Trump. This indicates a child-like ignorance of how government affects their lives.
The tragedy here is that what sounds like whining is actually true. There is, for example, no actual crisis funding Social Security. There is plenty of money available. It's just that somehow, within our current government, those in power refuse to tax the rich at the same rates at which they tax the poor, so the system is starved. Our system works as those in power intend it, to remove wealth from the poor and middle class and send it to the rich, so money for most of us runs short. And yet, in response to suffering, the poor and middle class continue to vote for the noisiest hate mongers, perpetuating the system.
I was thinking along the same lines. I've never had much in the way of choices in my life. Collectively is a somewhat different story, but with reichwing media dominating the airwaves and the web, how can we get people to see reality and think?
I think a lot will see reality soon if the Republican congress gets rid of Medicaid to give the rich another big tax break. Don’t forget Medicaid pays for elderly and disabled in nursing homes. Nursing homes won’t stay open for free. Also all the disabled children on Medicaid who will help care for them for free?? The reality of what trump and his cronies are doing is going to put them all in shock!!
I can't honestly claim credit for coming up with that. I "borrowed" it from another commenter on another thread. I can't recall the handle now, but I have to give credit where credit is due.
And this has to become the message from dems. We have put up w zuck and musk and bezos et al for too long. They are buying our govt. it’s time we take it back. 50-75% taxes on them. Trickle down is just piss. It’s a lie. Always has been and we have gone extreme. We must reclaim. We did it after the robber barons and to must happen again.
In my experience, Americans pretending to be Canadian while traveling always backfires. At best Europeans find it odd and at worse, Canadians find it insulting. It’s best to be yourself. I find most people respond to your humanity, not your nationality.
A former CIA worker recommended that Americans avoid the mannerisms and dress patterns that identify them as Americans. 1) only American men regularly wear ball caps. 2) only Americans wear outer clothing with ads (like a t-shirt with "Coca-Cola" stenciled on it). In particular, don't wear Northface clothing. 3) American men stand with their weight on one leg. European men stand with their weight evenly distributed. 4) American tourists tend to congregate when they meet others. Even if you're following the first three recommendations, stay away from people who aren't.
The man was giving this advice to help American tourists avoid being targeted by pickpockets.
In addition to this, the photographer L.L. Rue told anyone who would listen "Don't wear camouflage!"
If following that advice makes you feel safer from pickpockets then you should by all means do it. I lived in London for a year, and found that keeping my valuables well protected and staying alert was the most reliable way of protecting myself against theft. It also focuses your attention on safety rather than spending mental energy worrying about your clothes.
People are going to clock you as a North American within 10 seconds of opening your mouth, so I wouldn't spend too much time concerned about how you hold your weight or whether you wear a ball cap or not.
"#1 only American men regularly wear ball caps" ... could be true in Europe, but I've never been there. In South and Central America and the South Pacific, plenty of men where ball caps ... probably because they're inexpensive.
Partially, but the uneducated keep putting these people into power. It started with Reagan. I like to think we are seeing an end moment of American capitalism right now. Reaganomics has been the economic paradigm our society has rested on for 45 years now. The US was a New Deal/Keynesian society from WWII-1981 (when Ronnie took over), and there's a reason those days were great days, Pax Americana. It's been shit since for a reason.
The tragic thing is that most of those rich folks honestly feel that they are doing more than their part to support our society and that anybody at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile is there because they choose to be or are simply inferior. They have convinced themselves of their virtue and make no connection whatsoever between the improved living conditions elsewhere and a choice by that country's wealthy class to support that better lifestyle. Like Musk, many of the wealthy in the US do look at empathy as a failing, not a virtue.
>It isn’t that we wouldn’t like to live better but the rich won’t let us.<
Please. This is a naive view. Do you really think rich people in other countries are so much nobler and altruistic than America's? Sure, many of our rich are real stinkers. But many aren't so: the United States has developed the world's most powerful array of philanthropic organizations, largely spearheaded by its wealthy.
No, Paul Krugman is right: the decision not to live better isn't because "the rich won't let us." It's because we keep electing the wrong kinds of politicians.
Ineffective government isn't an inevitably. It's a choice. And it is within the power of Americans to make a very different choice as to the kind of government policies we live under.
Today's very rich, in particular the tech billionaires like Musk & Andreesen, are not like the earlier philanthropists. With a handful of exceptions like Gates and Mackenzie Scott, they are not supporting cultural institutions or donating to build hospital wings, etc. They want more and are not inclined to give any of it away.
He is describing advantages to the whole country made possible by taxation system that keeps more money in "ordinary" people's hand AND which allows their governments to afford policies that focus on the common good.
Would Americans today vote for an expensive public school system such as we have if it were on the ballot for the first time today? For public libraries if someone came up with idea today and we hadn't inherited them? I don't think so: there would be talk of socialism and "if you can't afford to educate your own children why did you have so many?"
We have been gaslit for decades about how government can supply services that MOST of us would benefit from. It's always "the market can meet that need more efficiently" -- which it can for those who can afford to pay for it. Notice the key word, MOST, not ALL. People are okay with Social Security and Medicare and don't call them "socialist" because everyone gets them, even the rich who don't need them and even homemakers who didn't work outside the home.
But target a program toward the poor or the working poor? All of a sudden our tax money is helping the "undeserving."
I met a nurse from Idaho who was opposed to SNAP because she saw mothers using food stamps to buy junk food for their kids. Using "her tax dollars" to give their kids poor nutrition.
Idaho and a few other states are trying to get the government to exclude candy etc. from being covered by SNAP. But these are states that are already trying to cut elegibility for this program, and which probably don't think it worthwhile to help educate the public about better food choices.
Having recently returned from a Dutch vacation I can agree that life seems better compared to how we live it.
Visiting an “Oude Kerk” I was asked where I was from and I said “Canada”. The person replied “Oh, one of my favorite countries!” I then ‘fessed up and said “really I’m from the USA but some folks back home suggested we pretend otherwise.” The person said “You should say you are American. I believe in God. Things will all work out. Have faith.”
I was very moved by the sympathy and by the encouragement.
Indeed nearly everyone in The Netherlands speaks English. Not always well, but understandable. This is the case in many Western European countries although less so the more southern you go. That’s because in countries like France, Italy, Spain and to some extent even in Germany, they dub movies and shows, opposed to subtitles.
Thanks for your kind words Dr. Krugman. I have lived about 30 years in the US, although I travel back to my native Netherlands about 6-8 times per year. Funnily enough, I have followed and read Krugman since 1990, being an Econ undergraduate exchange student.
Very worried about what’s going on now here, although in a way also interesting. Growing up in post WWII Netherlands, which was heavily scarred from occupation by Germany, we studied the Nazi period intensely. In a way, all these many hours of reading, film, and studying are coming to life, as scary as that is.
My first experience, in Utrecht, was that I quickly stopped the "Excuse me, do you speak English" preface after I sensed a facial reaction I interpreted as, "Of course; do I look stupid?"
Paul: my in-laws were Dutch. My wife speaks Dutch fluently. But the Dutch speak great English. Which makes me ask why can’t more Americans be bilingual? If we took learning language seriously, and taught a useful language like Spanish starting in elementary school, we could be bilingual.
Yes, most people in the Netherlands speak some English. So PK probably could have chatted up someone. A Dutch person told me that everyone speaks English because no one in the rest of the world speaks Dutch.
I spent a couple of months on Duolingo picking up a few Dutch words and phrases before going to the Netherlands. The people were charmed that anyone would bother. I do not have many useful phrases but I could say some of the basics.
We Americans are not bilingual because we don’t have to be. If English ceases to be the language of commerce and science internationally, then (some) Americans will learn other languages. (I am bilingual and dabble in a few more, but I think it’s fun. Many do not).
I went to grad school in Europe. There were tv programs from multiple countries in multiple languages. Compared to the US countries are small. Most people spoke more than 2 languages
Sorry, my finger hit send. Almost everyone spoke or at least understood English and 2or 3 others. My point is it was both easier and more necessary to become multilingual. We haven’t needed to do that here. Although many people speak Spanish and English.
The reality is it is far more useful for Dutch people to speak English than for Americans to speak just about any foreign language. Even Spanish—while obviously quite useful in many parts of the United States—isn't the requirement for higher end jobs that knowing English is for millions of people worldwide.
The fact is Charles - being Dutch and speaking 7 languages- that if your brain learn how to use a second language, other than your native language, you easily pick up a 3rd, 4th, 5th and so on. Language is music. And if you are only a bit musical, learning a new language is easy. And fun. Try it. One sentence a day. And 10 new words a day. And find out which oral muscles are used in that language. And how is the intonation (or melody). It enriches your life and sharpens your brain. 😉
Years ago college friend married a Dutch guy and moved to there. She mentioned that Dutch people all speak several languages. I asked why. She said think about it. Me: Duh.
You can drive for a week in the US and still be in English speaking US. Other than northern teir people maybe going to English speaking Canada, most Americans don't ever get to other countries or have passports.
Also we lucked out with the British Empire, post-WWII occupations, etc. English is the defacto international language. In Japan all the street signs have English subtitles, and the screen on the buses showing upcoming stops too. Not helpful to someone from some other writing system but pretty great for us.
I grew up in East Tennessee. There is no language other than English that would have been useful there. Of course, some people would claim that English was a foreign language there (I had to act as interpreter when a fellow student from New Jersey tried to understand a gas station attendant from Sevierville).
Let us not forget the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which leveled most of the city. They built the city back much grander than before, and mostly fire proof, afterward. The US isn't Russia, Hungary, or El Salvador. After the last embers of Trumpism are extinguished - they eventually will be - we can build the US back with a stronger firewall of democracy. That's the light at the end of the tunnel.
Ummm… sorry, sorry Anne-Marie, but we live in Belgium, all my family are Dutch, and we love taking trips to friends in all the countries around about (we’ve just come back from a morning visiting a dear friend in Germany). Comparing notes, in all the years we’ve not met anyone in the EU (who wasn’t a shell-shocked refugee passing through) who wanted to live in the US. In truth, you most often hear people saying they have no interest even in visiting (and this was before Trumpet); although most people would be far too polite to tell you that to your face. We ourselves love our American friends, and always found it interesting to visit the States, but we wouldn’t ever ever ever want to live there, even without the Felon and his Friends. The thing is, for all the interest of places like NY and the beauty of places like Maine… well, they don’t actually make up for strip malls and cars the size of tanks and Fox TV and plastic surgery and no healthcare and no childcare and GUNS everywhere: not to mention the religious devotion to political parties. And we would miss the deep interest in philosophy and books and history etc: it’s not absent in the US, but it doesn’t permeate everything down to the bone as it does here.
Quality of life is about joie de vivre, which you get in abundance when you have less ‘stuff’ and more society: in Portugal and Spain and Italy and Greece and so on. Now, it IS hard to have the long dinner conversations we adore here in Northern Europe (we’re in Belgium) without everyone around the table beginning to express a wistful desire to move to one of THOSE countries … 😸
But the moment you get rid of the Maggots, we’ll be back to visit you, with pleasure! (At the moment, they’d not let us in anyway, I suspect).
That is the fantasy that Americans cling to. They think everyone wants to move there and therefore it must be the most wonderful country in the world. When in fact, the USA serves as a warning against “letting things get out of hand”. We use it as an argument in any discussion, like plastic surgery, “do you want American situations?”, large clumsy houses, “do you want American situations?”, guns “do you want …..?”, you get the drift. Sorry, reslity is harsh and Europeans are polite to US visitors, more polite than honest.
I don’t understand your “believe in God” statement. I mean no offense but this is a human caused debacle. Surely if there was a God, wouldn’t God have done something long, long ago. You know before the Crusades, Nazis, Trump. If God didn’t/hasn’t done anything to stop the horrors past/present, why would anyone believe in one. Honestly, I mean no offense.
The comment was made to me from a person in the Netherlands while standing in a church. We are, as of today, all entitled to our own beliefs, or lack thereof. This could change with the current administration.
Dear LJ: Please don’t lie and say you’re Canadian, especially in the Netherlands. I’m Canadian. My dad and his brother spent a couple of years in the 1940s fighting in Europe, and one of my mom’s brothers lies in Dutch soil. We are proud to have helped the Dutch regain their country from the Nazis, and their gratitude to us is humbling. When you lie about your nationality, you cheapen that.
Also, your country’s president and government is currently engaged in economic war against us and has undermined decades of cooperation and partnership. If you’re not proud of your country’s current actions, I’d suggest you do everything you can to change your country, or leave it. Pretending to be Canadian is childish and dishonest.
I hope this encounter was the last time you lied to strangers about where you are from. Please discourage others from doing so, especially amongst the Dutch, Belgians and in Northern France. That's tantamount to "stolen valour".
"one unfortunate thing about the Netherlands, from my point of view, is that people speak Dutch" - I well remember visiting the Netherlands in 1980 or so, on the cheap, with a friend from England. At one point, we needed to cash in some traveler's checks, so we found a bank and joined the queue inside. I rather sheepishly asked if anybody there spoke English, and the guy in front of us in the queue turned round and looked at me quizzically before replying "But we all do." I learned something that day.
A similar experience: In 2017 I was to attend a four-day technical meeting in Amsterdam. Even though that conference would be conducted in English, for two months I meticulously worked through an online course in Dutch. Yet whenever I attempted to use my Dutch (e.g., in a restaurant), people immediately switched to English. The only place where the other person did *not* switch to English was in the post office in Brussels, Belgium, where I stopped before proceeding on to the Netherlands.
Same happened to me in France, when trying to say something in French, only to hear "can you say that in English instead?" I'm still not sure whether to find that polite or not.
But we could legitimately boast that we didn’t have a national language…or a national religion either. Both of which the regime wants to change. They wreck all that is good.
They are also targeting foreign language majors in college. Several of the outrageous demands made against universities recently have included ending a long list of majors, among which I was surprised to see Spanish. To a former language major this is damn depressing.
Learning another language exposes you to the other culture snd increases understanding. But too msny Americans aren't intetested.
The lack of spelling and grammar skills in comments at sites that a broad range of Americans read is stunning. Almost always right wingers. Constant mistakes I learned about by about the fourth grade.
Years ago I was in a restaurant in Brussels where a group sitting next to us were speaking various languages. One of them suggested they all speak English, which they did. It made me 'proud' to think ours is a 'universal' language. It also makes me sad that so many of us can only speak one language.
I’m kind of proud but mainly grateful that English has become the language for sharing, the “universal”. We are lucky lucky lucky for that. The downside being that some are arrogant and demanding about that both here and even abroad. Also I wonder if learning another language is experienced as more of a drudge here, because it is not the norm, and not begun early, when the brain is primed to take in words.
I agree we're lucky, but it's also made us fairly complacent. I'm envious of those who can speak multiple languages and I love seeing little kids learning other languages in school. I'm trying to learn Spanish because I think it's a fairly widely-used language.
The reason English is the universal language is because Britain subjugated so many parts of the world and turned them into colonies. Americans were once colonial subjects of the British crown.
I believe they all spoke English thanks to Hollywood, which brought them into contact with the language from early on. The Germans used to be not nearly as proficient at that time, because their Hollywood movies were dubbed, not subtitled like in the Netherlands.
You might be proud that their English language proficiency is a product of the US :-).
The Dutch don’t speak English because of Hollywood, they speak English (and often many other languages) because of trade. They live in a tiny country that is surrounded by many other languages. French, English, German, Danish, Swedish—all within an area about the size of New England. It’s not uncommon for the Dutch and Flemish Belgians to speak four or five languages.
Sorry, Rainer, but this is a ridiculous comment. The Dutch speak English (and other languages) because they have an education system that values the teaching of other languages from an early age. I won’t presume to speak for the Dutch, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t make this policy choice so they could watch freakin’ American movies.
So true for my generation. We learned British English, German and French at highschool. And at certain schools Latin and old Greek as well 😂. Nowadays kids also learn english from social media as well as school
Nice idea, and I'm sure it's at least partly true. However, the main reason so many people in the northern European seaboard countries speak English so well is down to England/Britain being very close by, and the LW and MW domestic BBC radio broadcasts from England having penetrated well into Europe for so many years, bringing independent and objective news to millions.
These days, such broadcasts have almost disappeared, but of course teaching of English in the schools, and the universal availability of the (still predominantly English-language) internet now plays a huge rôle in keeping the language alive and flourishing in these countries. Indeed, I've heard that in Denmark, the widespread use of English is threatening to relegate Danish to a second language status!
Oh dear. You start out from a false premiss, i.e. that "northern European seaboard countries speak English so well."
This was simply not the case in 1980. Germany is a northern European seaboard country too, and in the 1980s the Germans did NOT speak English "well" by any reasonable standard. The experience that you had in the bank? That would not have happened in Germany at the same time.
I should know because I am German and I am old enough to remember the 1980s. I went to University back then. All lectures were in German. It was still acceptable to list German editions of articles and textbooks in your term paper bibliography, even if their original language was English.
Bookstores didn't carry English-language books, not even popular ones. I remember how I had to wait several weeks for my copy of Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach". If you wanted to read The New York Times, you were reduced to a slimmed-down version called "The International Herald Tribune" from large railway stations at a quite inflated price.
So no, English language proficiency was NOT ubiquitous in northern European seaboard countries, and any explanation why the Dutch spoke English quite well in 1980 should ALSO account for the absence of proficiency on the side of the Germans during the same decade.
Completely agree about Germany and English, I lived in West Berlin throughout the 1980’s, where even there most stores and banks were completely German speaking. I miss the IHT, it was nice to have something in one’s hands versus on a tablet. These days I read the NRC (formerly NRC Handelsblatt) as after all these years in the Netherlands I speak Dutch, but when I arrived here 30+ years ago before the internet, I found having the IHT comforting and in those days it was still a joint effort between the Washington Post and the New York Times. My son did secondary school here in the Netherlands and took classes in French, Spanish, Germany, English as well as Dutch. I think everyone at his school had a working knowledge of at least five languages at graduation back in 2001.
I was in SW Germany in 1980. All my college - 20s aged cousins and their friends all spoke English relatively well, but their parents did not speak any. My cousin told me to stop speaking German even though I had it in college. They had had years of English classes in school by then.
Today younger people in Germany throw whole English phrases in conversation with each other all the time.
Around most of the world, the international language once was French, except in the British Empire, which was huge, if you recall. The second language of the Empire was English, a the largest country was India (second largest population). After WWII, English began to emerge as the dominant second language, and with the economic might of the US, international business began to be conducted in English. Hollywood movies coincided with that trend, but was not the impetus or primary cause. Teaching English as a second language has been practiced virtually on every continent since. That's why international programs like USAID and everything else DOGE has killed are important to America's place as a model for the world.
The Dutch speak English because they are a county to 15 million people and know that no one speaks Dutch. This was explained to me when I lived here for some time…
So, they take it upon themselves to be bi-lingual, at least in French because of Belgium is Flemish/French. But most Nederlanders also speak German and of course English.
They are a well educated and sensible country. And they rides bikes everywhere. Not much better than that.
Perhaps that is true for the Germans, but people living around the North Sea always had good trade relations with the British, so they spoke British English even before the War.
So your theory is that Germans are NOT people living around the North Sea, or what? Or that the language proficiency of merchants somehow miraculously infected the rest of German society?
Sorry for being dense, but I was born and raised in Hamburg, which is as anglophile as it gets in Germany. Rest assured I have a very good idea what the language proficiency of my compatriots was in the previous century.
My theory is that within Germany, until the end of the Reich, proficiency in English was far and apart, and of course the Hanseatic cities (like Hamburg) were nothing like the rest of Germany due to their history. The same goes for ex-DDR until the Wall came down.
But the point is, even though Hamburg may have been somehow privileged thanks to trade, ordinary people there still didn't speak English like the Dutch did. And that needs an explanation.
I'm honestly baffled why commenters here react so allergic to the suggestion that undubbed Hollywood movies did some good for English proficiency abroad. I find it intuitively plausible, and so did the Dutch author whose theory this was in the first place.
I agree to such an extent that English language films with subtitles (undubbed) has eased/helped the English language become more widespread, but mostly people speak more/better English, even though sometimes with local accent, because they were taught in school from second or third grade.
The German language was previously Lingua Franca in most of Continental Europe north and east of the Alps. After eight decades of English influence on the German language, many words in German are anglifications, which sounds terrible in the ears of older citizens.
By the way, it is still difficult to find someone in rural Germany that speaks comprehensible English, they prefer to speak German.
It would be part of my "theory" that Germany as a whole could not be included in a "European northern seaboard" grouping as far as English language abilities would be concerned, notwithstanding the fact they have a fair amount of coast there. I put it down to stubbornness on the part of Germans who, on the whole, resisted the introduction of English as a "second language" for a long time. I've lived in Bavaria for 35 years and I've never assumed that people here can speak English, even though a fair few can.
Dear Paul, Thank you for being so nice to us - hope to return the favour. As a Dutchman living in Leiden I can assure you that what you saw is one side of the medal: the heritage which took us some 2000 years to build and which, at least until today, we cherish. There is, however, another side to, with people suffering worse conditions than you might have experienced in Leiden's historical center. And it is a pity you had no opportunity to discuss our view on global politics; we might have told you that indeed we are very worried about the state of things in your country, but also in Ukraine, Yemen, Congo and, above all, Gaza - but also about the national politics of The Netherlands, in which fascism and racism are growing rapidly. Let's just say I can only hope that we will keep cherishing the heritage you so enjoyed. Have a safe trip back!
Well, perhaps we (the U.S.) can be a warning for how quickly things can get very bad indeed. Of course, we had a lot of "help" from Russian propaganda and the international fascist movement. To the extent your country can close or expose digital loopholes, you may fare better. I do hope so!
Don’t exaggerate! In the Netherlands, as in many European countries, we can have small far right or far left parties. But they will never reach a majority. In the UK and in the US small far right groups took over a whole national party (Tories and Republican), and were not recognised as becoming far right. At the same time, newspapers and opinion magazines in both countries kept pointing the finger at Europe and warning against neo-nazis whilst denying the fascist and racist tendencies in their own countries. Now we see Trump/Republican/Musk take-over with explicitly eugenistic, authoritarian reality.
Your experience abroad is something that should be repeated by every American, so they can have a standard against which to compare their political decision-making in the US. It might cost $0.5% of a tax levy on billionaires - but will be repaid many times!
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of Americans travel abroad, and even fewer take the opportunity to visit Europe. I read that a large number of U.S. citizens don’t even have a passport.
True, but think about the cost and time required of Americans to visit anywhere other than Mexico or Canada. Most Americans don't have the money or time to make such trips. In contrast, the French, for example, get 4-5 weeks of vacation a year. And many Europeans live a 2-5 hour drive from at least one and sometimes and sometimes several countries. When I lived in Germany people thought nothing of driving to the Netherlands for a weekend at the beach. That was not a big outlay of money. --But I take your point: compared to Europeans, Americans as a whole are not cosmopolitan.
I should have mentioned that historically, Canada has not required US citizens to have a passport to enter Canada. But effectively we now do because we know that they cannot return to the US without a passport!
(I would guess that this US requirement is unconstitutional but arguing with customs and border officials of any country is foolish and dangerous.)
I'm sure that it's unconstitutional in the sense that there's nothing in the US Constitution about it, but (despite what some people believe) that doesn't make it unconstitutional. If the Constitution does not forbid something, that something is constitutional. It's the same as saying that, if there's no law against something, that something is legal by definition.
It appears that Republican state governments are trying to tighten voter ID requirements to suppress the vote. I would guess that a passport would qualify since it is government issued photo-ID. But maybe not since it does not include the address of the holder.
And even many who do travel internationally stay in some 'bubble' such as with a primarily American tour group or at an all-inclusive resort and never really interact with citizens of the country they visit.
As you say, Barry, something that needs to be changed.
The "we" in your sentence refers to the 95%, not all of the "we." And most of the "we" did not know that they were agreeing to that bargain. Reagan referred to welfare queens, and white poor people, white working class people and white middle class people were okay with leaving the "undeserving" black people behind -even if poor white people suffered along with them.
It’s not that most of us *choose* to live lives that are nastier, more brutish, and shorter. It’s an easily-conned sizable minority, steeped in ignorance, that won’t *allow* us a choice.
I think the real motivation for your sizable minority is that they have been convinced they need to sacrifice their better lives so those same benefits can be denied to the bad "other people" who don't deserve them.
The people on top have split the rest of us into teams and set us against each other to distract us from realizing we're all losing together. They don't really care about the outcome as long as they can pocket the money they don't have to spend to provide better lives for the rest of us.
Thanks to them, class warfare happens within, not between, classes. And they get to entertain themselves by watching, plus they can buy that second yacht they always wanted.
I have considered moving to Europe and at one point discussed this with some MAGA family members. During the discussion they commented that at least Europeans get something from their governments and from the taxes they pay.
...and yet these same lifelong Republican voting, now MAGA family members benefitted from US ag support, free school lunches, PELL grants for their kids and despite this always vote against any US politician who supports any kind of safety net or anything akin to European type policies.
The motivation must be as you describe, Mobiguy. Otherwise, my brain hurts trying to rationalize their actions given their words.
An argument I’ve heard from Republicans I know is that European countries could and can afford to have effective social safety nets and lots of other “nice things” because they didn’t pay their fair share for NATO and the US provided their security. I feel like the math doesn’t add up for that argument but would love to read an economic analysis of this theory.
Think I've said this before, but worth repeating, GOP doesnt math.
Countries like Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark have low abortion rates. Why, are they more religious, more moral than the US? No, they invest heavily in reproductive education and birth control. There's an inverse relationship between abortion and access to birth control, scientifically proven in fact, but damn, there's another thing the GOP doesn't do ... science.
There's so much we could coulsld learn but choose to remain ignorant. So we continue to pay more for Healthcare while receiving poorer outcomes and generally worse health than other nations. Our children are hungry, under cared for, under educated and risk death by gun at high rates. All in the name of being Great.
YouTube has examples of sex education videos aimed at Norwegian schoolchildren - which are eye-openingly graphic even by British standards and pretty much unimaginable in a US context.
But they’re also clearly motivated by the utmost seriousness of purpose, and the statistics speak for themselves, not just in terms of much lower teen pregnancy rates but later first sexual experiences in general because they have a much better idea of how to ensure that it’s truly meaningful. Knowledge genuinely is power.
And then the fact that people in the mentioned countries in Europe are able to talk civilised about sex and reproduction. It's also not a financial disaster to have unplanned children in these countries.
It turns out that the Norwegian sex education series that I mentioned is no longer on YouTube with English subtitles, almost certainly because of Anglo-Saxon prudishness.
But a sample episode (thankfully still with English subtitles) can be seen here - https://tube.grin.hu/w/91eceec5-ecca-4fda-9691-034b89a418a8 - and although I have to flag up that certain parts are decidedly NSFW, it's worth adding that the target audience is eight to twelve.
And, in all seriousness, once you've got over the initial surprise as to just how upfront it is, why not? I had my first sex education class at ten, and while in retrospect I recognise I was better informed than many, I'd have honestly welcomed something as detailed as this, especially in the pre-Internet era where it was much, much harder to get hold of concrete info outside biology textbooks and novels well outside my age range (not that that stopped me).
Since I never had any sisters it took me well into adulthood to grasp how women function (in lack of a better word). This was in old analog days, when one could move through life with relatively few challenges to one's World view.
The teachers at the time were quite "vanilla" on the subject of teaching about sex and reproduction, and I don't blame them, at the time there wasn't proper educational material available, so many times they had to conceptualize from their own experiences without being too specific. It's not easy.
I still remember one of the older male teachers telling that's important to wash thoroughly or smegma will begin to smell. As a teenager I wondered whatever he was talking about, later in life: "Aha!".
I'm guessing that any respectable sixth grader today has watched some intenet porn. I know I would have. It's not hard to find. And also factual information about everything to do with sex and reproduction.
Of course, but this is why it's arguably even more important to have a programme of intelligent contextualisation in schools - and, again, the Netherlands and the Scandinavians are way ahead of Anglophone countries in general and the US in particular, by stressing the emotional and relationship aspects that you're not going to get out of porn.
If you leave it up to the kids to "do their own research" (as a conspiracy theorist would urge), they'll undoubtedly do that, but precisely what they end up researching - because they understandably don't know any better - may well seriously stunt their intellectual and emotional growth in the longer term and make it much harder for them to form meaningful relationships.
Porn will only teach/show the mechanics of sex and never get into details with whatever comes after ejaculation. Pornography is a fantasy world favoring certain views on sex.
I can certainly understand why many young people today are having problems communicating with people of the other sex, if all they know is what they've absorbed via porn.
It all comes down to the political will to spread wealth down and across through widely beneficial taxation. We simply don’t have it because of widespread ignorance and the overwhelming legalized bribery of our political class.
Is it Political will or Social will? The political will is currently owned by the 'Merchant Class' as James Madison noted in Federalist Papers, which could and is exerting it's wealth to wag the dog. And religious will, though banned from contributing to politics in the constitution, thru Citizen's United, is also busily buying unconstitutional influence, drowning out the Will of the People.
Oh to hear what Madison and Hamilton would say about today's Federalist Society.
The three pillars of U.S. global power—(1) the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency, (2) U.S. leadership in global trade institutions such as the WTO, and (3) its central role in NATO—do not merely entail costs and commitments. They have also brought the United States enormous strategic and economic advantages that no other country enjoys to the same extent.
The dominance of the dollar has enabled the U.S. to borrow cheaply, provided American companies with unparalleled access to global capital markets, and fueled domestic consumption. Americans are able to use their greenbacks and credit cards to purchase the best goods from around the world—often without having to worry about the balances in their accounts. Why? Because confidence in the dollar is supported not only by U.S. economic strength, but also by the global presence of over 750 American military bases, which reinforce the perception of geopolitical stability.
The U.S. is the biggest winner of globalization. Without it, American firms and banks could not operate so extensively across the globe, nor could the U.S. attract such volumes of capital, talent, and high-quality goods. This is one key reason why so many innovative and powerful companies are born in America.
These three pillars—especially U.S. leadership in NATO—have also secured decades of loyalty from allied nations, including European countries and Japan. In conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not just U.S. forces who fought—NATO allies stood beside them, underlining the political solidarity that comes with shared security commitments.
In this light, the U.S. global strategy can be seen not as a cost burden, but as a leveraged, long-term strategic investment. It has paid off not only in economic and political influence, but also in soft power—a form of leadership built on global respect and admiration, not coercion, as seen in more authoritarian models such as Russia’s.
What should the U.S. do now?
Rather than retreating from global leadership, the U.S. should invest more domestically—especially in:
- Public education,
- Retraining programs for those who have lost out in globalization (helping them gain the skills for jobs in emerging tech sectors), and
- Social security systems that cushion transitions and promote stability.
You're correct. The benefits far exceed the costs. And today, Trump is disrupting 80 years of American positive relations with most nations, benefitting both ends of the relationship. Trump is destroying in 100 days what America has worked to build for more than my entire lifetime. Are there strings? Yes, but the majority of the ties work to the good of both sides.
You're right. That would be an excellent start. Unfortunately, I don't see either party ready to destroy the health insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies to do this. Obamacare leaned in this direction but was so watered down in order to pass that it doesn't go very far at all.
I know, we were sold the myth of privatization, trickle down and supply side economics. And now we are going down the path of converting government using those same false notions. One can hope that the lesson can lead to a pull back to reverse Gilded Age 2.0 if we can get Teddy 2.0 to rise from the ashes.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that Trump and DOGE are attacking all 3 of those pillars. The techbros want to destroy the dollar's position as reserve currency. Now that Trump is imto bitcoin, he's on board with crushing the dollar, too. Of course, he hates NATO and has already imposed huge tariffs because hd really us delusional about how they work.
Your recommendations sadly have no chance in the foreseeable future in today's poisonous political atmosphere.
I can't agree with your comment 'also in soft power—a form of leadership built on global respect and admiration, not coercion, as seen in more authoritarian models such as Russia’s.' I live in New Zealand. I can well remember in late adolescence the USA attempts at coercion of 'men for beef' during the Vietnam war. A high level USA government executive visited New Zealand to demand NZ soldiers to fight their war in exchange for them buying NZ farm produced beef. 'Free trade?' The USA wanted conscription of NZ men to fight its evil war invasion into Vietnam- a war to control the largest known at that time deposits of Wolfram- a tungsten bearing ore needed for weapons so that the USA could maintain military world dominance. The USA coercion was internal as well with many USA conscripted soldiers maimed for life and killed. Vietnam is just one example of the USA conducting many wars since the second world war, some declared, but many by other covert means see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende 'On 11 September 1973, the military moved to oust Allende in a coup d'état supported by the CIA, which initially denied the allegations.[13][14]'
Well, this is true to some extent, one could say that it was much cheaper to be under the NATO (read US) umbrella during the Cold War. It was cold because it fortunately never became hot.
On the other hand, most NATO countries participated in the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (War on Terror), a war initiated by the US and the Europeans going along for the sake of loyalty. As an example, Denmark had more casualties per capita than the US, yet, the Trump administration have no recollection on what their allies did for them.
One could also say that the War on Terror capsized the US lust for engaging in foreign warfare, since it took a big toll on the national debt, which is the fundamental trigger of the current turmoil in US politics.
It is probably true that not having to pay as much for their own defence meant there was more money for social goods in NATO countries; but the US is a VERY wealthy country that could afford just about any social good if our tax system were different and if Americans were not obsessed with the "undeserving poor."
Ironically, the only time a NATO member has ever called on fellow members for assistance in the face of attack as required by the NATO treaty was -wait for it - when the US called on our allies after the World Trade Center destruction. And they responded as the Treaty required.
In his visit to the Netherlands, Paul Krugman reflects on how much better the quality of life feels there compared to the U.S., citing longer life expectancy, walkable cities, and less political anxiety. He highlights the contrast between Dutch public infrastructure and culture with America’s, noting the sense of ease and shared values in Dutch society.
While Krugman praises the Netherlands for its liberal values and social cohesion, it’s important to acknowledge that Holland also harbors a significant neo-Nazi and far-right presence, which contradicts the image of unanimous opposition to fascism and threatens the very ideals he admires. After all, this is the country where my cousin Ann was arrested and eventually murdered.
Most if not all of the developed world has a better quality of life than we do, with the plus of never having to go bankrupt due to the high cost of health care and not having to worry about dying in a mass shooting.
The crucial philosophical difference between the US and most of the rest of the so-called West is that the latter values "freedom from" as much as "freedom to" - which of course is why the US tends to poll comparatively poorly in annual global freedom indexes that take both these concepts into account (and it's likely to plunge several places in 2025).
For instance, while Finns appear to have a basic right to bear arms that's broadly equivalent to the situation in the US, weapons come under various classifications, and the deadlier they are (i.e. in terms of being able to spray bullets indiscriminately), the harder they are to get hold of, up to a level where you pretty much have to be a serving member of the armed forces with a clean mental health record and written permission from your superior officer.
There's absolutely no reason why the US can't adopt a similar system that doesn't in any way infringe their constitutional rights, but if Sandy Hook wasn't the loudest of wake-up calls, I fear that nothing's going to get through.
I've just had a similar experience travelling to Munich from the UK. You can tell it's a richer place. The public transport is less reliable than it used to be, but it's vastly superior to similar size British cities (Manchester, Birmingham). We visited this enormous spa that was like nothing I've ever seen. The housing seemed to be of much better quality. It's obviously hard to tell from a short trip, but things felt generally nicer to me.
For the past month, I have been following your writtings on Substack. Reading your daily “greeting diary” has become part of my routine.
In the past—as both a scholar and a portfolio manager—I drew great inspiration from your academic publications. Now, through your Substack writings, I feel I’ve come to know not only a brilliant economist, but also a vivid, empathetic voice: someone who cherishes life and freedom and defends democracy with conviction.
Your thoughtful reflections and your openness in sharing personal experiences have encouraged me to step out of the ivory tower. I’ve begun writing more actively myself, including for local newspapers. The two articles I recently published were both inspired by the spirit and communication style found in your posts and interviews.
I look forward to continuing to follow your work on Substack.
Thanks for taking us on vacation with you and your wife! My husband and I visited the Netherlands a couple of years ago and felt totally the same as you describe--although at that time we were not depressed about the U.S. as we are now because of he that shall not be named.
In that case you’re blaming the millions of Americans who voted for him the second time around or the Democrats who didn’t vote because they were miffed over non-democracy or non-rule of law issues
It isn’t that we wouldn’t like to live better but the rich won’t let us. We work for their companies but they don’t share their profits with us like they did years ago. The rich want to have the best of everything and want us to be their servants. So until we can change that and make the rich pay their fair share we will never get to the life we deserve.
We are in the "greed is good" life and have been since Reagan.
Jimmy Carter tried to reason with us, but....
Right. We ran him out of office and mocked his ethics and honesty! He was a nerdy not Clinton cool, but cool brings misbehavior and now, Trump corruption! I don't like extremes, but I'll take a nerd over tyranny any day. I love my country and its democracy, warts and all. I criticize it vehemently to force it and us to live up to the best we and it can be!
Thank you.
In the Trump universe, Gordon Gekko is the good guy… as long as he supports Trump… which he probably would. He might be head of the Treasury department.
I’d like to offer a contrasting opinion: “the rich” are not a single, distinct entity, but a collection of individuals with an income (or assets) above a certain defined threshold. We should appreciate those, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Reid Hoffman who are willing to share some of their wealth with the rest of us, while criticizing and forcing out of political power the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen.
Nah. The problem is great wealth itself, how it's accumulated, or inherited, and how little it's taxed. You mention billionaires sharing - there shouldn't be billionaires. There shouldn't be wealth even approaching a billion. Problem solved.
>Nah. The problem is great wealth itself, how it's accumulated, or inherited, and how little it's taxed.<
Nah. This is wrong. Europe has produced some perfectly spectacular fortunes. Bernard Arnault is worth over $150 billion. Sweden supposedly has more billionaires per capita than the United States.
But European voters opt for robust, effective safety nets and high quality public services. They maintain such societies despite the fact that they indeed allow for the existence of plutocrats, and have plenty of wealth concentrated in the hands of the super-rich.
(Mainly Europe does this by broad-based taxation, including VATs, payroll taxes and income taxation policies that aren't shy about making the "merely upper middle class" pay fairly substantial sums. In America, by contrast, Everybody Knows we'll have a national meltdown if professionals earning under $400K are required to pay more.)
I've lived in Sweden since 1983, I'm quite familiar with it.
You appear to be making a point about the political feasibility of taxing the rich more in the US. This may well be impossible, now or in any near term realistic scenario. However, my response was to a commenter apparently assuming that we need billionaires, we just need to distinguish nice ones that give a portion of their wealth away from those who give nothing or little. I maintain that no model or version of capitalism needs to tolerate billionaires, or even great sub-billion concentrations of personal wealth, or even extreme wealth inequality at all. The numbers can always be discussed, but theoretically as well on the basis of 20th and 21st century evidence, their is clearly nothing essential about personal wealth at that level. If the electorate is inclined, or more likely persuaded, to tolerate it, fine, but defending it as economically essential or otherwise justified strikes me as pretty silly. They have PR people and their political servants to spin those tales, we don't need to carry that water ourselves.
>I maintain that no model or version of capitalism needs to tolerate billionaires<
It's nice to maintain things, but it's not at all clear that a country would be better off without the kinds of incentives in place that, among other outcomes, produce a fair number of great fortunes. Like Sweden. And the US. Also, unless you can somehow convince all rich countries to outlaw billionaires at the same time, you're going to have a situation where some countries still allow them, which will inevitably lead to capital flight.
Fortunately, the country you live in is pretty sensible about such things:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-billionaires-per-capita-us-spotify-eurovision-b2542893.html#:~:text=Ek%20and%20Lorentzon%20are%20firmly,liberal%2C%20diverse%20and%20inclusive%20nation.
I like pstokk's point that accumulating billions is not *necessary*, and I think that greed elevated to a positive virtue is part of the problem. We don't need to "outlaw" the accumulation of wealth, but we need to change the tax structure so that the wealthy compensate society by contributing back, not just "providing jobs." The captains of industry find a Trump government agreeable because it is dedicated to removing safety and environmental rules that require them to take some social responsibility for their mess.
Pstokk- very good reply. At the minimum societies should provide income floors, below which no one allowed to drop. Used to work for a democrat party presidential candidate that advocated that, but this was fifty years ago and he was branded a socialist for his heresy even by other Democrats. That's the minimum a floor but we should have a fairly low ceiling too.
There you have it Mike. Ceilings and floors. There is a difficult, but more accurate name for that you speak of, that has been - I think overly complicated, and by design, ignored for nearly 50 years in this country, and that I think is the "standard of living" and a more accurately factored and defined data set to define "it." Cost of living hasn't been a reliable definition, and has been intentionally skewed politically, yet touted as the whole of a model and academics keep pushing it out there as some granite boulder of entire truth, but it's not - *and pathetically inadequate and a bigger source of growing structural resentment among those "feeling and living the lies" of any hope to attain any semblance of a mythical "American Dream" for the greater of our masses and they are no longer buying into what they live and see as the 'smoke' that academics keep trying to blow up their tails. Neo-conservatives, extremists, and the christian nationalist coalitions convinced them of that, and that it's 'all' entirely the fault of the tone deaf neoliberals and academics. I dare you to convince them otherwise; But that's the actual task at hand that those of some level of comfort shy away from like the plague. That level of comfort is precisely the standard of living, which has fallen precipitously over 50 years. The practical seeming 'wise one' that can be pointed to was Ross Perot, who foretold the nation that we were entering a "Race to the Bottom" - he was correct and a majority feels and lives it, wondering "So, how's that American dream workin' out for ya' now" ? The far right extremists had a convenient and correct "feeling" answer for them. Academics I find, repeat this error over and over again in the course of 'human affairs' and causes me to think of one of my very favorite idioms of all times, spoken for one, by Rabindranath Tagore who said "A mind all logic is like the knife all blade; It makes bleed the hand that wields it." Best paraphrasing I can recall off hand. I could also apply that axiom to any notion of economics - that is strictly a discipline of numbers, digits, and charting of theoretical models; It's not. There is some measure of politics within the art of it. Art in the sense of the medical 'arts' and medicine as a 'practice' and not a model of perfection. Anyway that would be more than enough of moi'. If you did, thanks for your indulgence.
The electorate in in the US is far more inclined to tolerate billionaires than socialists. The reasons are many, from racial divisions and cultural differences to the sheer size and wealth of natural resources that makes it harder to impose/get people to agree to limits. The lack of hereditary class/aristocracy has long meant that ordinary working people can indulge in the fantasy of becoming rich someday, ridiculous as that may sound to the educated upper middle class.
Taxation of inheritance and at 50% over $500,00 net year-over-year is how handling this shifted wealth from bottom to top could be implemented. I propose that Task Forces gathered to study and discuss and propose solutions is wildly needed for all the major problems currently neglected (environment; health - medical/mental; education and training to meet the AI effects; etc. etc).
Studying, researching these issues and having the top minds report and offer suggestions would be a good start. Then their ideas are taken with an open mind to town halls were everyone gets to mold the final draft of where we go from here! This would be a good, unifying effort, rather than all this fighting and chaos! We all need to decide and act accordingly that we will not allow tyranny in our country -- we will not live under a dictator no matter how entertaining his nonsense can be!
That’s really not the problem any more…to start with, we need to work more on basics, on people being able to relate to one another and get out of the warring tribes paradigm that dominates politics. Even if you knew exactly what to do, if people don’t trust you, if they think you are part of demonic force coming to take what little control over their lives they currently have, you will get shut down. Trust is the most basic building block of social order, and we have let it get shredded by social media and political polarization.
I recall one of the sons of the Patagonia Co founder saying something like: "Every billionaire is a policy failure." It has stuck with me.
The company that put all their for profit shares in a trust so the family can maintain control and avoid taxation? How magnanimous.
I don't mind if millionaires hive away some of their wealth to avoid higher tax rates.
Oops should have been Give not Hive.
what we need is fewer billionaires and more millionaires. If wealth were more evenly distributed, there would be more visions made manifest by more philanthropists and of course, we would still tax those millionaires to pay for needed social services like schools and medicine.
Piketty has the data on this. Capitalism is more stable with steeply progressive income tax rates combined with modest tax rates on wealth. Even the capitalists would be better off.
Yes, and the billionaires that remain should be prohibited from making political donations. But, really, we shouldn't have any at all. They do far more harm than good. They don't need the money in any reasonable sense of need. They just want to climb the Fortune leaderboard of the richest people on the planet. And they believe that their ability to make their billions is proof that they should be calling all the shots.
Have any of the billionaires explained why they need tax cuts, or how they justify having the workers and retirees, school children and veterans, who are already living from check to check? Can they share with us their secret for being able to sleep at night and live with themselves?
I’m curious what Prof. Krugman would say about this. He supports a heavily expanded American welfare state (and higher taxes on the very rich, especially billionaires), but a 100% wealth tax on assets over $1 billion?
Even if you ignored that the vast majority of billionaire net worth is in illiquid holdings like stocks, even if you ignored the suppressive effect on innovation by centimillionaires, how would you actually enforce that, logistically?
Historically, the top income tax rate in the US was much higher than it is now. The current tax rate on the ultra-rich is ridiculously low. That needs to be changed. This is not just an issue about fairness, it's also about political power. The Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision made it legal to flood our electoral system with "dark money" that now controls our electoral system. This situation must change if we expect to have a functioning democracy.
Another poster pointed out that Elvis Presley was in the top tax bracket, 95%at the time. Even young people have heard of Elvis, so this might make an impression on them, that higher tax rates were once accepted as normal.
This is just a canard. Almost no one paid those elevated marginal tax rates of the past because of how the tax system actually worked. Reagan supposedly cut all these taxes and the Federal percent of taxes taken in GDP hardly changed because of the loopholes that were closed.
Just look at the graph:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Point me to where the magical high tax period of the past was?
Your graph shows federal tax receipts as % of GDP. It says nothing about effective tax rates across income classes, which was the point raised.
Worth noting though, the highest tax rate tended to fall on ball players or pop stars who came into sudden wealth without the education or background to know about the need for lawyers and accountants. There were always tax shelters and whatnot that allowed people who knew what they were doing to avoid getting hit with the highest marginal rates. Still, overall rates were higher prior to Reagan…I when Mitt Romney ran for president and released his tax forms, he was paying an effective rate of around 15%. When his father George Romney (also a wealthy man) ran for president in the 70s, he was apparently paying an effective tax rate around 30%.
100% wealth tax over 100 million would be better. 100% income tax over 20 million.
You seem concerned about innovation. Do you have any evidence that centimillionaires are especially interested in or good at promoting innovation, individually? Or that they are better at funding it than say, funds or banks that make corporate investment decisions? Or for that matter better than governmental investment decisions in basic research? I suspect that the ultra-rich have bamboozled you a bit about how essential they are to making sure innovation happens, or that capitalism works well.
Any kind of wealth holding can be converted to liquidity if you must pay taxes.
Unless you take the definition of “rich” down into what in most places would be considered upper middle class, there simply isn’t enough extra money there to make a difference. Remember that roughly half of Americans don’t pay any income tax because they make too little. The current tax burden already falls differentially on folks with higher incomes.
Granted, the US is currently somewhat undertaxed by the standards of the developed world—where the average is about 33%-34% of income. However, moving to a taxation level consistent with the social safety net I think many people here would like to see is going to require a sacrifice from almost everyone. There isn’t a free lunch available here.
Taxation does not consist solely of the income tax on wages, though we are schooled to think it is the only tax that matters. We need higher taxation of capital gains and other forms of accumulated wealth. The argument for improving the safety net depends on the view that we actually get something of value, like a more stable society, for our taxes. Not just a "sacrifice."
I'm more concerned about unaccountable power than I am about revenue. This is another case of whataboutism.
I’m not saying they’re essential and unique in innovative capacity, just that money gained from a system where producing goods or services that people want is correlated with it.
Again, Krugman (and I) support higher taxes on the rich, but I suspect your absolute maximum would worsen, not better, the living standards of the median American.
Our system is set up to award graspy behavior right now. Europe has regulations regarding corporate governance and a VAT. US agencies have been bipolar for years, and regulations are meant to not be enforced half the time depending on who the executive is and the whims of the Parties. Our country is a walking donut, with a big whole in the middle where the center should be. While homes become unaffordable our infrastructure is left to fall apart, not because of wealth but because of bad regulation and preferential planning. I don't think we can become Holland, but we certainly can do better. CEOs have been working for themselves and not their customers for a long time; their compensation goes up even faster than service and the quality of life goes down. Unions combat the industries they need to thrive, and block necessary improvements in manufacture in favor of expensive manual labor, while politicians sell phony protectionism for votes. , That behavior gets a pass, but we get the satisfaction being cruel to the immigrant motel maid and laborer instead. If there is a cabal of rich folks, they should be more concerned than everyone else about improving this situation, because they have more to lose. Doubling down on corrupt behavior will not deliver an answer they (or I) would want.
You mean in contrast to the 1960s? Really? As far as I can see,, regulation and anti-trust are the main drivers of improvement in consumer products.
Again pstokk- makes good points. I argue above somewhere that innovation is likely to go away, at least not so long as we're divided into competitive nation states.
"...how would you actually enforce that, logistically?"
Since the Republicans have always made it their goal to under fund the IRS, we can't even enforce the current laws.
When Biden tried to increase agents, my Republican Senator Deb Fischer wrote, "80,000 IRS agents are out to get you!" Right, Senator -- maybe they're out to get you?
He did increase agents, and tax collection increased afterward. Now DOGE has cut those new hires (probationary!) and thousands more, with more firings planned. So revenue will go down this year and in the future.
Laurence - I strongly disagree with your supposition that higher taxes support "a heavily expanded American welfare state". America is a very large, diverse society, and to function properly, societies need infrastructure and rules, and ways of enforcing them and to provide for the population so that we maintain our society. I'm not lecturing, Laurence, because I'm certain that you understand this, but if you look at all the programs being cut because 'we're strongly in debt' (which isn't as simple as a single household operating on one or two incomes) it's clear that those aren't 'welfare'. Most of those programs are what has gotten the U.S. to it's position of prominence in the world, which we are now ceding to China, Europe, etc. We can debate how we handle the poor, the homeless, the underprivileged, but in now way is a billionaire paying their fair share, expanding a welfare state.
I don’t use that phrase negatively, as conservatives generally do. I think an expanded welfare state for America is just and humane.
If you're saying that expanding help to the poor eventually lifts everyone up, then yes, I hear you and it makes a ton of sense. I'll never understand how a nation purportedly so steeped in "Christianity" can be so cruel to those less fortunate. Maybe that's just me.
Finally, trying to deal with such complex subjects in a 'reply bubble' such as this is a disservice to trying to solve the issues of the day. Chris Hayes has a great book out "The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became The Worlds' Most Endangered Resource". The title speaks volumes, but you need to pay attention, read and digest what he's saying.
Laurence- you make some good points but I don't think we need fear a loss of innovation. Humans are hardwired for that and we would become a crowd of listless Eloi.
We can restrict the number of billionaires and multi-millionaires through taxation. And we can restrict the number of billionaires who make their fortune by choosing rich parents with an inheritance tax. But the effort to totally eliminate billionaires doesn't seem worth any potential gain. I'm okay with people building obscenely large fortunes as long as we tax them enough to support everyone in comfort.
The problem is that they don’t have enough money to support everyone in comfort Europeans support their welfare state with very high taxes on middle class people.
But we seldom see the Europeans fleeing here to get out from under their higher tax burdens. The ones that do are usually the oligarchs. We Americans live in a rude and barbarous land economically speaking, but it has for all of that allowed us to do some good things.
They don't necessarily. In fact there have been cases where they bought patents or purchased companies in order to squelch new technologies.
It is entirely possible for a single individual to be primarily responsible for creating a billion dollars worth of value. If you can provide $10 worth of value to 100 million people, that's a billion dollars, and the United States alone has 300 million people.
I don't think it's a failure of any kind if Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, or JK Rowling have become billionaires. What they've made is worth a lot more than that.
As for people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos who get rich because they started and owned a business that became huge, well, the market capitalization of Amazon is nearly two *trillion* dollars. Jeff Bezos owns about nine percent of that; I don't know how you want to divide the credit between everyone that's ever worked for Amazon for creating that much value, but even a small percent of two trillion can still be a heck of a lot of money.
See also: "How to Make Wealth" by Paul Graham
https://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
An employee doesn't get their marginal product, but the price required to ensure their employment. Above that you are talking about quasi rent, and it is a power struggle between consumer surplus and producer surplus. I' m on the side of consumer surplus in this battle. Besides don' t make the error of confusing price and value. Water and diamonds.
Yes. Remember marginal benefit, though: when you have almost no water, getting a little bit more water is extremely valuable. When you already have a lot of water, getting a little bit more isn't.
Maybe, that that doesn't mean he should get to capture the entire value.
and MELINDA GATES, TYLER SWIFT and other female philantrophists. Let’s not forget female contributors !
For heaven's sake, to take your cap off and tug your forelock in gratitude when His Grace tosses a guinea from his saddlebag as he canters by...can you grovel any more? Tax the rich as I am taxed, then we'll talk.
Exactly, philanthropy is not democratic.
We are trained from a young age to worship the rich. I suppose it is harder to unlearn for some than others...
Mark Twain, (I believe) said in the USA, the poor think of themselves as temporarily inconvenienced Millionaires. (Keep taxes low for when i regain my lands and titles.)
Add MacKenzie Scott!
Huge fan of Melinda Gates.
Thank you for making a nuanced reply. In social media comments running more than a few sentences are in a definite minority. Most commenters take, for simple brevity concerns, very simplistic responses- boo/hurrah ethics. Smith is good and Jones is bad or generalizations like all x are y. Some commenters feel that vehemence or profanity are the proper carriers of their sentiment.
No, not all rich people are bad and want to enslave us; not all people who oppose autocracies are good; not all people desire to live affluent lives and not all people think having lots of material possessions and enjoying libertarian paradises of personal freedom is the acme of human existence. Reality is muddled and messy, uncomfortably so but this social media world really doesn't reward long comments like this one. TLDR
I agree but too bad there are only a few😢
Just reading The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolfe. It’s very good. He does offer some other good ideas for addressing inequality besides taxing wealth, although he endorses that, and he’s nobody’s idea of a communist. A couple of things - reducing the length of copyright (Dean Baker also writes about this), changing rules around intellectual property, capital control agreements such as the agreement Janet Yellen negotiated before Trump was elected, which he scrapped, reforming executive pay, less emphasis on shareholder value. Lots more. It’s worth reading. Not finished yet.
Yeah, no. Billionaires should be taxed out of existence. Wealth should be redistributed to the public for universal healthcare, four-day work week, 1 year paid maternity/paternity leave, 6 weeks yearly vacation, free daycare. Instead, our president and his billionaire cronies dream of a techno-feudalism dystopia where we’ll live in company towns (Elon’s building one!) as modern day serfs.
We’ll disagree on that and that’s fine. My view is that your proposal sounds far better in ideal than in practice, and that the logistics of the government doing this would not leave us better — and likely worse — than most of our European (former?) allies struggling with persistent debt and stagnation. The most aggressive wealth tax in the EU pales in comparison to your own, and applies to a far lower threshold.
“The most aggressive wealth tax in the EU pales in comparison to your own, and applies to a far lower threshold.”
I don’t have a wealth tax so there’s no comparison. Likewise to the non-existent “threshold.”
Sounds like you are suggesting that we can’t have what other G7 social democracies manage because,
1) It can’t be done in practice (⁉️even though they ALL do it and our economy is bigger than theirs)
2) “It would not leave us better… than our allies…” (no one’s asking to be better off than our allies. The goal is to have what other rich countries have proven is possible to provide)
3) it would cause insurmountable debt and stagnation (tax cuts for the wealthy cause every-increasing debt. Universal healthcare has been shown repeatedly to be more efficient and cheaper than for-profit healthcare).
It can be done if the people want it done. Get rid of billionaires & we don’t have to worry which ones are nice and which ones are nasty. I don’t TRUST any of them. In the US, Power rightfully belongs to the people—not the oligarchs.
Well, which of those other G7 countries come even close to having a “no billionaires” tax policy? And how would you do it without an extremely high wealth tax, far greater than anything that exists in the world right now?
I don’t suggest we or any other nation adopt a ”no billionaires“ policy. I want for Americans to have what other G7 nations have. We don’t even have to have a “wealth tax,” although I’m not opposed to that per se. They just need to start paying like how the 99% of us are paying. And that goes for corporations too, many of which pay $0 or even negative taxes. They got the money, their CEOs don’t need such lavish compensation, they’ll still be rich f#ckers even after giving more to Uncle Sam.
Ok. I agree, but I also propose that the shift of wealth from the bottom to the top that has occurred in the U.S. over what the last 30 +/- years is unsustainable in a free democracy. And, the elites know it, and only Warren Buffet has spoken out against it. Go figure! His life is based on ideas of enduring and sustainability, and most others are short term focused, and play the "long" and the "short" simultaneously suggesting their only value and ethic is $$$$. And, that is exactly what we see today eroding our democracy, its institutions and now attacking its economic base.
And Melinda Gates and McKenzie Bezos.
George Soros took government money and used it to pay protestors and agitators, he has paid for fake indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples from other areas to go to reserve land in Canada that wanted to have development such as pipelines and cause a big scene infringing on their right to decide what happens in their lands. Bill Gates puts profits first and regularly pushes vaccines in 3rd world countries which don’t trust him and he wants to patent seed to have control of the food system. (Your choice in hero philanthropists is bizarre and off balance). The media is very controlled in America and only wants to promote certain changes that is why there is such division. If there isn’t money in it for a lobbyist group 🤷♀️ forget it, too much corruption. If there was less governmental corruption and wasteful spending America would be better off then most of Europe. You need better drug treatment centres and resources for your homeless, better education, and to stop letting big pharma set the agenda, how many natural cures are buried? And how much artificial crap are willing to let them feed you? European font allow most of the chemical in the good they eat real food and it’s one of the reasons there oberstes are way lower.
All pretty much laid out in Project 2025.
Just heard snippets of the "Meet the Press" interview with the orange turd billionaire. Never thought I would hear an American president bragging about policies that sound like those I heard about from former Soviet-bloc country residents!
Only a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc I was engaged in a discussion during a long car ride through Hungary in which my Hungarian business colleagues recounted how they had waited over 10 years in order to buy a car in Soviet-bloc Hungary. Similarly, a student I met in Slovakia was over the moon that they now were able to buy jeans. Was reminded of these very conversations when I heard the orange turd billionaire say that children in the country he governs only need two dolls or 5 pencils.
The billionaire President and his GOP are giving Americans a Soviet-style economy.
Spare yourself the rest of the interview, especially if you know anything at all about how finance and economic work. It was painful to listen to him spout blatant nonsense. For example he really does seem to think imposing steep tariffs will reduce inflation and that closing the trade deficit will automatically spur GDP growth and foreign investment. How does this man hold a Wharton MBA?
He doesn't have an MBA. Wharton also has an undergraduate program, and that's where he got a BS.
Yes. And a shitload of BS it was, too.
Thanks for correcting me. I believed his non-quite-lie.
One of his professors called him the dumbest g******d student he ever had.
That hasn't changed.
Trump's "BS" is a genetic trait. As opposed to the Bachelors degree from Warton, where it's debatable if it was even a participation prize.
It always helps to descend from a long line of Brick and mortar, and mix in a bit of grift.
I don't think he has an MBA. That was Dubya (Harvard), but apparently Daddy Trump managed to get U Penn to give Donny a BS degree with the name Wharton on it and he has played that for all it's worth.
Wharton has lost half of its "value" since people learned the Orangimodo's association with it
I’ve believed this all along. They will start selling the National parks as soon as this tariff outage calms a little so they can get the minerals. The oligarchs will buy, and I’ll be surprised if some of them aren’t Russian. An immigrant friend of mine who came from Russia after Glasnost says the shortages that are coming remind her of those times. She couldn’t buy milk for her newborn. Forget formula.
@Data Driven—your personal anecdote about Soviet-bloc Hungarians waiting over ten years to buy a car reminds me of a joke my father liked to tell; funny enough but we’re headed towards this endgame in the US, too:
A man walks into his local Transport Ministry office to order his new car. The bureaucrat behind the counter dutifully records all the information, then announces, “Comrade, your new car will be ready for pickup five years from next Thursday.” The customer quickly retorts, “Morning or afternoon?” The official replies, “Comrade, what difference does it make; it’s five years from now!” And the customer says, “Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.”
Good one. Thank you, David!
Your father's joke sounds like the backend of my own discussion with my Soviet-bloc Hungarian colleagues -- after hearing the story about waiting for the car, my U.S. colleague asked whether they had been able to choose the car color! I laughed so hard the tears were just streaming down my face!
I'm not willing to "let" middle class and poor Republican voters off the hook here. The 99% could overcome the 1% if the vast majority of us voted to do so. The problem is, we don't do so nationally.
Republican voter opposition to even such mild healthcare reforn as the ACA was often based on an opposition to "socialism" and fearmongering based on that term. Even if people like Elon weren't able to attempt to control politicians thanks to decisions like Cifizens United, IMO we'd still have some of the same problems.
IMO, there are two longstanding historical problems we still have yet to vanquish that prevent the US from moving toward a more equitable and prosperous socisty. One's slavery/racism, and the other's the incorrect belief in "rugged individualism."
Part of that belief in individualism has, at least since Reagan arrived in DC in 1980, morphed into selfishness and a "Why should you have/get something I don't?"
On a personal level, Americans willingness to help each other I don't think has necessarily diminished. But our willingness to help each other through government and taxes reached its height with JFK and LBJ, and died with Americans rejection of Jimmy Carter and embrace of Reagan and the "me!" decade of the 80s.
Really good post. Especially the last paragraph. The area I grew up in is very Trumpy today. Those folks aren't selfish though. They would drop everything to help someone in need whether they are Democrat, Republican, communist, atheist, gay, straight, furry, any category you can think of... but it's bc they are neighbors and friends and their kids are friends and they share the same community. But you're right, almost none of them want to do this through the govt. That's where they see what's "theirs" going to someone they consider "undeserving."
You’re being too generous.
At best, what you’re seeing is a childish version of citizenship, where people are happy to behave with decency within their local tribe, but choose not to think beyond that. I suspect you might be choosing to ignore some of the darker views of your neighbours too - have any of them been bothered by the deportations without due process, for example?
In any case, across the USA the pattern is the same. People are free to choose candidates who would try to improve their lives in meaningful ways (e.g. better healthcare, which in the USA is too expensive and cut off/poor quality for many people). But instead they chose Trump. This indicates a child-like ignorance of how government affects their lives.
The willingness to help others through taxes was there in the Eisenhower administration. Lets make America go back to the fifties in tax rates.
Trump should not push tax cuts. But of course he is!
he only wants tax cuts for the rich. He’s bled the middle class out already and now he’s just going to finish the job
Right.
The tragedy here is that what sounds like whining is actually true. There is, for example, no actual crisis funding Social Security. There is plenty of money available. It's just that somehow, within our current government, those in power refuse to tax the rich at the same rates at which they tax the poor, so the system is starved. Our system works as those in power intend it, to remove wealth from the poor and middle class and send it to the rich, so money for most of us runs short. And yet, in response to suffering, the poor and middle class continue to vote for the noisiest hate mongers, perpetuating the system.
As I tried to 'splain to my pals in the bar, 10% of a Roman centurion's wage is the same amount of money as 10% of theirs.
Huh?
We were in a bar Anne.
and well into your cups, it would appear.
Perhaps they were decimated?
We were solving man's existential questions as our compatriots in today's post are stridently endeavoring to do. With greater clarity I would add:-)
I was thinking along the same lines. I've never had much in the way of choices in my life. Collectively is a somewhat different story, but with reichwing media dominating the airwaves and the web, how can we get people to see reality and think?
I think a lot will see reality soon if the Republican congress gets rid of Medicaid to give the rich another big tax break. Don’t forget Medicaid pays for elderly and disabled in nursing homes. Nursing homes won’t stay open for free. Also all the disabled children on Medicaid who will help care for them for free?? The reality of what trump and his cronies are doing is going to put them all in shock!!
I hope they care.
They do not care.
Oh yeah. If that doesn't wake them up, nothing will.
Reichwing-perfectly said.
I can't honestly claim credit for coming up with that. I "borrowed" it from another commenter on another thread. I can't recall the handle now, but I have to give credit where credit is due.
And this has to become the message from dems. We have put up w zuck and musk and bezos et al for too long. They are buying our govt. it’s time we take it back. 50-75% taxes on them. Trickle down is just piss. It’s a lie. Always has been and we have gone extreme. We must reclaim. We did it after the robber barons and to must happen again.
I'd say they don't want us to and we let them. No one took a gun to Trump voters' heads and made them go MAGA.
In my experience, Americans pretending to be Canadian while traveling always backfires. At best Europeans find it odd and at worse, Canadians find it insulting. It’s best to be yourself. I find most people respond to your humanity, not your nationality.
A former CIA worker recommended that Americans avoid the mannerisms and dress patterns that identify them as Americans. 1) only American men regularly wear ball caps. 2) only Americans wear outer clothing with ads (like a t-shirt with "Coca-Cola" stenciled on it). In particular, don't wear Northface clothing. 3) American men stand with their weight on one leg. European men stand with their weight evenly distributed. 4) American tourists tend to congregate when they meet others. Even if you're following the first three recommendations, stay away from people who aren't.
The man was giving this advice to help American tourists avoid being targeted by pickpockets.
In addition to this, the photographer L.L. Rue told anyone who would listen "Don't wear camouflage!"
If following that advice makes you feel safer from pickpockets then you should by all means do it. I lived in London for a year, and found that keeping my valuables well protected and staying alert was the most reliable way of protecting myself against theft. It also focuses your attention on safety rather than spending mental energy worrying about your clothes.
People are going to clock you as a North American within 10 seconds of opening your mouth, so I wouldn't spend too much time concerned about how you hold your weight or whether you wear a ball cap or not.
"#1 only American men regularly wear ball caps" ... could be true in Europe, but I've never been there. In South and Central America and the South Pacific, plenty of men where ball caps ... probably because they're inexpensive.
I've been around Europe recently and while there are fewer ball caps they are now not uncommon.
"American men stand with their weight on one leg. European men stand with their weight evenly distributed." Never heard of or noticed that. Why?
Unionize!
Partially, but the uneducated keep putting these people into power. It started with Reagan. I like to think we are seeing an end moment of American capitalism right now. Reaganomics has been the economic paradigm our society has rested on for 45 years now. The US was a New Deal/Keynesian society from WWII-1981 (when Ronnie took over), and there's a reason those days were great days, Pax Americana. It's been shit since for a reason.
The tragic thing is that most of those rich folks honestly feel that they are doing more than their part to support our society and that anybody at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile is there because they choose to be or are simply inferior. They have convinced themselves of their virtue and make no connection whatsoever between the improved living conditions elsewhere and a choice by that country's wealthy class to support that better lifestyle. Like Musk, many of the wealthy in the US do look at empathy as a failing, not a virtue.
>It isn’t that we wouldn’t like to live better but the rich won’t let us.<
Please. This is a naive view. Do you really think rich people in other countries are so much nobler and altruistic than America's? Sure, many of our rich are real stinkers. But many aren't so: the United States has developed the world's most powerful array of philanthropic organizations, largely spearheaded by its wealthy.
No, Paul Krugman is right: the decision not to live better isn't because "the rich won't let us." It's because we keep electing the wrong kinds of politicians.
Ineffective government isn't an inevitably. It's a choice. And it is within the power of Americans to make a very different choice as to the kind of government policies we live under.
Today's very rich, in particular the tech billionaires like Musk & Andreesen, are not like the earlier philanthropists. With a handful of exceptions like Gates and Mackenzie Scott, they are not supporting cultural institutions or donating to build hospital wings, etc. They want more and are not inclined to give any of it away.
The rich want us to be serfs.
that's what Unions are for.
What does this have to do with the differences Paul notes, which seem to have more to do with urban design and the welfare state?
He is describing advantages to the whole country made possible by taxation system that keeps more money in "ordinary" people's hand AND which allows their governments to afford policies that focus on the common good.
Would Americans today vote for an expensive public school system such as we have if it were on the ballot for the first time today? For public libraries if someone came up with idea today and we hadn't inherited them? I don't think so: there would be talk of socialism and "if you can't afford to educate your own children why did you have so many?"
We have been gaslit for decades about how government can supply services that MOST of us would benefit from. It's always "the market can meet that need more efficiently" -- which it can for those who can afford to pay for it. Notice the key word, MOST, not ALL. People are okay with Social Security and Medicare and don't call them "socialist" because everyone gets them, even the rich who don't need them and even homemakers who didn't work outside the home.
But target a program toward the poor or the working poor? All of a sudden our tax money is helping the "undeserving."
I met a nurse from Idaho who was opposed to SNAP because she saw mothers using food stamps to buy junk food for their kids. Using "her tax dollars" to give their kids poor nutrition.
Idaho and a few other states are trying to get the government to exclude candy etc. from being covered by SNAP. But these are states that are already trying to cut elegibility for this program, and which probably don't think it worthwhile to help educate the public about better food choices.
Having recently returned from a Dutch vacation I can agree that life seems better compared to how we live it.
Visiting an “Oude Kerk” I was asked where I was from and I said “Canada”. The person replied “Oh, one of my favorite countries!” I then ‘fessed up and said “really I’m from the USA but some folks back home suggested we pretend otherwise.” The person said “You should say you are American. I believe in God. Things will all work out. Have faith.”
I was very moved by the sympathy and by the encouragement.
Indeed nearly everyone in The Netherlands speaks English. Not always well, but understandable. This is the case in many Western European countries although less so the more southern you go. That’s because in countries like France, Italy, Spain and to some extent even in Germany, they dub movies and shows, opposed to subtitles.
Thanks for your kind words Dr. Krugman. I have lived about 30 years in the US, although I travel back to my native Netherlands about 6-8 times per year. Funnily enough, I have followed and read Krugman since 1990, being an Econ undergraduate exchange student.
Very worried about what’s going on now here, although in a way also interesting. Growing up in post WWII Netherlands, which was heavily scarred from occupation by Germany, we studied the Nazi period intensely. In a way, all these many hours of reading, film, and studying are coming to life, as scary as that is.
My first experience, in Utrecht, was that I quickly stopped the "Excuse me, do you speak English" preface after I sensed a facial reaction I interpreted as, "Of course; do I look stupid?"
Paul: my in-laws were Dutch. My wife speaks Dutch fluently. But the Dutch speak great English. Which makes me ask why can’t more Americans be bilingual? If we took learning language seriously, and taught a useful language like Spanish starting in elementary school, we could be bilingual.
Yes, most people in the Netherlands speak some English. So PK probably could have chatted up someone. A Dutch person told me that everyone speaks English because no one in the rest of the world speaks Dutch.
Exactly. They go a hundred miles and no one speaks their language. Dutch is kinda like German though.
Well, it's been a separate language since the 11th Century (derived from Low German). Speaking "germanized" Dutch/Flemish is a long-standing joke.
I spent a couple of months on Duolingo picking up a few Dutch words and phrases before going to the Netherlands. The people were charmed that anyone would bother. I do not have many useful phrases but I could say some of the basics.
Not for lack of trying though- Bahasa Indonesia still carries strong influence from the colonial era.
We Americans are not bilingual because we don’t have to be. If English ceases to be the language of commerce and science internationally, then (some) Americans will learn other languages. (I am bilingual and dabble in a few more, but I think it’s fun. Many do not).
I went to grad school in Europe. There were tv programs from multiple countries in multiple languages. Compared to the US countries are small. Most people spoke more than 2 languages
Sorry, my finger hit send. Almost everyone spoke or at least understood English and 2or 3 others. My point is it was both easier and more necessary to become multilingual. We haven’t needed to do that here. Although many people speak Spanish and English.
The reality is it is far more useful for Dutch people to speak English than for Americans to speak just about any foreign language. Even Spanish—while obviously quite useful in many parts of the United States—isn't the requirement for higher end jobs that knowing English is for millions of people worldwide.
The fact is Charles - being Dutch and speaking 7 languages- that if your brain learn how to use a second language, other than your native language, you easily pick up a 3rd, 4th, 5th and so on. Language is music. And if you are only a bit musical, learning a new language is easy. And fun. Try it. One sentence a day. And 10 new words a day. And find out which oral muscles are used in that language. And how is the intonation (or melody). It enriches your life and sharpens your brain. 😉
I don't think learning another language in school actually works unless you're highly motivated.
Years ago college friend married a Dutch guy and moved to there. She mentioned that Dutch people all speak several languages. I asked why. She said think about it. Me: Duh.
You can drive for a week in the US and still be in English speaking US. Other than northern teir people maybe going to English speaking Canada, most Americans don't ever get to other countries or have passports.
Also we lucked out with the British Empire, post-WWII occupations, etc. English is the defacto international language. In Japan all the street signs have English subtitles, and the screen on the buses showing upcoming stops too. Not helpful to someone from some other writing system but pretty great for us.
I grew up in East Tennessee. There is no language other than English that would have been useful there. Of course, some people would claim that English was a foreign language there (I had to act as interpreter when a fellow student from New Jersey tried to understand a gas station attendant from Sevierville).
Perhaps they speak American, not English there.
When my 2 sons were in grammar school (kindergarten to 5th grade)
Let us not forget the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which leveled most of the city. They built the city back much grander than before, and mostly fire proof, afterward. The US isn't Russia, Hungary, or El Salvador. After the last embers of Trumpism are extinguished - they eventually will be - we can build the US back with a stronger firewall of democracy. That's the light at the end of the tunnel.
What about the millions of Americans who voted for Trump second time round. They’re not going anywhere soon.
“We”? Maybe my grandchildren… more likely my great-grandchildren
Europeans disagree with our government, but gosh they love Americans.
They do love (most) Americans. And many Europeans want to move here if they could.
Ummm… sorry, sorry Anne-Marie, but we live in Belgium, all my family are Dutch, and we love taking trips to friends in all the countries around about (we’ve just come back from a morning visiting a dear friend in Germany). Comparing notes, in all the years we’ve not met anyone in the EU (who wasn’t a shell-shocked refugee passing through) who wanted to live in the US. In truth, you most often hear people saying they have no interest even in visiting (and this was before Trumpet); although most people would be far too polite to tell you that to your face. We ourselves love our American friends, and always found it interesting to visit the States, but we wouldn’t ever ever ever want to live there, even without the Felon and his Friends. The thing is, for all the interest of places like NY and the beauty of places like Maine… well, they don’t actually make up for strip malls and cars the size of tanks and Fox TV and plastic surgery and no healthcare and no childcare and GUNS everywhere: not to mention the religious devotion to political parties. And we would miss the deep interest in philosophy and books and history etc: it’s not absent in the US, but it doesn’t permeate everything down to the bone as it does here.
Quality of life is about joie de vivre, which you get in abundance when you have less ‘stuff’ and more society: in Portugal and Spain and Italy and Greece and so on. Now, it IS hard to have the long dinner conversations we adore here in Northern Europe (we’re in Belgium) without everyone around the table beginning to express a wistful desire to move to one of THOSE countries … 😸
But the moment you get rid of the Maggots, we’ll be back to visit you, with pleasure! (At the moment, they’d not let us in anyway, I suspect).
XXX
It's rude to call people housfly larvae. I go with the very respectful "MAGAts."
That is the fantasy that Americans cling to. They think everyone wants to move there and therefore it must be the most wonderful country in the world. When in fact, the USA serves as a warning against “letting things get out of hand”. We use it as an argument in any discussion, like plastic surgery, “do you want American situations?”, large clumsy houses, “do you want American situations?”, guns “do you want …..?”, you get the drift. Sorry, reslity is harsh and Europeans are polite to US visitors, more polite than honest.
I don’t understand your “believe in God” statement. I mean no offense but this is a human caused debacle. Surely if there was a God, wouldn’t God have done something long, long ago. You know before the Crusades, Nazis, Trump. If God didn’t/hasn’t done anything to stop the horrors past/present, why would anyone believe in one. Honestly, I mean no offense.
The comment was made to me from a person in the Netherlands while standing in a church. We are, as of today, all entitled to our own beliefs, or lack thereof. This could change with the current administration.
I meant no disrespect.
I think it is possible to have faith that life can be better, can be made better, whether it is from "God" or human interactions.
Dear LJ: Please don’t lie and say you’re Canadian, especially in the Netherlands. I’m Canadian. My dad and his brother spent a couple of years in the 1940s fighting in Europe, and one of my mom’s brothers lies in Dutch soil. We are proud to have helped the Dutch regain their country from the Nazis, and their gratitude to us is humbling. When you lie about your nationality, you cheapen that.
Also, your country’s president and government is currently engaged in economic war against us and has undermined decades of cooperation and partnership. If you’re not proud of your country’s current actions, I’d suggest you do everything you can to change your country, or leave it. Pretending to be Canadian is childish and dishonest.
Message received.
Watching your PM school our “president” is heartwarming.
Our parents and grandparents secured the future of the free world and it was never my intention to cheapen their successes and their sacrifices.
Thanks for understanding.
I hope this encounter was the last time you lied to strangers about where you are from. Please discourage others from doing so, especially amongst the Dutch, Belgians and in Northern France. That's tantamount to "stolen valour".
Thank you for listening.
Message received.
One can be an American and humbly admit it!
I found the same kind of kindness when I was there. The Dutch people are cool and have other issues to think about other than the crazy US!
What a great comment.
"one unfortunate thing about the Netherlands, from my point of view, is that people speak Dutch" - I well remember visiting the Netherlands in 1980 or so, on the cheap, with a friend from England. At one point, we needed to cash in some traveler's checks, so we found a bank and joined the queue inside. I rather sheepishly asked if anybody there spoke English, and the guy in front of us in the queue turned round and looked at me quizzically before replying "But we all do." I learned something that day.
A similar experience: In 2017 I was to attend a four-day technical meeting in Amsterdam. Even though that conference would be conducted in English, for two months I meticulously worked through an online course in Dutch. Yet whenever I attempted to use my Dutch (e.g., in a restaurant), people immediately switched to English. The only place where the other person did *not* switch to English was in the post office in Brussels, Belgium, where I stopped before proceeding on to the Netherlands.
All the world over, people take pride in being able to understand other peoples’ speech - it’s a fine thing, for eavesdropping and watching films.
Same happened to me in France, when trying to say something in French, only to hear "can you say that in English instead?" I'm still not sure whether to find that polite or not.
It’s the French.
No, it wasn’t bring polite or accommodating. I had the same experience in Paris some years back.
And I say that with affection.
Americans boast of speaking a single language - and badly, at that.
And in all the time they've been boasting that they speak a single language, it has never been even remotely true.
But we could legitimately boast that we didn’t have a national language…or a national religion either. Both of which the regime wants to change. They wreck all that is good.
They are also targeting foreign language majors in college. Several of the outrageous demands made against universities recently have included ending a long list of majors, among which I was surprised to see Spanish. To a former language major this is damn depressing.
Learning another language exposes you to the other culture snd increases understanding. But too msny Americans aren't intetested.
The lack of spelling and grammar skills in comments at sites that a broad range of Americans read is stunning. Almost always right wingers. Constant mistakes I learned about by about the fourth grade.
We write what we say the same, but as for speaking it, not a chance. I’ve heard people talking in Alabama in an accent that I can barely understand.
Years ago I was in a restaurant in Brussels where a group sitting next to us were speaking various languages. One of them suggested they all speak English, which they did. It made me 'proud' to think ours is a 'universal' language. It also makes me sad that so many of us can only speak one language.
I’m kind of proud but mainly grateful that English has become the language for sharing, the “universal”. We are lucky lucky lucky for that. The downside being that some are arrogant and demanding about that both here and even abroad. Also I wonder if learning another language is experienced as more of a drudge here, because it is not the norm, and not begun early, when the brain is primed to take in words.
I agree we're lucky, but it's also made us fairly complacent. I'm envious of those who can speak multiple languages and I love seeing little kids learning other languages in school. I'm trying to learn Spanish because I think it's a fairly widely-used language.
The reason English is the universal language is because Britain subjugated so many parts of the world and turned them into colonies. Americans were once colonial subjects of the British crown.
I believe they all spoke English thanks to Hollywood, which brought them into contact with the language from early on. The Germans used to be not nearly as proficient at that time, because their Hollywood movies were dubbed, not subtitled like in the Netherlands.
You might be proud that their English language proficiency is a product of the US :-).
The Dutch don’t speak English because of Hollywood, they speak English (and often many other languages) because of trade. They live in a tiny country that is surrounded by many other languages. French, English, German, Danish, Swedish—all within an area about the size of New England. It’s not uncommon for the Dutch and Flemish Belgians to speak four or five languages.
When I was in Amsterdam I had a young tour guide who switched seamlessly between dutch, english, french, german, italian and Japanese!
Sorry, Rainer, but this is a ridiculous comment. The Dutch speak English (and other languages) because they have an education system that values the teaching of other languages from an early age. I won’t presume to speak for the Dutch, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t make this policy choice so they could watch freakin’ American movies.
So true for my generation. We learned British English, German and French at highschool. And at certain schools Latin and old Greek as well 😂. Nowadays kids also learn english from social media as well as school
They also pick up BBC TV broadcasts from Britain (for free) and rebroadcast with subtitles.
And the intenet, and pop songs. Younger Germans today throw whole English phrases into conversation all the time.
We start learning English at a very early age in Germany. School English might not be the best, but it gives us a good starting point and base.
If you live in Germany, you must know that "Schulenglisch" is kind of pejorative.
It implies that your English is barely sufficient to ask for directions and order in a restaurant.
Well, I might to differ. It served me very well so far.
Nice idea, and I'm sure it's at least partly true. However, the main reason so many people in the northern European seaboard countries speak English so well is down to England/Britain being very close by, and the LW and MW domestic BBC radio broadcasts from England having penetrated well into Europe for so many years, bringing independent and objective news to millions.
These days, such broadcasts have almost disappeared, but of course teaching of English in the schools, and the universal availability of the (still predominantly English-language) internet now plays a huge rôle in keeping the language alive and flourishing in these countries. Indeed, I've heard that in Denmark, the widespread use of English is threatening to relegate Danish to a second language status!
So, the US as a source? Nope, not so much.
A musician in the US who was a child in Laos says he learned his English from Beatles recordings.
Oh dear. You start out from a false premiss, i.e. that "northern European seaboard countries speak English so well."
This was simply not the case in 1980. Germany is a northern European seaboard country too, and in the 1980s the Germans did NOT speak English "well" by any reasonable standard. The experience that you had in the bank? That would not have happened in Germany at the same time.
I should know because I am German and I am old enough to remember the 1980s. I went to University back then. All lectures were in German. It was still acceptable to list German editions of articles and textbooks in your term paper bibliography, even if their original language was English.
Bookstores didn't carry English-language books, not even popular ones. I remember how I had to wait several weeks for my copy of Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach". If you wanted to read The New York Times, you were reduced to a slimmed-down version called "The International Herald Tribune" from large railway stations at a quite inflated price.
So no, English language proficiency was NOT ubiquitous in northern European seaboard countries, and any explanation why the Dutch spoke English quite well in 1980 should ALSO account for the absence of proficiency on the side of the Germans during the same decade.
Completely agree about Germany and English, I lived in West Berlin throughout the 1980’s, where even there most stores and banks were completely German speaking. I miss the IHT, it was nice to have something in one’s hands versus on a tablet. These days I read the NRC (formerly NRC Handelsblatt) as after all these years in the Netherlands I speak Dutch, but when I arrived here 30+ years ago before the internet, I found having the IHT comforting and in those days it was still a joint effort between the Washington Post and the New York Times. My son did secondary school here in the Netherlands and took classes in French, Spanish, Germany, English as well as Dutch. I think everyone at his school had a working knowledge of at least five languages at graduation back in 2001.
My brother and I toured Bavaria in 1990. I can't recall meeting any local who spoke English. Fortunately, both John and I speak a little German.
I was in SW Germany in 1980. All my college - 20s aged cousins and their friends all spoke English relatively well, but their parents did not speak any. My cousin told me to stop speaking German even though I had it in college. They had had years of English classes in school by then.
Today younger people in Germany throw whole English phrases in conversation with each other all the time.
Around most of the world, the international language once was French, except in the British Empire, which was huge, if you recall. The second language of the Empire was English, a the largest country was India (second largest population). After WWII, English began to emerge as the dominant second language, and with the economic might of the US, international business began to be conducted in English. Hollywood movies coincided with that trend, but was not the impetus or primary cause. Teaching English as a second language has been practiced virtually on every continent since. That's why international programs like USAID and everything else DOGE has killed are important to America's place as a model for the world.
They all learn English in school, from a young age.
The Dutch speak English because they are a county to 15 million people and know that no one speaks Dutch. This was explained to me when I lived here for some time…
So, they take it upon themselves to be bi-lingual, at least in French because of Belgium is Flemish/French. But most Nederlanders also speak German and of course English.
They are a well educated and sensible country. And they rides bikes everywhere. Not much better than that.
Well, the place is really flat.
We may have to forget learning about other cultures through FILM.
Isn’t Trump planning to put a heavy tariff on foreign films?
Perhaps that is true for the Germans, but people living around the North Sea always had good trade relations with the British, so they spoke British English even before the War.
Edited.
So your theory is that Germans are NOT people living around the North Sea, or what? Or that the language proficiency of merchants somehow miraculously infected the rest of German society?
Sorry for being dense, but I was born and raised in Hamburg, which is as anglophile as it gets in Germany. Rest assured I have a very good idea what the language proficiency of my compatriots was in the previous century.
My theory is that within Germany, until the end of the Reich, proficiency in English was far and apart, and of course the Hanseatic cities (like Hamburg) were nothing like the rest of Germany due to their history. The same goes for ex-DDR until the Wall came down.
But the point is, even though Hamburg may have been somehow privileged thanks to trade, ordinary people there still didn't speak English like the Dutch did. And that needs an explanation.
I'm honestly baffled why commenters here react so allergic to the suggestion that undubbed Hollywood movies did some good for English proficiency abroad. I find it intuitively plausible, and so did the Dutch author whose theory this was in the first place.
I agree to such an extent that English language films with subtitles (undubbed) has eased/helped the English language become more widespread, but mostly people speak more/better English, even though sometimes with local accent, because they were taught in school from second or third grade.
The German language was previously Lingua Franca in most of Continental Europe north and east of the Alps. After eight decades of English influence on the German language, many words in German are anglifications, which sounds terrible in the ears of older citizens.
By the way, it is still difficult to find someone in rural Germany that speaks comprehensible English, they prefer to speak German.
It would be part of my "theory" that Germany as a whole could not be included in a "European northern seaboard" grouping as far as English language abilities would be concerned, notwithstanding the fact they have a fair amount of coast there. I put it down to stubbornness on the part of Germans who, on the whole, resisted the introduction of English as a "second language" for a long time. I've lived in Bavaria for 35 years and I've never assumed that people here can speak English, even though a fair few can.
Dear Paul, Thank you for being so nice to us - hope to return the favour. As a Dutchman living in Leiden I can assure you that what you saw is one side of the medal: the heritage which took us some 2000 years to build and which, at least until today, we cherish. There is, however, another side to, with people suffering worse conditions than you might have experienced in Leiden's historical center. And it is a pity you had no opportunity to discuss our view on global politics; we might have told you that indeed we are very worried about the state of things in your country, but also in Ukraine, Yemen, Congo and, above all, Gaza - but also about the national politics of The Netherlands, in which fascism and racism are growing rapidly. Let's just say I can only hope that we will keep cherishing the heritage you so enjoyed. Have a safe trip back!
Well, perhaps we (the U.S.) can be a warning for how quickly things can get very bad indeed. Of course, we had a lot of "help" from Russian propaganda and the international fascist movement. To the extent your country can close or expose digital loopholes, you may fare better. I do hope so!
Don’t exaggerate! In the Netherlands, as in many European countries, we can have small far right or far left parties. But they will never reach a majority. In the UK and in the US small far right groups took over a whole national party (Tories and Republican), and were not recognised as becoming far right. At the same time, newspapers and opinion magazines in both countries kept pointing the finger at Europe and warning against neo-nazis whilst denying the fascist and racist tendencies in their own countries. Now we see Trump/Republican/Musk take-over with explicitly eugenistic, authoritarian reality.
Yep. From the Netherlands as well. You are not wrong. Oftewel: echt, hè?
☺️
Glad you liked my home town, Mr Krugman. Next time, let's share a beer! Best regards, Roland de Ligny, Leiden, Netherlands
Your experience abroad is something that should be repeated by every American, so they can have a standard against which to compare their political decision-making in the US. It might cost $0.5% of a tax levy on billionaires - but will be repaid many times!
... a world-traveled Canadian
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of Americans travel abroad, and even fewer take the opportunity to visit Europe. I read that a large number of U.S. citizens don’t even have a passport.
True, but think about the cost and time required of Americans to visit anywhere other than Mexico or Canada. Most Americans don't have the money or time to make such trips. In contrast, the French, for example, get 4-5 weeks of vacation a year. And many Europeans live a 2-5 hour drive from at least one and sometimes and sometimes several countries. When I lived in Germany people thought nothing of driving to the Netherlands for a weekend at the beach. That was not a big outlay of money. --But I take your point: compared to Europeans, Americans as a whole are not cosmopolitan.
They have trains all over the place and a lot of HSR there too.
We don't use the word, but by "not cosmopolitan" I think you might mean "provincial."
Yes, and that is a reality we need to change.
I'm afraid that after the Muskrat gets through cutting staff, it's going to take people a long time to get a passport.
I'm hoping that I'm wrong, since I'm submitting an application for renewal tomorrow.
Why does a Canadian say "we" in this sentence?
I know we (I'm a Canadian too) would like US folks to have passports so that they can visit us.
A secondary effect is that they would have enough credentials to vote, even after proposed voter suppressing ID requirements.
I should have mentioned that historically, Canada has not required US citizens to have a passport to enter Canada. But effectively we now do because we know that they cannot return to the US without a passport!
(I would guess that this US requirement is unconstitutional but arguing with customs and border officials of any country is foolish and dangerous.)
I'm sure that it's unconstitutional in the sense that there's nothing in the US Constitution about it, but (despite what some people believe) that doesn't make it unconstitutional. If the Constitution does not forbid something, that something is constitutional. It's the same as saying that, if there's no law against something, that something is legal by definition.
I don't see how they would have credentials to vote, if they have US passports, but I may be missing a key point here...
It appears that Republican state governments are trying to tighten voter ID requirements to suppress the vote. I would guess that a passport would qualify since it is government issued photo-ID. But maybe not since it does not include the address of the holder.
And even many who do travel internationally stay in some 'bubble' such as with a primarily American tour group or at an all-inclusive resort and never really interact with citizens of the country they visit.
As you say, Barry, something that needs to be changed.
True- has to involve participation...
America decided 45 years ago that we are prepared to pay any price, bear any burden in pursuit of lower taxes on the wealthy.
The "we" in your sentence refers to the 95%, not all of the "we." And most of the "we" did not know that they were agreeing to that bargain. Reagan referred to welfare queens, and white poor people, white working class people and white middle class people were okay with leaving the "undeserving" black people behind -even if poor white people suffered along with them.
It’s not that most of us *choose* to live lives that are nastier, more brutish, and shorter. It’s an easily-conned sizable minority, steeped in ignorance, that won’t *allow* us a choice.
I think the real motivation for your sizable minority is that they have been convinced they need to sacrifice their better lives so those same benefits can be denied to the bad "other people" who don't deserve them.
The people on top have split the rest of us into teams and set us against each other to distract us from realizing we're all losing together. They don't really care about the outcome as long as they can pocket the money they don't have to spend to provide better lives for the rest of us.
Thanks to them, class warfare happens within, not between, classes. And they get to entertain themselves by watching, plus they can buy that second yacht they always wanted.
I have considered moving to Europe and at one point discussed this with some MAGA family members. During the discussion they commented that at least Europeans get something from their governments and from the taxes they pay.
...and yet these same lifelong Republican voting, now MAGA family members benefitted from US ag support, free school lunches, PELL grants for their kids and despite this always vote against any US politician who supports any kind of safety net or anything akin to European type policies.
The motivation must be as you describe, Mobiguy. Otherwise, my brain hurts trying to rationalize their actions given their words.
Trump won the popular vote
An argument I’ve heard from Republicans I know is that European countries could and can afford to have effective social safety nets and lots of other “nice things” because they didn’t pay their fair share for NATO and the US provided their security. I feel like the math doesn’t add up for that argument but would love to read an economic analysis of this theory.
Think I've said this before, but worth repeating, GOP doesnt math.
Countries like Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark have low abortion rates. Why, are they more religious, more moral than the US? No, they invest heavily in reproductive education and birth control. There's an inverse relationship between abortion and access to birth control, scientifically proven in fact, but damn, there's another thing the GOP doesn't do ... science.
There's so much we could coulsld learn but choose to remain ignorant. So we continue to pay more for Healthcare while receiving poorer outcomes and generally worse health than other nations. Our children are hungry, under cared for, under educated and risk death by gun at high rates. All in the name of being Great.
YouTube has examples of sex education videos aimed at Norwegian schoolchildren - which are eye-openingly graphic even by British standards and pretty much unimaginable in a US context.
But they’re also clearly motivated by the utmost seriousness of purpose, and the statistics speak for themselves, not just in terms of much lower teen pregnancy rates but later first sexual experiences in general because they have a much better idea of how to ensure that it’s truly meaningful. Knowledge genuinely is power.
My eighth grade science teacher was fired for giving us a "birds & bees" talk.
And then the fact that people in the mentioned countries in Europe are able to talk civilised about sex and reproduction. It's also not a financial disaster to have unplanned children in these countries.
How we treat our children is the greatest warning sign of all ... while professing 'family values' out of the other side of our mouths.
It turns out that the Norwegian sex education series that I mentioned is no longer on YouTube with English subtitles, almost certainly because of Anglo-Saxon prudishness.
But a sample episode (thankfully still with English subtitles) can be seen here - https://tube.grin.hu/w/91eceec5-ecca-4fda-9691-034b89a418a8 - and although I have to flag up that certain parts are decidedly NSFW, it's worth adding that the target audience is eight to twelve.
And, in all seriousness, once you've got over the initial surprise as to just how upfront it is, why not? I had my first sex education class at ten, and while in retrospect I recognise I was better informed than many, I'd have honestly welcomed something as detailed as this, especially in the pre-Internet era where it was much, much harder to get hold of concrete info outside biology textbooks and novels well outside my age range (not that that stopped me).
Since I never had any sisters it took me well into adulthood to grasp how women function (in lack of a better word). This was in old analog days, when one could move through life with relatively few challenges to one's World view.
The teachers at the time were quite "vanilla" on the subject of teaching about sex and reproduction, and I don't blame them, at the time there wasn't proper educational material available, so many times they had to conceptualize from their own experiences without being too specific. It's not easy.
I still remember one of the older male teachers telling that's important to wash thoroughly or smegma will begin to smell. As a teenager I wondered whatever he was talking about, later in life: "Aha!".
I'm guessing that any respectable sixth grader today has watched some intenet porn. I know I would have. It's not hard to find. And also factual information about everything to do with sex and reproduction.
Of course, but this is why it's arguably even more important to have a programme of intelligent contextualisation in schools - and, again, the Netherlands and the Scandinavians are way ahead of Anglophone countries in general and the US in particular, by stressing the emotional and relationship aspects that you're not going to get out of porn.
If you leave it up to the kids to "do their own research" (as a conspiracy theorist would urge), they'll undoubtedly do that, but precisely what they end up researching - because they understandably don't know any better - may well seriously stunt their intellectual and emotional growth in the longer term and make it much harder for them to form meaningful relationships.
Porn will only teach/show the mechanics of sex and never get into details with whatever comes after ejaculation. Pornography is a fantasy world favoring certain views on sex.
I can certainly understand why many young people today are having problems communicating with people of the other sex, if all they know is what they've absorbed via porn.
It all comes down to the political will to spread wealth down and across through widely beneficial taxation. We simply don’t have it because of widespread ignorance and the overwhelming legalized bribery of our political class.
Is it Political will or Social will? The political will is currently owned by the 'Merchant Class' as James Madison noted in Federalist Papers, which could and is exerting it's wealth to wag the dog. And religious will, though banned from contributing to politics in the constitution, thru Citizen's United, is also busily buying unconstitutional influence, drowning out the Will of the People.
Oh to hear what Madison and Hamilton would say about today's Federalist Society.
Now, allow me to offer a broader perspective.
The three pillars of U.S. global power—(1) the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency, (2) U.S. leadership in global trade institutions such as the WTO, and (3) its central role in NATO—do not merely entail costs and commitments. They have also brought the United States enormous strategic and economic advantages that no other country enjoys to the same extent.
The dominance of the dollar has enabled the U.S. to borrow cheaply, provided American companies with unparalleled access to global capital markets, and fueled domestic consumption. Americans are able to use their greenbacks and credit cards to purchase the best goods from around the world—often without having to worry about the balances in their accounts. Why? Because confidence in the dollar is supported not only by U.S. economic strength, but also by the global presence of over 750 American military bases, which reinforce the perception of geopolitical stability.
The U.S. is the biggest winner of globalization. Without it, American firms and banks could not operate so extensively across the globe, nor could the U.S. attract such volumes of capital, talent, and high-quality goods. This is one key reason why so many innovative and powerful companies are born in America.
These three pillars—especially U.S. leadership in NATO—have also secured decades of loyalty from allied nations, including European countries and Japan. In conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not just U.S. forces who fought—NATO allies stood beside them, underlining the political solidarity that comes with shared security commitments.
In this light, the U.S. global strategy can be seen not as a cost burden, but as a leveraged, long-term strategic investment. It has paid off not only in economic and political influence, but also in soft power—a form of leadership built on global respect and admiration, not coercion, as seen in more authoritarian models such as Russia’s.
What should the U.S. do now?
Rather than retreating from global leadership, the U.S. should invest more domestically—especially in:
- Public education,
- Retraining programs for those who have lost out in globalization (helping them gain the skills for jobs in emerging tech sectors), and
- Social security systems that cushion transitions and promote stability.
You're correct. The benefits far exceed the costs. And today, Trump is disrupting 80 years of American positive relations with most nations, benefitting both ends of the relationship. Trump is destroying in 100 days what America has worked to build for more than my entire lifetime. Are there strings? Yes, but the majority of the ties work to the good of both sides.
By moving to universal health care we would save money and improve outcomes...how is that for a starter?
You're right. That would be an excellent start. Unfortunately, I don't see either party ready to destroy the health insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies to do this. Obamacare leaned in this direction but was so watered down in order to pass that it doesn't go very far at all.
I know, we were sold the myth of privatization, trickle down and supply side economics. And now we are going down the path of converting government using those same false notions. One can hope that the lesson can lead to a pull back to reverse Gilded Age 2.0 if we can get Teddy 2.0 to rise from the ashes.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that Trump and DOGE are attacking all 3 of those pillars. The techbros want to destroy the dollar's position as reserve currency. Now that Trump is imto bitcoin, he's on board with crushing the dollar, too. Of course, he hates NATO and has already imposed huge tariffs because hd really us delusional about how they work.
Your recommendations sadly have no chance in the foreseeable future in today's poisonous political atmosphere.
I can't agree with your comment 'also in soft power—a form of leadership built on global respect and admiration, not coercion, as seen in more authoritarian models such as Russia’s.' I live in New Zealand. I can well remember in late adolescence the USA attempts at coercion of 'men for beef' during the Vietnam war. A high level USA government executive visited New Zealand to demand NZ soldiers to fight their war in exchange for them buying NZ farm produced beef. 'Free trade?' The USA wanted conscription of NZ men to fight its evil war invasion into Vietnam- a war to control the largest known at that time deposits of Wolfram- a tungsten bearing ore needed for weapons so that the USA could maintain military world dominance. The USA coercion was internal as well with many USA conscripted soldiers maimed for life and killed. Vietnam is just one example of the USA conducting many wars since the second world war, some declared, but many by other covert means see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende 'On 11 September 1973, the military moved to oust Allende in a coup d'état supported by the CIA, which initially denied the allegations.[13][14]'
Totally agree with you and well put! Shocking how much of this my relatively intelligent Republican friends can’t see or don’t want to admit.
Instead, we are headed in exactly opposite direction, when we could have easily had it all.
Well, this is true to some extent, one could say that it was much cheaper to be under the NATO (read US) umbrella during the Cold War. It was cold because it fortunately never became hot.
On the other hand, most NATO countries participated in the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (War on Terror), a war initiated by the US and the Europeans going along for the sake of loyalty. As an example, Denmark had more casualties per capita than the US, yet, the Trump administration have no recollection on what their allies did for them.
One could also say that the War on Terror capsized the US lust for engaging in foreign warfare, since it took a big toll on the national debt, which is the fundamental trigger of the current turmoil in US politics.
It is probably true that not having to pay as much for their own defence meant there was more money for social goods in NATO countries; but the US is a VERY wealthy country that could afford just about any social good if our tax system were different and if Americans were not obsessed with the "undeserving poor."
Ironically, the only time a NATO member has ever called on fellow members for assistance in the face of attack as required by the NATO treaty was -wait for it - when the US called on our allies after the World Trade Center destruction. And they responded as the Treaty required.
Whatever we spent above our “share” due to any failure of them to do so was, first, our choice, and, second, to our benefit.
In his visit to the Netherlands, Paul Krugman reflects on how much better the quality of life feels there compared to the U.S., citing longer life expectancy, walkable cities, and less political anxiety. He highlights the contrast between Dutch public infrastructure and culture with America’s, noting the sense of ease and shared values in Dutch society.
While Krugman praises the Netherlands for its liberal values and social cohesion, it’s important to acknowledge that Holland also harbors a significant neo-Nazi and far-right presence, which contradicts the image of unanimous opposition to fascism and threatens the very ideals he admires. After all, this is the country where my cousin Ann was arrested and eventually murdered.
Most if not all of the developed world has a better quality of life than we do, with the plus of never having to go bankrupt due to the high cost of health care and not having to worry about dying in a mass shooting.
The crucial philosophical difference between the US and most of the rest of the so-called West is that the latter values "freedom from" as much as "freedom to" - which of course is why the US tends to poll comparatively poorly in annual global freedom indexes that take both these concepts into account (and it's likely to plunge several places in 2025).
For instance, while Finns appear to have a basic right to bear arms that's broadly equivalent to the situation in the US, weapons come under various classifications, and the deadlier they are (i.e. in terms of being able to spray bullets indiscriminately), the harder they are to get hold of, up to a level where you pretty much have to be a serving member of the armed forces with a clean mental health record and written permission from your superior officer.
There's absolutely no reason why the US can't adopt a similar system that doesn't in any way infringe their constitutional rights, but if Sandy Hook wasn't the loudest of wake-up calls, I fear that nothing's going to get through.
I've just had a similar experience travelling to Munich from the UK. You can tell it's a richer place. The public transport is less reliable than it used to be, but it's vastly superior to similar size British cities (Manchester, Birmingham). We visited this enormous spa that was like nothing I've ever seen. The housing seemed to be of much better quality. It's obviously hard to tell from a short trip, but things felt generally nicer to me.
Munich is very nice, but rather expensive to live there. I live some 50 km south of the city where rents are considerably lower.
Dear Professor Krugman,
For the past month, I have been following your writtings on Substack. Reading your daily “greeting diary” has become part of my routine.
In the past—as both a scholar and a portfolio manager—I drew great inspiration from your academic publications. Now, through your Substack writings, I feel I’ve come to know not only a brilliant economist, but also a vivid, empathetic voice: someone who cherishes life and freedom and defends democracy with conviction.
Your thoughtful reflections and your openness in sharing personal experiences have encouraged me to step out of the ivory tower. I’ve begun writing more actively myself, including for local newspapers. The two articles I recently published were both inspired by the spirit and communication style found in your posts and interviews.
I look forward to continuing to follow your work on Substack.
Warm regards,
Was great to have you here! I like the interview you did for the Dutch ‘financial times’. Have a safe flight and come back soon!
Thanks for taking us on vacation with you and your wife! My husband and I visited the Netherlands a couple of years ago and felt totally the same as you describe--although at that time we were not depressed about the U.S. as we are now because of he that shall not be named.
I'm sorry, but i still blame trump and his accomplices.
In that case you’re blaming the millions of Americans who voted for him the second time around or the Democrats who didn’t vote because they were miffed over non-democracy or non-rule of law issues
Them too.