The US is one of the best places in the world to be a business owner, that's why its economy is so much more dynamic than European economies. In order to create such an environment worker protections cannot be as robust as in Europe. This biased article of course ignores that fact.
Many workers are much better off in the US than in Europe as well. They get to keep a greater portion of their income, their income goes farther in the US than it would in Europe, and they have more opportunities to change jobs and careers because the flip side of weaker worker protections means businesses can hire with greater agility than in Europe.
> They get to keep a greater portion of their income
I always see this come up during discussions about how the US compares to other developed countries. I think the mentality is slightly different in the EU. If you were raised knowing that your income was going to be taxed at 50% but you also got free healthcare, education, welfare assistance, etc., you’d probably learn to value those things over buying a bigger TV or whatever. The only reason we complain about how they have less disposable income is due to the fact that we spend so much of ours on healthcare and education so it looks like a scarce resource that we need to hoard.
This is how I feel. I'm taxed a lot, but I can see that money being used for things to benefit me and those around me. I appreciate that I don't have to worry about bike infrastructure, or healthcare, or education, or my coworkers being stressed out about taking time off after having a kid. If I had that money in-hand those are the same things I'd want to buy with it anyway (except then I'd have to worry about actually taking care of all the details myself whereas now I don't). At the same time I feel like I can afford what I need/want even if I take home less money than I would in parts of the US.
This is also where the basic argument to "tax the rich" comes from. For the price of a yacht, you could feed and house multiple families for a year in some cities.
I was once asked how much money I could sustainably spend every single day without explicitly trying to waste money. I settled on 10,000/day (I assume big ticket items like house/car would be absorbed by that effortlessly).
Then I was asked to do the math on how long it would take to spend 1 billion - the minimum amount to qualify as a billionaire - at that rate.
IIRC, ignoring interest and inflation, it worked out to 216 years.
Now billionaires dont have a bill sitting around in liquid cash, this is just a thought experiment to try a grasp how much a billion is, but it is an effective one. (Also cool as a party trick, as people tend to always pick a power of ten, so based on their answer you can whip out 2161 years or 21.6 years or whatever)
I'm not even sure that we really get to "keep" more of our income. We have to hoard more of our income to buffer ourselves against emergencies that can drive people into bankruptcy, such as medical care. We have to save for college if we have kids. We need to cover ourselves in old age. It's "our" money, but it isn't really ours to spend.
The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted. So the Europeans are paying for something that decreases in real value the more that people have access to it. That's a self defeating policy, especially since it encourages people to remain in academia for significantly longer than they would otherwise, because hey, it's paid for by the taxpayer.
Someone earning a second Master's degree in Russian literature is not a productive use of taxpayer money.
In the US by contrast, people are able to make decisions for themselves about how to educate themselves because loans are widely available and are just a tax on their future income. If they want to pursue a high income career, they will take out a loan to cover educational expenses since it makes financial sense to do so. If their desired career is less lucrative, they will not take out more loans than absolutely necessary, freeing that money up to be put towards more profitable projects in the broader economy.
That's a nice economic theory you've concocted, but it seems like you're living in a bubble. The reality on the ground in the US is that college degree inflation happened every bit as much in the EU by a generation of middle-class people who saw a college education at the ticket to prosperity. Now to get any kind of decent job requires a college degree. Federal loans are handed out like candy, and people snap them up despite not having any financial basis for that decision. Because the loans are unforgivable in bankruptcy, there is much lower risk in handing them out. Because the loans are easy to get, college tuition rises higher and higher outside the realm of real market forces.
The fantasy that the US system is someone leveraging market forces to optimize efficiency is ludicrous. 18-year-old kids have no idea of the impact of 5 or 6 figure loans at various interest rates and their expected ROI. Even many of their parents, who had good post-war working class union jobs with a nice pension and affordable homes they could buy in their early 20s have a blind spot around this because all they know is that the career paths they enjoyed are dead and gone and just some vague ideal that "college-educated" is still a meaningful adjective.
Frankly, it's an embarrassment to even try to sell the idea that the US system is better. The only significant difference in outcomes is that a huge portion of young Americans are destroying their lives with unmanageable debt, where EU citizens may get an inflated degree but they won't be an indentured servant for the rest of their lives.
You're trying to argue that forcing the entire population to pay for college education for everyone is justifiable even when the people going to college may study subjects or intend to enter fields that have very poor financial prospects or lack productive value for the society as a whole.
As opposed to....
A system in which people have the freedom to decide for themselves how to allocate their own financial resources based on their career goals and not use other people's money to fund 4 years of useless study (if they study a useless subject)?
You have a very skewed understanding of what is fair and justifiable.
If people make poor financial and educational decisions, that's on them. Don't punish the rest of society by forcing it to foot the bill for someone else's foolishness.
The sad thing is, Europeans will be the indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the depressed wages they'll have to endure and the high taxes they'll have to pay.
> Someone earning a second Master's degree in Russian literature is not a productive use of taxpayer money.
How could you possibly know if this is a productive use of taxpayer money or not? Someone with a master's in Russian literature could potentially be very valuable as a spy, a diplomat, a business leader, etc. No matter the degree, having an educated population is incredibly valuable to society as a whole. Government should encourage education and provide it for as low a cost as possible or free. The idea that liberal arts, foreign language, fine arts, etc. majors do not contribute to society that I see mentioned often is frankly ludicrous and insulting to the people who work hard to achieve their education.
> If their desired career are less lucrative, they will not take out more loans than absolutely necessary
This is not in fact what is actually happening. Lots of people take out loans whey they are first starting college, when they are young, inexperienced and by definition uneducated. Few of them even try to calculate the expected value of college for their future income, and the ones who try don't have high quality information.
The problem with the 'personal responsibility' screed in regards to university in America is that more or less my entire generation was hoodwinked into going to college and doing anything and to totally not worry about the cost because loans are available and you'll never get a job that will amount to anything if you don't go to college. Ironically enough, a large portion of my high school class that's doing the best financially are the kids who didn't think they were smart enough for college that went into trade school or apprenticeships. When your parents, guidance counselors, and basically the entire system are yelling that you'll never do more than flip burgers if you don't rack up a lot of student debt going to school, and you're a young impressionable youth that trusts these people...well, I think you have to be somewhat willfully ignorant or just an obtuse asshole to blame those of us who took that advice and got burned.
Everything you say (except for the bit about me being willfully ignorant or an asshole) is true.
The solution to the problem is getting people to be realistic about their prospects. Guidance counselors play a role in this solution. So do parents. And the students themselves.
But the solution absolutely does not involve raising taxes to pay for everyone to go to college.
I agree that we need to get people to be realistic, but I disagree that we should just be saying "tough shit" to an entire generation that got thrown under the bus by a mixture of predatory student loan practices and well-meaning adults who did more harm than good attempting to provide guidance.
> The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted. So the Europeans are paying for something that decreases in real value the more that people have access to it.
This assumes that the only value of education is the signaling value. I strongly disagree with that assumption.
You seem to have a greater concern with who pays for education than you do for its macro-level effects. You simply don't think its the function of society to provide an education, even though it is society exactly that reaps benefits from it. These macro-level benefits to an education don't stop at high school graduation, even though the U.S. stops paying for it at that point. The demands on education are pretty much the same in (developed countries) worldwide, but the U.S. system of unsupported education causes overvaluation especially when student loans are government-guaranteed and so easy to get. Since the last few generations in the U.S. have been smaller due to decreased birth rates, colleges & universities have met increased competition for smaller student populations with fancier facilities and amenities. They show no concern with price sensitivity of students because demand for college education is pretty inelastic, close to that medical care and students can always get loans. Actually affording the debt service on those student loans is another subject, though.
So if education is undervalued in the European model, and overvalued in the U.S. system, perhaps it just a matter of finding out which system properly values education? Currently, the U.S. system is seeing runaway inflation in education costs, isn't it? How does it serve America to have such education this expensive? In the 1970's, its possible their model was sustainable but once demand was cut by subsequent, smaller generation size, and the supply of colleges stayed the same, its pretty easy to see how unsustainable this is. The European model simply remove education from the job qualification equation, much as the developed world has done for health care, for instance. You certainly need to be at a certain level of health if you're going to be employed, so developing countries at the start of the 20th century made great investment in public health to cut the communicability of disease with public health infrastructure around inoculations and early detection of epidemics, etc. Think of the impact of diseases such as Spanish Flu and later, polio. Much of this public health investment was done to preserve the stability of the workforce, and less so out of humanitarianism. But, of course, the workforce support society and humanity at large, too.
The only hope for many Americans paying student debt in their mid-twenties (and beyond) is the inheritance they will receive from their boomer parents. While I am not quite that young, I do know many that are factoring inheritance into their retirement planning.
This is true for middle-class and upper-middle class workers. But there has always been an underclass of people who barely make enough to survive, lack the market power to negotiate for better wages, lack the ability to acquire new skills in order to get different jobs, and/or are stuck with their current employers for lack of other opportunities. This population is also susceptible to overtime abuse and wage theft.
As for the middle and upper middle class, taking home more of your income is only part of the story. I don't have statistics on this, but I am sure that much of that take-home pay is offset by higher medical costs and the need for more retirement savings. Not to mention the fact that the American work week is longer and vacation days are rarer.
Even after employer subsidies, group rates, and tax savings from income deduction, health insurance can cost a lot of money, and you will still have routine non-covered medical expenses, as well as quite a lot of downside risk depending on your plan.
Same with 401(k). Employer match is a nice bonus but it is not enough.
This comment betrays an incredible misunderstanding or naivety of how medical insurance works in the US, and what/how it covers people.
Also a completely bizarre use of 401(k)’s which are not available to most citizens and are highly volatile.
Compared to the rest of the world the US spends more individually on healthcare & gets less. It’s average retirement savings are amongst the lowest in the developed world!
Hand waving away like you’re doing is not supported by the facts.
Why are you being downvoted? Even after employer subsidies, group rates, and tax savings from income deduction, health insurance can cost a lot of money, and you will still have routine non-covered medical expenses, as well as quite a lot of downside risk depending on your plan.
I'm reminded of this almost every time I read a novel set in a modern western European country. Protagonists can be poor and receive reliable legal and medical care that smashes my suspension of disbelief, yet the author (inevitably from said country) did not think twice about it, presumably because the idea isnt ridiculous on its face to them.
Anecdote, not data, but it has come up enough and this background detail isnt the author TRYING to persuade me, so it has been very effective at doing so nonetheless.
Additionally every time the underclass bargaining power is about to raise due to shortage of labor the ruling elite imports competition that has even less rights and has to work for less, in worse conditions and in constant fear of being deported.
The most important thing to change is stopping illegal immigration. Either allow more people in and give them equal standing in the job market to citizens or don't allow them in at all.
Anecdotally, I have lived in both the United States and United Kingdom. My tax rate was similar and in the UK I largely paid less for rent, healthcare and public transportation while paying more for staples like food. All in all costs were largely equaled out, although in the UK I enjoyed more vacation and worker protections I did not have as a US employee.
I don't know about the UK, but my net annual savings in the US is about equal to what my gross income would be in France or Germany.
If I worked in the tech industry I'm sure the difference would be even greater.
Also, healthcare is a problem in the US for people who don't get it from their employer. For those who do, it's often relatively inexpensive. I pay ~$100/month for really good coverage.
It's the lower to lower-middle class that has it difficult in the US.
> Many workers are much better off in the US than in Europe as well
Workers are not better off, there are way worse off in the US. They get less money due to the minimum wage being very low and the cost of medical care, they work more in average, they have less holidays and less social mobility than in Europe.
Big businesses however are better off so I agree in part with your first paragraph.
That greater agility comes at a cost of stability. It's better for those with the means to not worry about the instability - those who are better able or willing to gamble upon an unsure thing, but it punishes those less risk adverse, or less capable of taking advantage of the system (the poor, those with dependents or debt).
> They get to keep a greater portion of their income
If only that greater portion wasn't immediately being eaten up by rapidly rising healthcare, college, etc. costs.
Between premiums, copays, and non-covered stuff like compounded medications and dental, I spent $33k last year for a family of four on healthcare. The college I went to - $36k in 2001 - is now $60k/year. I'll take the higher taxes...
Notice how every sector of the economy that the government is highly involved with (health care, education, real estate) keeps increasing its costs?
Your inflated health care bills helped pay for the 280k average salary of physicians (source: https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2018-compensation-overvie...), which is over 2x as high as Western european doctors' salary. You can thank the aggressive occupational licensing that the AMA engages in that prevents more potential doctors from joining the workforce and keeps salaries high. For instance: Western european doctors do not need a 4-year bachelors degree just to _enter_ medical school.
You are also sponsoring drug discovery. United States pays for the drug research, eats the high drug costs, and then Western Europe mooches off our R&D spending.
And guess what? Western Europe's free health care is not free: The 50% higher taxes in Western Europe are required to pay for all this.
I doubt that's the majority of the massive cost difference.
> For instance: Western european doctors do not need a 4-year bachelors degree just to _enter_ medical school.
Don't know where you are basing this but in France, Pharmacist is High School Diploma + 6 years or + 9 year depending on the specialty. So you get out at 24 or 27 year old (best scenario), I doubt that's longer in the US or otherwise there's a big problem there.
Same in France, I guess the US is structured differently but overall it's probably the same amount of years. I doubt they study more than 6 or 9 years after high school or otherwise it's a bit too long.
Post-high school schooling for a standard family doctor (one of the lowest paid doctors):
4 years bachelors + 4 years medical school + 3 years residency = 11 years post-high school education.
Ah yeah, there's maybe something wrong there then, it's a bit too long I think. For a standard doctor, it's 9 years in France and it's already quite long.
"Different sources have slightly different numbers" isn't the same as "fake news". The OECD's numbers are publicly available.
The NPR link you cite has Canada at 4576 and the US at 9237, for a ratio of 2.02. The CTV link (citing a different organization; perhaps one considers dental/eyeware and the other doesn't, or something along those lines) doesn't offer US numbers to compare against.
And yet health care costs are lower in countries where the government runs healthcare.
Our system of government involvement, where it’s neither a free market, nor a single payer system, is indeed an example of the worst way government can be involved.
> And the Western European governments have _death panels_ to decide who deserves medical care and who deserves to die.
Private insurance is also a death panel, they decide who deserves medical care and who deserves to die.
> And guess what, your taxes are 50% higher to pay for all this.
The US health-care is not tax-free, you already pay more in the US for health-care with just the taxes than Western Europe. It's just that you also pay insurance on top of those taxes as well.
> In a survey of 15 large U.S. metropolitan areas conducted by national physician search firm Merritt Hawkins, researchers found the average patient waited approximately 29.3 days to see a family medicine practitioner in 2016, an increase of approximately 50 percent since 2014.
> And guess what, your taxes are 50% higher to pay for all this.
Europeans pay half what the US does for their healthcare, including taxes.
> Whatever you say on this does not line up with reality.
This sounds like you refuse to consider that you could be wrong. Is there evidence that would convince you, or will you simply decide any evidence is wrong and find a new justification?
I could be wrong (feel free to prove me so! ;) ) and there is nothing wrong with being convicable-but-unconvinced (as I currently am about the superiority of the US healthcare system) but that is not the impression I have taken from your comment.
Why is this a competition and quest for superiority?
The US is very different from its founding principles, priorities, and government structure. Comparing on just the basis of healthcare costs reduces these complex differences to simple sound bytes and obliterates any nuance.
You are correct that there are cases where the nuances make it impossible to have one be "superior" to another, and I'm not arguing otherwise.
That does not mean that some systems can't be objectively worse than a collection of others. I also never brought up costs - healthcare outcomes matter, because...health.
I never made it a quest for superiority - I insisted that everyone participating in a discussion should be in a place where they CAN be convinced of some points - arguing from a place of facts, not unshakeable emotion.
You just moved the goalpost. We were talking about wait times for insured people, which is 88% of Americans. Can we stick to one topic until it is resolved?
For the 88% of Americans who are insured, their wait times are lower than in rich Western European countries and Canada, and far lower than poorer Western European countries like Italy.
> We were talking about wait times for insured people, which is 88% of Americans.
No, we're talking about wait times for people in the respective countries. If you think wait times of six months are excessive, you should be incensed about "forever".
> Have you ever seen an article about people going to Canada for superior medical care?
I would suspect the citizenship/residency requirements make this difficult in practice, as does their legal ban on a parallel private system.
Meanwhile, if going overseas for care is a bad sign, as you allege, the US sees the same thing:
"Lots of people are pointing out that this isn’t really true, but I want to point out something different: Americans flee the US in pretty similar numbers to Canadians fleeing Canada. The best numbers we have suggest that about 45,000 Canadians left the country for medical care in 2015. (That’s all destinations, not just the US.) Meanwhile, about 250,000 Americans left the US for medical care abroad. And these numbers don’t even count the number of Americans who get their prescription drugs from overseas."
You should at least briefly skim it if you want to debate constructively. If you'd done so, you'd have noticed that the line "Meanwhile, about 250,000 Americans left the US for medical care abroad" is a link. To a US government publication at https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/c....
Yet, social mobility is higher in Europe. Also, americans can keep more of their income, if they skimp on health insurance and pensions savings. I don't think americans in general grasp how much higher quality the healthcare system is in Europe.
Example: get scorned at by your GP doctor for seeing them for a bad cold. Get billed $20.
Receive open heart surgery and triple by-pass. Get billed $20.
Social mobility doesn't really matter when everyone more or less has the same quality of life, as in Europe. That's what many don't understand. The Europeans have essentially nullified the value of social mobility in the first place. That is why their economies are more stagnant than that of the US.
Have you... been to Europe? This is in no way accurate. There are definitely classes of citizen here, from the working class all the way to billionaires.
No, it has a real meaning. How many new businesses are started each year in the US vs the EU? For an existing company, how easy is it to enter a new line of business? How easy is it to hire new workers?
Those things are how dynamic the economy is. It's hard to measure in a rigourous way, but in the US it is distinctly easier for a business to start/expand than it is in the EU.
Digression, so I can get shot at from all sides: This dropped under Obama. Again, it's hard to put concrete numbers on it, but things started happening more slowly - I suspect because regulation became more onerous.
This is highly generalized. Check the numbers from Switzerland compared to any high income city in the US the take away and living standard almost always seems a lot better in switzerland.
Generally we talk about less taxes, cheaper health care and a higher or similar income.
"Recent empirical work has drawn attention to an unmistakable shift in U.S. firm dynamics since the late 1970s. Principally, the entry rate, measured as the share of new employer firms out of all employer firms, declined by nearly 40 percent from 1977 to 2007, even before the impact of the Great Recession. Remarkably, this steady decline occurred relatively uniformly within geographic areas and within relatively narrow industry aggregations. Taking this trend decline or startup deficit as given, Pugsley and Sahin (2014) show that both its direct effect on business formation and its indirect cumulative effect through a shift in the employer age distribution partly explain the emergence of slower employment recoveries with each business cycle."
Many workers are much better off in the US than in Europe as well. They get to keep a greater portion of their income, their income goes farther in the US than it would in Europe, and they have more opportunities to change jobs and careers because the flip side of weaker worker protections means businesses can hire with greater agility than in Europe.