Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure where you ate getting that comparison. 2 mins on Google tells me [1] that ireland for example has a ppp per capita gdp of 79k vs USA average of 63k. Which would seem to imply that the first country in EU I compared with is significantly higher than at least some of us states? And that isn't a recent development. The choice isn't about getting massively poorer, it's just whether you want to be able to look yo…
That's nominal, severely outdated, and severely misleading. Ireland is the third richest [1] country in the world on paper as far as GDP/capita PPP measures, while in reality the household income/capita is a small fraction of that. The reason their GDP is so high is that hundreds of multinationals (including Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) filter large sums of money through Ireland in tax avoidance schemes. It's one of…
As for national incomes - see my comment below but unless you are subtracting out costs for healthcare and other services offered to all citizens that are not offered by the US government you are not comparing apples to apples either.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?location...