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Everyone except the US is going to come out stronger on the other end of this mess. Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the

Everyone except the US is going to come out stronger on the other end of this mess. Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening. As a German that has lived in the US for over 10 years I just watch and wonder. Moving back to Germany is a more enticing prospect than it has been for a long time. I know a lot of Europeans that have moved or are planning their move. I don’t mean they talk about plans, they are buying land, building houses, etc.

gotoeleven 2y ago
What I hear from europeans is that it sucks to be there if you're ambitious. https://x.com/DouglasCarswell/status/1893374276327137367 https://x.com/DouglasCarswell/status/1893374276327137367
- squigz 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - shaftoe 2y ago
    We can agree to disagree without name-calling, but the impact of compounding growth vs intentional stagnation is going to continue to widen the gap that's already opened up over a few generations.
    - Herring 2y ago
      You'll discover that compounding growth is useless to YOU, when Trump and Musk are taking 99.9% of it. Wages are stagnant. The US is #24 on the world’s happiest countries list, and has been dropping for a long while. At the top of the list, we find socialist countries with access to world-class public services like healthcare and education -- which the US is currently trying very hard to gut. The last time something like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for Americans to snap out of it. Inequality is destabilizing and Americans are clueless (see inflation leading to Trump), so I think Europe is likely to do better in the long run.
      - shaftoe 2y ago
        These socialist countries that are so happy because of the money they pour into healthcare and education, do so at the expense of their future growth and their own self defense. This seems unsustainable. The US is also a much larger and heterogenous society compared to the countries above us on most lists, such as the scandinavian countries or Lichtenstein. Anecdotally, when the homeless have smart phones to accept donations and obesity is an epidemic of the poor, we're not suffering for material wealth. A poverty of virtue, maybe so.
        Herring 2y ago
        This comment is sadly wrong, like saying "the sky is green". I recommend you talk to chatGPT (4o+) and learn something. Nordic countries combine high taxes and spending with competitive, open economies. Denmark and Sweden have high labor productivity and GDP per capita, etc. These societies are no longer homogeneous. Talk to the bot. Ask open-ended questions, ask for sources, read those sources. I don't have the patience to work with blind ideological bias. Like I said before, usually the only thing that helps Americans snap out of it is intense economic pain, which should happen between 2025-2035 with high cost of living, social safety net collapse, climate disasters, and maybe even AI job displacement at scale.
        shaftoe 2y ago
        In a hypothetical hacker news guide for how to win friends and influence people, I'm pretty sure "you're so wrong you should go talk to a chat bot" is not a recommended approach. I hope you're right, for what it's worth. It's a better world than "the only thing that helps Europeans snap out of it is intense economic pain combined with a Russian invasion of the Baltics"
        Herring 2y ago
        Go debate creationists for a while then come tell me I'm being abrasive. Believe me this is the easiest way when we disagree on basic facts. US culture (especially among white men) has a lot of internalized individualist, anti-union, and anti-government views, despite the incredible success of the New Deal (combined socialism+capitalism) in creating their entire world. The bot is really the best way to counter these attitudes. It beats spending hours on google.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- awongh 2y ago
  When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated. I wish that the USA did better on taking care of people, (because it sucks right now) but some on the left act as if there are no consequences to deciding to implement these things.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated. In my experience working with some former European entrepreneurs, the startup problem isn’t really directly related to anything about social democracy or safety nets or even taxes. They talked about how difficult, painful, and risky it was for them to start and operate a company at every turn. Even things like bankruptcy and allowing founders to move on with their lives if their startup fails, which we take for granted here, are not a given in European countries. It’s not just the government to blame. The private banking and even societal norms are very different in ways that we don’t even consider in the United States. The US is very friendly to funding and building startups. I didn’t appreciate it until talking to ex-founders from various European countries as well as many founders here who explicitly left EU countries for America because they wanted to start a company.
    - awongh 2y ago
      But these societal norms and conservatism are the reasons why it's politically possible to implement social democracy, right? I agree that it's not as simple as "regulation" and "taxes"- it's more fundamental than that. Which is why I think it'll so so hard for the USA to implement a fair social health care system, even though it needs one so badly.
    - dachworker 2y ago
      Bankruptcy law is a big one. Another big one is the reputation hit that you are going to incur if your startup fails. Europe does not believe in learning through failure. It is puzzling to a European, that there could be serial entrepreneurs with a history of 3 failed startups who still get funding for their fourth attempt.
- Herring 2y ago
  Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.
quantum_state 2y ago
The world needs a united and strong Europe for stability and many other advances …
- fasbiner 2y ago
  Have european arms races against a real or perceived russian threat historically led to stability in europe?
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    The threat is not only from Russia. Also, if you are referring to Hitler's and Napoleon's failed campaigns on Russia, it's important to mention that those were fighting wars of aggression on multiple fronts against their European neighbors. It was not a united EU propping up defenses against real threats.
lolinder 2y ago
The funny thing is that if you listen to Trump and the MAGA folks, they explicitly do not believe that the world would be screwed without the US and USD, and further do not believe that the US should care if they were. Trump's whole schtick with NATO is that Europe should be defending itself, not relying on the US. So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago
  We understand the schtick, it just seems like a grave miscalculation of the return on investment for the US.
- dijit 2y ago
  This is largely what I believe to be true also. "We have a lot of leverage, and even if we don't, then we don't have to pay to be the worlds police" - is largely how I (also a european) have seen Trumps actions. The "issue", is that this is a populist take. It's weirdly not in Americas interest to take that stance, because they are a defacto world government with the amount of soft power they are able to exert, militarily and in trade. So, the GP is quite right, people are waking up to the idea that this soft power was running kinda deep and we shouldn't just allow ourselves to get soft too. Just like an insurance company will find a way not to pay: the US may never have actually come to the aid of Europe; and nobody thought about that, they just accepted most of what the US was asking in the hope that they would. The lesson will be painful in the short-term, but I'm also hopeful that we take it seriously and start investing in ourselves.
- hnkland 2y ago
  [dead]
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
  One promise i would love to see him keep is turning the liabilities in europe into an asset. Instead of paying for european security, if we can charge them for security and sell them weapons and tech from our big contractors, the US wins.
Aurornis 2y ago
I don’t agree with the current direction, but I also think most people don’t understand how large the US defense budget is relative to other countries. The US defense budget is around $850 billion. Depending on the year you look at, the US defense budget is larger than around 7-9 of the next largest budgets from other countries combined. If you add up all of the countries in the world, the global total is around $2.5 trillion. The United States makes up 1/3rd of that. The US defense budget also hasn’t been a target for cuts, which is a topic of debate. So while there’s a lot of headlines being made about other countries increasing their defense spending, the numbers are closer to a rounding error in the US defense budget than a massive global power shift. People scoff at the idea of the US being a global military powerhouse because they don’t like the idea, but the bottom line is that when you look at the numbers there really is a reason that the US military is so important, and it comes down to sheer size and spending.
- tobias3 2y ago
  We only have to defend Germany/Europe + shipping routes with our military. Idk what the plan is with the US military. Occupy Canada and Panama?
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    If Trump's previous statements are taken at face value: Also Greenland - and later on Mexico, too
- Trasmatta 2y ago
  There's a lot more to this equation than defense spending. Also it's not fair to compare the US to Germany. The US compared to the combined EU spending is more of a fair comparison.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > Also it's not fair to compare the US to Germany. The US compared to the combined EU spending is more of a fair comparison. US spending is 1/3 of the entire global spending. US spending is higher than the next ~9 countries’ budgets combined I only included Germany because that’s what this article is about.
fasbiner 2y ago
I have difficultly understanding this point of view, although I'm sure it is not uncommon. Why do people believe it would it be an economically good decision to buy land and build houses in Germany, a place with negative GDP, no long term energy independence solution except for returning to coal, sharp curtailments on basic free speech, press, and assembly, and a massive military build-up which will require high levels of debt, cutting social spending, or both? Is it more about a question of national feeling and patriotism and the details aren't as important as the national pride, or is there an underlying economic analysis? It's also possible that Germany will simply deindustrialize, financialize, do debt-based stimulus, and accelerate the pace of mass migration further, which would indeed be good for home prices for remote owners who continue to live abroad.
- fabian2k 2y ago
  There are certainly some problems in Germany that need to be solved, but you're painting a very extreme and absolute picture here that is pretty far from the truth. Free speech is different in Germany than the US, that doesn't mean we don't have free speech in Germany. The US doesn't have the one and only true definition of free speech. And right now Trump is assaulting free speech in the US, so those lectures from Vance and others are just blatant, partisan rethoric. We're not returning to coal. The economy could be better, but it's not as terrible as you imply.
  - fasbiner 2y ago
    If you're not returning to coal, and you're anticipating further hostilities with Russia, then you're buying liquid natural gas from the US at much higher prices than are paid by both US and Chinese industry + domestic consumers. Germany returning to coal would be a bitter pill to swallow, but insisting that Germany will remain competitive despite much higher energy costs which only get worse with scale by saying "it's not that bad" is not convincing. Free speech, free press, and free assembly is under another round of attacks many places, including Germany, The United States, Russia, Israel, and Turkey, among others. Some are relatively better than others and some had very little left to fall, but all are in absolute decline. As I'm in favor of free speech as a universal value and not an apologist for anyone's domestic authoritarianism, I don't consider the hypocrisy of the speaker to be a good justification to sweep aside mutually unflattering facts about state policy.
honkycat 2y ago
Keep in mind: republicans are low information voters, and additionally they tend to be single issue voters. So 99% of them probably don't care about this particular thing. They care about abortion, or "corruption", or welfare queens, or something else. They have no idea the entire point of this exercise is to gut our public infrastructure so they can give hand-outs to their cronies companies to do the exact same job, but more expensive.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Funny. For me it's the other way around. I'm just laughing out loud at all the craziness. Maybe it depends on where you're living, on your citizenship status, wealth, whatever.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago
  The term you're looking for is privelege.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
    I haven't checked...
tim333 2y ago
And maybe Russia. They are not very popular just now. The US will probably be ok if a bit troubled by their current economic policies.
csa 2y ago
> Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening. Most Americans who voted for this (and to some extent their representatives) genuinely and seriously do not think about this matter with any depth and don’t care about the knock-on effects one bit. They lack any desire to know if the world would be screwed or not by US actions. They really just don’t care. They (think that they) want isolationism, less trade, less immigration, less interacting with others. This isn’t hubris — it’s simply ignorance.

gotoeleven 2y ago

What I hear from europeans is that it sucks to be there if you're ambitious. https://x.com/DouglasCarswell/status/1893374276327137367 https://x.com/DouglasCarswell/status/1893374276327137367

squigz 2y ago
[flagged]
- shaftoe 2y ago
  We can agree to disagree without name-calling, but the impact of compounding growth vs intentional stagnation is going to continue to widen the gap that's already opened up over a few generations.
  - Herring 2y ago
    You'll discover that compounding growth is useless to YOU, when Trump and Musk are taking 99.9% of it. Wages are stagnant. The US is #24 on the world’s happiest countries list, and has been dropping for a long while. At the top of the list, we find socialist countries with access to world-class public services like healthcare and education -- which the US is currently trying very hard to gut. The last time something like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for Americans to snap out of it. Inequality is destabilizing and Americans are clueless (see inflation leading to Trump), so I think Europe is likely to do better in the long run.
    - shaftoe 2y ago
      These socialist countries that are so happy because of the money they pour into healthcare and education, do so at the expense of their future growth and their own self defense. This seems unsustainable. The US is also a much larger and heterogenous society compared to the countries above us on most lists, such as the scandinavian countries or Lichtenstein. Anecdotally, when the homeless have smart phones to accept donations and obesity is an epidemic of the poor, we're not suffering for material wealth. A poverty of virtue, maybe so.
      - Herring 2y ago
        This comment is sadly wrong, like saying "the sky is green". I recommend you talk to chatGPT (4o+) and learn something. Nordic countries combine high taxes and spending with competitive, open economies. Denmark and Sweden have high labor productivity and GDP per capita, etc. These societies are no longer homogeneous. Talk to the bot. Ask open-ended questions, ask for sources, read those sources. I don't have the patience to work with blind ideological bias. Like I said before, usually the only thing that helps Americans snap out of it is intense economic pain, which should happen between 2025-2035 with high cost of living, social safety net collapse, climate disasters, and maybe even AI job displacement at scale.
        shaftoe 2y ago
        In a hypothetical hacker news guide for how to win friends and influence people, I'm pretty sure "you're so wrong you should go talk to a chat bot" is not a recommended approach. I hope you're right, for what it's worth. It's a better world than "the only thing that helps Europeans snap out of it is intense economic pain combined with a Russian invasion of the Baltics"
        Herring 2y ago
        Go debate creationists for a while then come tell me I'm being abrasive. Believe me this is the easiest way when we disagree on basic facts. US culture (especially among white men) has a lot of internalized individualist, anti-union, and anti-government views, despite the incredible success of the New Deal (combined socialism+capitalism) in creating their entire world. The bot is really the best way to counter these attitudes. It beats spending hours on google.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
awongh 2y ago
When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated. I wish that the USA did better on taking care of people, (because it sucks right now) but some on the left act as if there are no consequences to deciding to implement these things.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > When I read this, as an American it really strikes me what a trade-off the implementation of social democracy is. It does seem like they are correlated. In my experience working with some former European entrepreneurs, the startup problem isn’t really directly related to anything about social democracy or safety nets or even taxes. They talked about how difficult, painful, and risky it was for them to start and operate a company at every turn. Even things like bankruptcy and allowing founders to move on with their lives if their startup fails, which we take for granted here, are not a given in European countries. It’s not just the government to blame. The private banking and even societal norms are very different in ways that we don’t even consider in the United States. The US is very friendly to funding and building startups. I didn’t appreciate it until talking to ex-founders from various European countries as well as many founders here who explicitly left EU countries for America because they wanted to start a company.
  - awongh 2y ago
    But these societal norms and conservatism are the reasons why it's politically possible to implement social democracy, right? I agree that it's not as simple as "regulation" and "taxes"- it's more fundamental than that. Which is why I think it'll so so hard for the USA to implement a fair social health care system, even though it needs one so badly.
  - dachworker 2y ago
    Bankruptcy law is a big one. Another big one is the reputation hit that you are going to incur if your startup fails. Europe does not believe in learning through failure. It is puzzling to a European, that there could be serial entrepreneurs with a history of 3 failed startups who still get funding for their fourth attempt.
Herring 2y ago
Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.

quantum_state 2y ago

The world needs a united and strong Europe for stability and many other advances …

fasbiner 2y ago
Have european arms races against a real or perceived russian threat historically led to stability in europe?
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  The threat is not only from Russia. Also, if you are referring to Hitler's and Napoleon's failed campaigns on Russia, it's important to mention that those were fighting wars of aggression on multiple fronts against their European neighbors. It was not a united EU propping up defenses against real threats.

lolinder 2y ago

The funny thing is that if you listen to Trump and the MAGA folks, they explicitly do not believe that the world would be screwed without the US and USD, and further do not believe that the US should care if they were. Trump's whole schtick with NATO is that Europe should be defending itself, not relying on the US. So while the left and center of the US largely views this whole saga as a catastrophic loss of the US brand and foreign policy aims, this kind of rearmament is exactly what Trump promised his base he'd make happen.

AlecSchueler 2y ago
We understand the schtick, it just seems like a grave miscalculation of the return on investment for the US.
dijit 2y ago
This is largely what I believe to be true also. "We have a lot of leverage, and even if we don't, then we don't have to pay to be the worlds police" - is largely how I (also a european) have seen Trumps actions. The "issue", is that this is a populist take. It's weirdly not in Americas interest to take that stance, because they are a defacto world government with the amount of soft power they are able to exert, militarily and in trade. So, the GP is quite right, people are waking up to the idea that this soft power was running kinda deep and we shouldn't just allow ourselves to get soft too. Just like an insurance company will find a way not to pay: the US may never have actually come to the aid of Europe; and nobody thought about that, they just accepted most of what the US was asking in the hope that they would. The lesson will be painful in the short-term, but I'm also hopeful that we take it seriously and start investing in ourselves.
hnkland 2y ago
[dead]
TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
One promise i would love to see him keep is turning the liabilities in europe into an asset. Instead of paying for european security, if we can charge them for security and sell them weapons and tech from our big contractors, the US wins.

Aurornis 2y ago

I don’t agree with the current direction, but I also think most people don’t understand how large the US defense budget is relative to other countries. The US defense budget is around $850 billion. Depending on the year you look at, the US defense budget is larger than around 7-9 of the next largest budgets from other countries combined. If you add up all of the countries in the world, the global total is around $2.5 trillion. The United States makes up 1/3rd of that. The US defense budget also hasn’t been a target for cuts, which is a topic of debate. So while there’s a lot of headlines being made about other countries increasing their defense spending, the numbers are closer to a rounding error in the US defense budget than a massive global power shift. People scoff at the idea of the US being a global military powerhouse because they don’t like the idea, but the bottom line is that when you look at the numbers there really is a reason that the US military is so important, and it comes down to sheer size and spending.

tobias3 2y ago
We only have to defend Germany/Europe + shipping routes with our military. Idk what the plan is with the US military. Occupy Canada and Panama?
- ffsm8 2y ago
  If Trump's previous statements are taken at face value: Also Greenland - and later on Mexico, too
Trasmatta 2y ago
There's a lot more to this equation than defense spending. Also it's not fair to compare the US to Germany. The US compared to the combined EU spending is more of a fair comparison.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > Also it's not fair to compare the US to Germany. The US compared to the combined EU spending is more of a fair comparison. US spending is 1/3 of the entire global spending. US spending is higher than the next ~9 countries’ budgets combined I only included Germany because that’s what this article is about.

fasbiner 2y ago

I have difficultly understanding this point of view, although I'm sure it is not uncommon. Why do people believe it would it be an economically good decision to buy land and build houses in Germany, a place with negative GDP, no long term energy independence solution except for returning to coal, sharp curtailments on basic free speech, press, and assembly, and a massive military build-up which will require high levels of debt, cutting social spending, or both? Is it more about a question of national feeling and patriotism and the details aren't as important as the national pride, or is there an underlying economic analysis? It's also possible that Germany will simply deindustrialize, financialize, do debt-based stimulus, and accelerate the pace of mass migration further, which would indeed be good for home prices for remote owners who continue to live abroad.

fabian2k 2y ago
There are certainly some problems in Germany that need to be solved, but you're painting a very extreme and absolute picture here that is pretty far from the truth. Free speech is different in Germany than the US, that doesn't mean we don't have free speech in Germany. The US doesn't have the one and only true definition of free speech. And right now Trump is assaulting free speech in the US, so those lectures from Vance and others are just blatant, partisan rethoric. We're not returning to coal. The economy could be better, but it's not as terrible as you imply.
- fasbiner 2y ago
  If you're not returning to coal, and you're anticipating further hostilities with Russia, then you're buying liquid natural gas from the US at much higher prices than are paid by both US and Chinese industry + domestic consumers. Germany returning to coal would be a bitter pill to swallow, but insisting that Germany will remain competitive despite much higher energy costs which only get worse with scale by saying "it's not that bad" is not convincing. Free speech, free press, and free assembly is under another round of attacks many places, including Germany, The United States, Russia, Israel, and Turkey, among others. Some are relatively better than others and some had very little left to fall, but all are in absolute decline. As I'm in favor of free speech as a universal value and not an apologist for anyone's domestic authoritarianism, I don't consider the hypocrisy of the speaker to be a good justification to sweep aside mutually unflattering facts about state policy.

honkycat 2y ago

Keep in mind: republicans are low information voters, and additionally they tend to be single issue voters. So 99% of them probably don't care about this particular thing. They care about abortion, or "corruption", or welfare queens, or something else. They have no idea the entire point of this exercise is to gut our public infrastructure so they can give hand-outs to their cronies companies to do the exact same job, but more expensive.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

Funny. For me it's the other way around. I'm just laughing out loud at all the craziness. Maybe it depends on where you're living, on your citizenship status, wealth, whatever.

AlecSchueler 2y ago
The term you're looking for is privelege.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  I haven't checked...

tim333 2y ago

And maybe Russia. They are not very popular just now. The US will probably be ok if a bit troubled by their current economic policies.

csa 2y ago

> Too many Americans believe the world would be screwed without the US and the USD, they can’t imagine trading being done in RMB or EUR, yet it is already happening. Most Americans who voted for this (and to some extent their representatives) genuinely and seriously do not think about this matter with any depth and don’t care about the knock-on effects one bit. They lack any desire to know if the world would be screwed or not by US actions. They really just don’t care. They (think that they) want isolationism, less trade, less immigration, less interacting with others. This isn’t hubris — it’s simply ignorance.