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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I call for the regulators to stop the US economy because it's making us in europe jealous.

>it's making us in europe jealous.

I don't think there is any growth in US that Europeans have to be jealous of. Any "growth" is just more wealth for billionaires, at a high cost to individuals.

Health spending accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy [1]. Between 2000 to 2020 health expenditure tripled from 1.4 trillion to 4 trillion, at a 4.2% annual growth rate. This is projected to accelerate, grow at 5.3% and reach 6.8 trillion by 2030. [3]

It is mostly health-care, which grows faster than the economy. Then higher rents, high cost of food, the numbers go up! Almost all sectors are monopolies/oligopolies with pricing power, they can extract more and more. Of course, the numbers will go up. But I doubt anybody is happier.

Family health insurance through work now costs $24,000 a year (note: this is just insurance, not the total cost!). Job-based health insurance are up 7% from last year: https://www.foxbusiness.com/healthcare/family-health-insuran...

A lot of new construction is hospitals. I have two new hospitals coming up where I live, in a one mile radius.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

[2] https://www.oecd.org/health/health-spending-set-to-outpace-g...

[3] https://www.cms.gov/files/document/nhe-projections-forecast-...

GDP is the worst metric ever devised. Even the guy who came up with it said not to look at it. If we ever fix healthcare the GDP is going to plummet, and everything other than GDP is going to be way better.

It's not much different in Europe.

Here in Spain health spending is so high that you have to pray to the gods to see a GP. Usually you end up having to go to the ER for any kind of problem because there are no appointments available for weeks.

Food and rent have skyrocketed these years. The official inflation numbers are a joke, they are like... 5%? When food has gone up in average by at least 50%.

Not sure about insurance.

Health spending is a larger percentage of GDP in the USA (16%) than in Spain (10%) by a good chunk (1.6 times more) [1]

My experience in being able to see q Europe seeing a GP is way better than in the USA but I know this varies by where you live (even inside the USA)

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268826/health-expenditur...

I'd urge you to consider that your personal lived experience may not match the experience of the other 332,000,000 Americans.

Instead of trying to explain away official statistics by talking about things you see on your drive to work, consider updating your priors instead.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-economic-pe...

Here's what they think. Telling everyone to eat some charts while they're getting squeezed is not going to go over well.

The growth in the US economy between 2000 and 2020 has resulted in many high-paying software jobs, including my own. Absolute BS that it’s all going to billionaires

Europeans can boost the GDP significantly by embracing American style healthcare.

For example, having an appendicitis in US increases the GDP by $10K but in most of Europe it barely moves the needle, thus Europeans lag in GDP metrics for the same healthcare.

Fresh, healthy produce as standart? Maybe good for people but destroys the GDP statistics. If Europeans embraced the idea that healthy stuff is for the rich and charge for it accordingly, they too can extract much more numbers from the tomatoes and have nicer GDP.

I'm sure there is more adjustment than in your caricature, but it is interesting to wonder how exactly a medical procedure contributes to GDP when every patient gets a different price and a significant fraction skip the bill (7% of people currently have significant unpaid medical debts).

Every patient getting a different price should not be an issue, nothing is priced the same everywhere and there's plenty of stuff priced per client.

So the situation with the US is that, their spendings on healthcare is gigantic percentage of their GDP and Germany is a distant second with the rest of the Europe and the world trailing behind. US also doesn't have much to show for that spending, all the health and longevity metrics are worse than Europe. The defence is usually that Americans are paying for R&D and UK, Europe and the 3rd world are freeloaders. The counterargument is that, US relies heavily on immigrant researches that were trained in those countries those they foot some of the bill for the R&D and non-trivial costs of the healthcare in US is in administrative costs and not drug or machinery that was R&D'ed in US.

So we can argue over the issue all they long but the fact remains that there's lots of accounting differences so it's not possible to compare GDP number to GDP number and if you compare other metrics about the output of that GDP, the USA lags quite a bit behind countries with much lower GDP or GDP per capita.

US of course has it's own unique strengths, making it the dominant country of the world.

Doesn’t PPP account for this? Comparing nominal vs PPP doesn’t really change the USA rankings.

>Comparing nominal vs PPP doesn’t really change the USA rankings

It changes substantially, when PPP is used China surpasses the US with a significant margin.

I was comparing per-capita GDP PPP. On the table on Wikipedia, China is 73rd, but USA is 9th.

The US is just printing money like there is no tomorrow. Just look at their deficit its now approaching 2 TRILLION USD. No wonder their GDP "grew".

This is inflation adjusted.

Inflation metrics are gamed, it no longer includes major categories.

There are a lot of price indexes that all include different things. Have there been changes to what goes into particular indices?

It does though. Which "major categories" are you talking about?

Even inflation "truthers" truflation.com had to stop showing their chart of "true" inflation because it had dropped so much. Prices now are higher than they were 3 years ago, but continued inflation is not currently a problem.

Ain't it funny how the raw potatoes dug out of the ground are just as cheap as they were 5 years ago here in my state, while potato chips have doubled in price? Even the supermarket brand chips are still only a couple dollars.

That sound like "Inflation" to you? Steak is still $8/lb but my sugar free soda is suddenly twice as expensive

But deficit doesn't mean inflation.

Appreciate you fighting the good fight here, but this one is actually a valid point. If real GDP growth is at 4.9% while the government deficit is at 5.3% of GDP, (in most cases) GDP isn't actually growing organically.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S

That's not really how it works. US deficit spending isn't producing goods or services. It can motive the production thereof, but it doesn't change the fact that actual things were produced and then purchased using that money.

If people took 100% of the government deficit spending and left it in a savings account, it wouldn't count towards GDP. But clearly that's not happening.

No, it is really how it works, (as I caveated) most of the time.

I don't understand what you're arguing here. Is your claim that most of that government deficit was not spent in the domestic economy (therefore stimulating GDP growth)?

It's not true that we're printing money like there is no tomorrow. Look: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S

This is as % of GDP, but it's a good stand-in for inflation. Deficits are going down since 2020.

They are trying their hardest, but it's not working.

Perhaps if they can make housing an even bigger drag, it will pull everything back in the next few quarters. But we are not there quite yet.

The biggest problem is there isn’t a critical mass of dynamic, global companies that can move the needle. This creates a feedback loop for the economy in general.

There’s only so many luxury bags and apparel that can be sold. Europe needs to come to grips with their risk adverse investing culture because there’s a great pool of talent there. But it isn’t being utilized well.

US regulators are working tirelessly on that very task.

A lot of the US supposed growth is over the death of European economy. Just look at how many German companies are moving to the US and how much the Europeans are paying for US natural gas. The US won't ever say no to Saudi Arabia even as it commits war crimes in Yemen, but Europe is supposed to say no to Russia's raw materials.

The US doesn't import much from Saudi Arabia. It is mainly for East Asia and Europe. Even tiny, little Belgium imports as much oil and gas from Saudi Arabia as the US does.

And the Yemen conflict is nearing a negotiated end. Soon you can stop worrying about Belgian economic support for Saudi war crimes.

It seems that Russia is also close to a negotiated end, so US can stop worrying about it.

Not even close. There are no negotiations underway for peace in the east. Between Russia and Ukraine about 3000 soldiers are estimated killed in the last week alone.

Meanwhile in Yemen the UN says fighting has subsided[0] and Iran and Saudi Arabia have begun rehabilitation of relations[1]. Comparing a frozen conflict in its negotiated end stages to an active war with thousands of casualties a week and hundreds of missile strikes on cities each month screams complete ignorance of the war you pretend to care about.

[0] https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15347.doc.htm

[1] https://apnews.com/article/saudi-arabia-yemen-war-peace-talk...

I thought Russia was on its last legs! The media tells me so since last year.

So you don't care about Yemen, it was only a red herring. Well whatever your reason for raising the argument, it hasn't influenced western European governments like Belgium to prefer Russian gas over any other sources.

> So you don't care about Yemen

Who said that? Please learn to read.

You brought up Yemen but didn't know about the state of the conflict it speaks louder than words.

You're cherrypicking the facts you want. Learn to read and interpret text first and we can have a discussion.

Skill issue

We can also increase government spending by $1 trillion and therefore increase our GDP by $1 trillion.

The US government is running a deficit that is equivalent of the GDP of Spain, while Americans life expectation is similar to third world countries. I don't see this as wealth generation.

The US choses to have too many suburbs which incurs a huge cost to maintain so many streets, and typical US states are completely brankrupt, so federal government needs to constantly save and help (like Biden's Build Back Better campaign and infrastructure package).

Because of this, US will always have a huge GDP that will just keep growing, but whether this is really better for the citizens, I have my own fair of questions.

It's very cheap to get some running shoes and go running and stay healthy, but some countries think they need protein powers, gatorade and Crossfit gyms in order to maintain a "healthy" lifestyle, maybe even take some testosterone, that all become GDP numbers, that's why GDP is a useless metric when comparing countries.

The majority of Americans are really struggling. Don't be too jealous.

The majority of Americans are the richest most privileged people on the planet.

The US economy is not growing through innovation which is what is always implied. Its "growing" because we are 1) printing more money 2) replacing American workers with wage slaves from poor countries to work for peanuts and pocketing the difference.

Do you have any pointers or read about either of these? Because to the best of my understanding neither of these can explain a GDP growth as high as this.

Nothing can explain GDP as high as this and it will quietly be revised downward at a later date after politicians have long since finished their victory laps.

That seems like a political belief, and not one based on any numbers... GDP growth was expected to be high. There are plenty of economists that can explain all the current phenomenon, they just get called "heterodox"

So a 'more efficient' workforce that does the same amount of work but for a fraction of the pay won't increase GDP?

If you are talking about "slave wages" then I am asking for some pointers to numbers that show that the US is relying on imports more, rather than less.

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