Has it been effective though? The EU used to have a bigger GDP than the USA in 2008 now the USA is over 50% larger. Member nations are still dragging their feet on doing much of anything in the Draghi report and it's unclear if that will ever change.
At preventing another European war? Up until very recently, pretty good. No more world wars as of yet, but 80 years has past since the last, everyone with memories of how horrible it was, are almost gone, so I guess we're building up to another one. I'm hoping that at least Europe sticks together if it gets down to it.
I'm not sure why GDP is such an important indicator to you, it's just the value of goods and services, what purpose is that supposed to serve?
USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer, education and health care gets worse, and people finding it harder and harder to find somewhere to live. So what good does a high GDP actually give you in the world today?
> USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer
People in the US may be many things but poor is not one of them. The median household income is ~$85k and the median household lives somewhere pretty inexpensive. The amount of money Americans can afford to waste on things they don't need is unmatched.
"Poor" isn't just "doesn't have N USD", purchasing power as just one example, matters so much more. But maybe it was a poor choice of words on my part, sorry.
That's what government social programs like Medicaid and SNAP/EBT are for, accounting for about 800 billion in gov spending in 2025, and a total of 1,2 Trillion the US gov spend on welfare in 2025. That's exactly the opposite of being poor. If you want to see real poverty, go to countries that don't have any government welfare programs.
In EU many workers also wouldn't be able to afford to live without taxpayer-funded government subsidies, tax credits or regulations forcing employers to not be able to pay minimum wages below a certain threshold (which is not coming out of shareholders pockets BTW but from the overall company salary budget pie, IE high earners) which also gets inflation adjusted yearly.
The lower class is always subsidised in wealthy de-industrialized western countries, since the low-skill jobs that previously could support a family, either got automated or offshored to Asia, causing a loss of worker bargaining power, so your only chance of preventing mass riots is to subsidize the lower class here and there. It's a masked UBI with extra steps.
> That's what government social programs like Medicaid and SNAP/EBT are for
Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't: People still can't afford food, healthcare, housing, and education. The programs are also being cut back on a large scale.
> The lower class is always subsidised
Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized. For example, most policy, laws, regulations, and both political parties are oriented toward serving and facilitating the wealthy, or at worst, not displeasing them. The military is sometimes used to serve large corporations, such as oil companies. Weathy people often pay a lower rate of taxes: The tax on their primary form of income, capital gains, is lower than the tax on other people's primary form of income, wages; the numbers get worse when you account for welfare taxes, which are regressive. People literally die of poverty - they are unable to afford the care they need.
>Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't
It's not as binary. It fails for some people, but it definitely works for most. There's always people slipping through the cracks of the net, even in the most generous welfare states, but that's a long stretch to claim americans are "dying of poverty" when they have an abundance of resources at their disposal to not die.
For example, if you're homeless american in a large city, you can go dumpster diving and get fresh food that's been thrown out just because it "looks ugly". If your tummy hurts, you can go to the ER and receive mandated sci-fi healthcare to not die, even if you're homeless. This is a far cry from the definition of "dying of poverty". I suggest you visit places like Russian republics, Myanmar or Nigeria if you want to see what actual dying of poverty looks like where you don't have access to free food and scifi healthcare.
The biggest problem killing americans is drug addiction and mental illnesses. Since if your brain is fried you won't be able to make much use of available free food and healthcare.
>Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized
That's always been the case since post-WW2 at least and gotten worse since Reagan. What's your suggestion to fix it? The super wealthy have too much power and influence over finance and politics, no matter who you vote for. Elected officials, on either side, will never touch them since they're in this together, so the system is working as intended, there's nothing you can fix here.
This is a commonly cited stat but it is mostly an exchange rate phenomenon that disappears when you adjust for purchase power. If you go by comparing GDP in dollars the EU recovered almost half this gap last year simply from the dollar dropping in value.
I was about to say... give dedollarization spurred by the current administration a couple more years and then compare GDP.
Being the world reserve and trade currency artificially props up the value of that currency (beyond what it would otherwise be), which has the result of artificially boosting GDP to GDP comparisons.
My point is rather than almost anything can be made smooth if you have enough $$ pointed at making it so. One of the biggest issues with small economies is that they don’t have the capital spent to make it easy to do things yet; which is friction that helps keep them small.
This is so ridiculously contrary to a Northern European existence that it's just funny. US is ridiculously more bureaucratic with lots of back office papers shuffled around by humans. US tax filing is hard to even describe to someone who never lived there.
Official procedures can be made smooth by valuing them being smooth.
You just pay. All the problems are known and have workarounds, it just involves money.
That’s my point.
It doesn’t have to be nice or clean or smooth, if there is a known solution which someone can just throw money at, at scale.
The harder problem with these smaller countries and economies, is people haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So you end up having to track down x or y random lawyer, then hope they don’t screw you, etc.
That's a very American approach. Just enable a grift economy existing purely because the original thing was bad. The Nordic approach is to make the original thing better. The end result is less wasteful.
