41–50 of 70 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
surely buying bonds will save you when you are running 8% yearly deficits to buy votes with welfare payments
The author writes for Jacobin. Of course it’s promoting Communism.
in the US it protects the corporations so they don't have to pay a living wage * https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/07/22/amazon-gi...
Is that why wages in the US are double those in europe or more
https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/walmart-workers-go...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that why wages in the US are double those in europe or more
The median salary in the US is $43k for the latest year I see data (2023). Median salary in the Netherlands and Germany was €44-48k or ~$50-55k. We might make half as much (rather less for me actually) because of our specific industry, but that's not generally true.
"Median weekly earnings of the nation's 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026"
Saying country like Norway has open economy without capital controls is just not true. Try to leave that welfare paradise, you are still on hook as tax resident for extra three years after leaving!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution? At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
Your "often" is not borne out by actual econometric studies. The actual rate of minimum wage that produces dead-weight loss is much higher than most minimum wages in the USA. In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage r…
> Where redistribution runs vertically and broadly, the welfare state absorbs global finance shocks... If this was true, then the Eurozone crisis would not have been as severe as it was in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and France - all countries with broad and large social assistance programs. --- Also, the HN title is editorialized, the correct title is "Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial…
The crisis was largely artificially engineered because Germans believed that Southern Europeans were "lazy" and needed to be made an example of. The ECB could have brought government bond yields down from the beginning and most of the problems could have been avoided.
Germany had relatively reasonable debt and government spending relative to taxes.
Italy had entirely dysfunctional spending and Greece was essentially a house of cards built on fraud. Without the Eurozone, Greece would have faced bankruptcy and/or hyperinflation, but instead they got bailed out by the rest of the EU.
Check out Michael Lewis's book Boomerang that covers the distinct problems Iceland, Ireland and Greece faced. The TL;DR on Greece is a country with massive social spending and tiny tax receipts, that took out massive and entirely unsustainable debt thanks to the other Euro countries and then inevitably was unable to pay it back.
Germany was the hero who saved the EU from complete implosion, but instead of being thanked they get misplaced anger for being the only responsible ones in the room.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution? At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
The actual problem in the US is housing costs, but most people are around social media knowledge level in this area, and just blame the first thing in front of them. Raising wages will do nothing to ease housing costs, which eat the largest chunk of everyone's pay.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The median salary in the US is $43k for the latest year I see data (2023). Median salary in the Netherlands and Germany was €44-48k or ~$50-55k. We might make half as much (rather less for me actually) because of our specific industry, but that's not generally true.
Not sure where you're getting that $43k number. The most up to date number is $65,052[0]. "Median weekly earnings of the nation's 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026" https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html
I suspect the difference is that "full-time wage and salary workers" is a much smaller group than "all workers". I admit that I used the word salary in the original post though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure we do have better quality of life in Europe. We may have in the 2000s, but we're in decline relative to the US. Even if you take things like healthcare into account: US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
Citation? Median earnings is less than that. And median household income is only marginally more. the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360. According to the CPS, the median household income was $70,784 in 2021.…
OECD is the source for disposable income.
US: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...
UK: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...