Do Americans Know What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is?

quote:

---

I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just life is. For no good reason at all.

---

quote:

---

When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too.

---

quote:

---

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over. American life is the biggest ripoff in the world. Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now stay poor.

---

quote:

---

How much do I pay for internet and TV in Europe? About thirty dollars, give or take. How much do I pay in America? $150. That’s five times as much. And what I get in America is way, way worse. At least half of the junk on TV is ads, I don’t get the wonderful and illuminating and sparkling stuff that European TV makes on a regular basis, from good coverage of global affairs to politics to economics to ground-breaking shows and movies. I’m getting massively, massively ripped off. Why? Let me answer, with another example.

---

quote:

---

Let’s take utility bills. They’re astronomical in America compared to the rest of the rich world, and even much of the rest of the world period. Heating, electricity, gas, water? These things can easily add up to $500 to $1000 dollars per month. That’s not even factoring in property taxes and maintenance costs and whatnot. Americans have no idea, but in Europe I’d pay maybe — maybe — half that, if even that much.

---

quote:

---

How much does it cost to just…have a place to live? The average American rental is about $1200. That’s for an apartment. Again, that’s a particularly high figure. It doesn’t cost that much to rent in Europe. In France, the the average house rental costs less than that — it’s about 800 euros, or maybe $1000 dollars.

---

quote:

---

The sad truth is that nobody can afford to live that way, at least not in a modern society. We know that because the average American doesn’t. They go into debt. Deeply into debt. So deep that the average American now dies underwater to the tune of about $60,000. They’ve spent a lifetime paying off debts that they can never fully make good on — precisely because the system is rigged against them.

---