[jijijijij]

> My second thought is what is going to happen in Europe once they have to beef up their military spending as the US has shown to be an unreliable partner.

I don't understand, what do you think may happen? Do you think Europe will collapse because they have to increase their military spending?

[scarface_74]

All of the EU countries combined have a lower GDP and a higher tax burden than the US. If they have to then spend more, tax rates will go up.

The other issue is that it is going to be a painful process to decouple their economies from exporting and importing between the US. But that’s also going to be necessary.

How much of the worlds pharmaceutical discoveries come from research and the approval process of studies done by the US? Maybe things will turn around. But right now, there is an anti-vaxxer with no medical background in charge of HHS. They are already purging and editing medical studies.

It’s going to take 5-10 years to see the fallout of the US losing its place on the world stage.

I’m more concerned about the effects on Latin America. Flights are short and cheap to and from the US and I would much rather beef up my Spanish than learn another language from scratch.

[jijijijij]

> If they have to then spend more, tax rates will go up.

Speaking for Germany, which is also the biggest economy in the EU, this is not necessarily true. Germany has notoriously low, more or less no debt and a lot of room to shift the tax burden towards the very rich like wealth and inheritance taxes, which are pretty much absent right now. It's a "very rich country", but the median wealth is actually quite low, comparatively. Germany could easily mobilize many, many billions before touching income tax. Investing in military and tech will also create jobs and so on.

This whole tax comparison is tiresome, since the real question is about quality of life, not numbers. It's tradeoffs countries decided upon. Great if you can keep most of it, but also lose it all if you trip badly. And overall I am quite happy to get "robbed" by the government so people can afford a living without actually robbing/shooting me on the streets. Here is the stats on people shot dead by the police in all of Germany (~84M people): https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/706648/umfrag...

Not sure where you are going with the rest of the argument. Sounds like the US will suffer just about the same here. So, what's wrong with moving to Europe? By the way, there is a country speaking Spanish in Europe too ;)

Honestly, looking at the potential crisis ahead, I am very happy Europe isn't deeply dependent on the "service industry", but tangible products. And with ASML, Zeiss and the highly capable chemical industry in the EU, I feel like we are better set up, theoretically, to bring home chip fabs, than the US replacing all the highly specialized machine parts produced across Europe, which run power generation and research facilities. And If tomorrow FAANG would exit Europe, we may survive that too lol. But we do have to get our shit together, which isn't guaranteed.