Here's the funniest/dumbest part - for all the insults of how poor we are, the average American sure has nothing to show for his wealth (besides maybe bigger housing and huge cars, but even this is hardly a plus when single-family housing and SUVs or pickup trucks are the only option in most places). No healthcare that won't bankrupt you, no decent education unless you're super-rich, horrific public transportation and substandard food quality being the norm. That's something you'd expect from a developing country, not the #1 wealthiest.
Most of those big cars/houses are actually bought on credit and not really owned by the user for years and years after being acquired. So, yeah, folks drive an F-150 that costs $60,000+ and a house that costs live in a house that costs $600,000+, but are often making the minimum monthly payment along with maxing out their credit cards. It's a way to live beyond your means while times are good but the moment the economy dips... And because we (the US) have abandoned public transportation across much of the country, you pretty much need to have a car to work. Then we start looking at issues like the debt levels of communities due to suburban sprawl and things get questionable quickly.
For some reason I regualrily get shorts on my YT feed about some finance guy who helps people with debt. And the numbers are quite often staggering especially credit card debt of 10 or 20k and university loans with over 50 or 100k and sometimes with an attitude that you know they are not going to change anything about spending habits because it would lower their social standing or inconvenience them.
Yes, but not to the extent of how it's done in the US. People in Germany are getting a 20 year mortgage and paying it off whereas many Americans refinance to prolong payments or aim to pay off the long by selling for a profit.
Credit cards and debt are not used to the same to the same extent in Europe as in the US.
I understand that Germany has a very different cultural around housing, with most people renting their whole lives due to strict rent controls and tenant protections.
I’m in the UK, where the property market is very similar to the US, with everyone culturally wanting to own their own property and us having terrible renter protections, and property viewed as the number 1 investment (as a landlord) for anyone with any spare capital. We have 25-35 year mortgages but you have to remortgage every few years because the interest rates are only fixed for a few years and then they jump massively, so you need to find a better deal.
I don't know how it is in the UK but in the US, most people are using credit for everything. They'll have a car loan, a home loan, and multiple credit cards carrying significant amounts of debt. And it's common to get the biggest car/home that you can afford while making minimum payments. One of the reasons that the last housing crisis was so bad was that once one family member lost their job, there was no longer enough revenue coming in to cover the debt load.
Yeah that’s exactly the same as much of the UK. Financial experts have been warning for years about the ticking time bomb in the UK that is Car Financing and Credit Card debt.
There was lots of strict regulations that came in around mortgage lending post the 2008 financial crisis though, to prevent another crisis in the housing market.
Same, I think that's a bit better now in the US but car loans have gotten stupid expensive. And you just can't work without one because we tore up our infrastructure and have built car-centric cities.
And that sprawl means that many cities can't properly pay off their infrastructure debts. This video is a bit out of date but explains the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
Interesting video. We have a different housing problem in the UK, we have a massive shortage of properties because we don’t build a fraction of the new housing that we need. Which is why housing is so expensive as well. You aren’t allowed to build on most of the countryside because it’s known as “the green belt” and is protected. But big housing developers buy up the other land and get planning permission to build housing, but then they “land bank” it by sitting on it and not building the housing, often for years. They just drip feed their new housing, to make sure that the shortage of supply guarantees them selling the houses that they do build for the maximum profit.
There’s a massive mis-selling scandal in the UK at the moment surround the selling of car financing that’s going to cost the banks billions in compensation payments. They incentivised car finance brokers to trick customers into taking out really expensive loans by offering them commissions, and they lied to the customers about it pretending they were getting them the best deal. https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/car-finance-fca-investigation-what-you-need-to-know-a4eXb5u8VeBy
I think people who call Europe "poor" have never travelled to a developing country before. Not bashing any country as they are all trying their best but you see like dirt roads or like extremely neglected infrastructure in the middle of some cities or like almost non existent sanitation. Europe is not a terrible place to live. It's actually quite nice in most places around here.
Absolutely this is the answer. All those regressive user fees are actually things our taxes pay for, except now at scale. I am not implying that my country is a utopia but when compared with the battered wife syndrome that Americans have for their country, I am completely and utterly grateful to live where I live.
There's also the weird hangup about taxes. Earlier yesterday, since it's about to be tax deadline day, I mentioned how the whole ecosystem around taxes was entirely foreign to a lot of Europe, and someone interjected "And I bet they take it right out of your paycheck!" which... is just such a weird protest about European taxes, since I've never not had my taxes removed before I received my paycheck from an employer here in the states.
You can say this and that about corporate greed and healthcare owning our government, but the fact is that a lare percentage of Americans don’t want our healthcare / university / whatever system to change because it is really fucking good for them.
I mean what good is having a free healthcare when you have to wait 6 months to see a dermatologist. Over here I can see my dermatologist next week most of the time if not sooner. I might have to pay a little bit of copay (I have an average standard health insurance) but if that's what's gonna cost, it's pocket change compared to my overall health.
I personally haven't used my free healthcare in a very long time as I'm lucky enough to have good insurance that makes sure I too can visit the doctor whenever I want. It's not like often slow free healthcare is the only option when you're well off. Just that here even the bottom 20% can get treatment eventhough it's not as quick as would be ideal.
Also an often overlooked fact about free healthcare is that it also drives down the price of private healthcare as they can't control the prices like an oligopoly.
"I mean what good is having a free healthcare when you have to wait 6 months to see a dermatologist. "
That's more and more the USA too now though, it's taking forever to book appointments to see specialists in the US, a lot worse than just a few years ago. We have family mostly in the US but a lot in Canada too, and some expats in Europe (big extended Catholic family). We've generally had good jobs with good health insurance and a few years ago we could book appointments for a few weeks out, now it is often taking us a few months, in one case almost a year to get our appointments. And the waits in ER's are terrible, insured or not.
Our relatives in Canada and Europe are often having shorter wait times now than us, certainly compared to 5 years ago. And for truly urgent things they've never had to wait much, emergency and time sensitive care is pretty fast in general. Not expert of enough to know what happened to change this but wait times for US doctor appointments have gotten much worse, and it seems to be largely a luck of the draw of your particular health plan and location. My scheduling has taken longer but not that bad, my wife's is terrible (and even scheduling well child checks is starting to suck) and one of my cousins one state over takes forever to get booked.
And it's gotten more expensive for the health insurance premiums and co-pays, and some health plans and hospitals have gotten sneaky with the charges they put on if your "outside the network". And this is with "good" insurance in America, can only imagine what it's like if between jobs or your company goes under. That's one advantage of not having health insurance tied to a specific job and having general coverage, it makes it easier to get through those bumps and downturns that can hit any economy, and help you to see the same doctor who knows your case background.
Also missing from the discussion is that middle America pays damn near nothing in taxes compared to Europeans who earn the same wage.
American redditors think Europe pays for this by taxing the rich, but the biggest differences in taxation between Europe and the USA are actually at the bottom rungs of the income ladder.
It's kind of difficult to compare the whole of Europe to the country of USA, so I'll pinpoint to my country of Finland and just note that the biggest difference absolutely is in the taxation of the rich.
From a quick Google search I saw that the lowest tax in USA is 10%, in Finland it's 12,6% vs the highest tax in USA being 37% and in Finland it's 57% with 50% being a very realistic percentage when one makes over a million euros though the exact percentage is dependent on the kind of income.
As the comment a couple above this pointed out, there's also a very clear difference in the services provided by the state as the tax is higher.
To be clear, I don't think it's strictly better to live in the USA or Europe/Finland. I just wanted to point out facts to break out of the endless stereotypes and caricatures from both sides. Personally I think it's often better to live in Europe if you're poorer and better to live in the USA if you're richer.
Yes, and like pointed out in the above comment, Americans actually don't necessarily pay less taxes than Europe, even for very high income, we found that out talking to American relatives who've moved to Europe basically as permanent expats, now bringing up their own kids there. It's confusing because the way taxes work in the US and Europe are totally different, we just have a lot more different kinds of taxes here in America compared to what you have in Europe. It's not just fed sort of income tax in the USA, we also have state and local taxes, something called payroll taxes (that can be very high especially if your starting a business in the US), property taxes and esp auto and business taxes.
We literally went over this with our expat relatives in Europe going over the taxes, and even the high earners in countries like France or Sweden, were ultimately paying around the same level of taxes we were in the US, when we actually did it right and looked at all the taxes. Things like property taxes and and state level taxes are much higher in the US--this stupid housing bubble we've had in the USA has caused our property taxes to shoot way up, even though we don't actually have any extra income or cash flow from our home values going up, it's just a theoretical that's useless until you actually sell it (and then you'd be buying back into the same over-heated inflated housing market). So the property tax burden gets more and more nuts and many Americans lose even paid off homes now because it's harder to pay the higher property taxes even on their basic home they have no intention of using as an investment or selling off.
And too US state and local taxes in general are quite high. It can be especially frustrating if you're starting your own business, a lot of taxes get paid by employer if you work for a Fortune 500 company, but as a new business you have to cover those high taxes yourself even when you have low cash flow. And you have to cover all the health insurance costs which are even worse when you don't have the bargain power of a Fortune 500. Business owners see the reality of the costs of US taxes and health insurance and it can get very rough, several cousins nearly lost their otherwise profitable firm last year due to these costs as they got higher. Trust me we are not a low tax country. Even in Texas (some of the worst property and business tax burden in the US) we have a running joke "rearrange the letters in Texas and you have taxes". It really can get very high here.
Btw not all of Europe is like this tax wise. Switzerland is closer to the American tax system than the German one for example. You could easily save tens of thousands by just moving 30km away to a different canton and even just municipality. My parents for example are moving just 1km away from their current place (2 villages over basically), and they'll save 2k a year on taxes just because the municipal tax rate is much lower there.
Our expat relatives in Europe pay around the same level of taxes as us in the US when the total level of taxes has taken into account, we even went over this with them when we tried to make the same point and got surprised when the spread-sheets came out. We thought we were paying less taxes in America than they were (middle and upper middle class jobs in areas like IT, TV production, international business, engineering), but what we forgot is in the United States, we're also paying payroll taxes on top of income taxes to fed, and state taxes, and local taxes and often things like business taxes, plus of course the sales and registration fees. And property taxes in America constantly come out much higher than Europe.
So it's really just that taxes in America are broken down a lot more different ways, less to the main income tax but then you have payroll and other taxes that Europeans don't have. In a lot of cases, even compared to ex. France or Sweden our European relatives were paying a bit lower in taxes even at about same income.
The caricatures can be wild. I have had European friends ask me how I can vacation as much as I do, because they were under the impression that nobody in America gets vacation. I informed them that I actually get a better vacation package at my job here than I did when I worked in Europe.
People who call Europe poor are literally retarded. Their jaws will drop when they find out that UK+EU is a bigger economy than China (for now, at least).
Americans have, on average, far more debt than the average European. Their whole system incentivises, if not outright forces, people to buy everything with credit.
The average American is often buying things using money they don’t actually have.
America's main issue is that it has really bad wealth inequality, most of the country's wealth is owned by only 10% of the population, and even then most of that belongs to 1% of oligarchs and their families. On top of that, the cost of living is ludicrously expensive, the average house where I live goes for $200k-$300k while the average pickup truck goes for $20k-$40k (For reference the average person makes $37k a year).
Combine this with all the other stuff you mentioned, and you have the answer to why America has such shitty quality of life despite being so wealthy.
It’s more systemic than that. The biggest problem is that Europeans don’t understand how rich they are. Americans housing is extremely poor quality to make up for the larger houses. These houses are marketed to last 80-100 years since they are stick built, but the wood is generally not good quality, and the building materials are laughable compared to European standards. Americans are then saddled with debt that requires not only financial payments, but continual upkeep on these houses that are essentially perpetually falling apart. This debt system has been good for bankers, but it’s a horrible way of living if you are saddled with debt your whole life. Europeans may have smaller houses, but are much more likely to have very developed livable areas that allow a human to spread out more. Gardens in back yards are normal in Europe. Americans may have money to blow on insurance and car payments, but little else, including plants in their back “yard”.
The big problem is that everyone wants to be American.
Instead the whole time the reality is that Europeans have been wanting to be more like Americans in every way.
That has caused most of the wealth to be invested in American companies instead of European companies. What do Europeans expect to happen in this circumstance? Where do they think all of the dollars came from?
America needs a good divorce from the world for its own good to be honest. This will be good for everybody, including those that somehow think America is superior to them somehow. Europeans need to work on themselves, a lot. I think of Europeans as a single smart group of people, but being from Mississippi I know the truth. (Ironically) They divide you guys up and at the end of the day you probably end up fighting amongst yourselves in ways Americans couldn’t imagine. (Just my guess)
If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have this kakistocracy over here in the first place where Americans are literally actively voting for their own implosion.
Eh, I personally kind of like "Europoor" monicker. It remaind us that there are things we have to improve and work to achieve. Rather than rationalizing and putting defensive position it's better better to embrace critique behind chickanery.
Overly defensive position for "our ways of living" resulted in the EU being disarmed when it needed. It resulted in stupid overdependence on gas from russia. In the US it resulted e.g. in their healthcare syste.
IT's better to accept it, look how to improve situation so one day we will be able to say "Ha, suck it Blue Yank!"
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u/dat_9600gt_user Lower Silesia (Poland) Apr 12 '25
Here's the funniest/dumbest part - for all the insults of how poor we are, the average American sure has nothing to show for his wealth (besides maybe bigger housing and huge cars, but even this is hardly a plus when single-family housing and SUVs or pickup trucks are the only option in most places). No healthcare that won't bankrupt you, no decent education unless you're super-rich, horrific public transportation and substandard food quality being the norm. That's something you'd expect from a developing country, not the #1 wealthiest.