> The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Which basically coincides with the introduction of the Euro currency. The dumbest currency ever created: a common currency for countries with different fiscal laws/different tax rates and different economic outputs. Since then one the Eurozone state already (partially) defaulted on its public debt: Greece.
My beloved EU is fucked. And not just because of that ultra-poorly and very probably short-lived currency that the Euro is: the EU is a socialist construction, by socialists, for socialists.
In 25 years of introducing the Euro they manage to kill the first industry of the most important economy of the EU: the car industry in Germany.
> Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well.
Oh but the EU is making sure the standard of living falls really quick.
For as if the EU wasn't falling into poverty quickly enough, politicians are at hard at work at importing millions upons millions of very poor people from africa and the middle-east. For the most part totally unemployable people (a politicians in Germany talked about 93% migrants without a job, that cannot speak the language and unemployable and used the term "a lost generation").
In my native city, Brussels ("head" of the EU), a recent report from a Belgian university estimates that 5% of the population of the city are undocumented migrants: undocumented means they aren't working. It's impossible to work without a shitload of paperwork in the EU. One out of every 20 people is an unemployable, unaccounted, undocumented, migrant. Let that sink in.
The EU is fucked way more than people imagine.
And anyone who thinks that the millions and tens of millions of migrants coming without any education are going to be the ones that shall save the EU economically is totally delusional.
I raised my kid in english, only every going to british school and now british college, and wife is working towards acquiring a new citizenship. Thankfully we've also got family in Japan (a country notoriously hard to get in), so we've got that option too.
We moved to a new country four times already, but now we're planning to leave the sinking ship that the EU is.
There's no future in the EU: the only way forward is that major european cities are going to keep turning ever more into slums.