I guess I'm trying to point out that, again, Europe
doesn't have economic woes to begin with compared to most people on earth. Competing on growth comes with extreme cost that has manifested as social and economic instability in the US. Our wealth inequality is much more severe; our poverty is much more damaging; our education systems have been steadily failing for the last forty years; our higher education systems are beginning to show extreme stress in an entirely different manner. Perhaps the sort of miasma that hangs over society that everything is just broken and the people to blame are often on tv is universal, but it's never been more obvious to
me that there's a very, very different economy for the rich and PMC than there is for the rest of the country, more so here than most places.
Perhaps we can agree that the sort of people that gravitate to the top of the political-economy in both our societies cannot be trusted.... but I think this is a much easier case to make here where the protections against said people never had the full time to develop.