> This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s,
This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.
Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.
How is this riskier or less “mentally sound” than what European countries do? European drug price caps are premised on the threat that, if drug companies don’t sell at those prices, that the government will bar sales of the drug in the country, or drop the drug from coverage under the public health system.
Here, there is no threat that the drugs will be banned from the market completely. The threat is that the drug companies will face high tariffs that reduce sales. That’s a much less extreme threat than what the European countries use as leverage.
> Negotiation with the government is also done in Australia. The drug is not banned here though if there's no agreement. It's just not publicly funded.
A tariff isn't a ban either. Imposing a tariff and eliminating a subsidy are both just ways of reducing a foreign drug maker's sales in a local market by making the product more expensive.
Fundamentally, neither Australia nor the U.S. can force companies located in Switzerland or Denmark to sell them drugs at a particular rate. The only leverage they have is hurting drug maker's sales by reducing the demand in the local market.
> You understand the US is the most expensive place in the world for medicine right... If you don't change your strategy this won't change.
The executive negotiating with drug manufacturers is a dramatic change in strategy from what the U.S. has done before.
The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.
NO! Laws should be drafted by lawyers and professionals in those fields. An election would select lawmakers by popularity contest. Can't expect good laws from tht kind of people.
What's needed is accountability for drafted laws and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.
> and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.
While I believe I understand where you are coming from, this seems unduly broad and harsh.
What limit on time, number of attempts, etc. whould we apriori in advance place on laws like equality, climate monitoring, abortion rights, etc. before the gate is dropped on any more of that kind of thing?
What they ought to do is have a process for passing EU-wide laws where they get introduced by a popularly elected legislature but to be enacted they also have to be approved by the majority of the legislatures of the member states. That gives you a good check on centralized power grabs because the member states have to approve anything that could usurp their role, but you can still pass things that make sense at that level like a common set of antitrust rules.
That’s similar to the original US model, except instead of the member state legislatures directly approving legislation, they appointed two proxies to the federal Senate. It’s a good system.
But being able to originate legislation in the directly elected legislature is important. Even the original U.S. constitutional design, which was quite anti-populist, made the directly elected House the main originator of legislation. (Either the House or Senate could do it, but only the House could introduce appropriations bills giving it primacy in the legislative process.)
The current system is new legislation has to be drafted by the Commission, which is the indirectly elected executive branch. That allows what would otherwise be popular proposals to never even be introduced. Whereas if you have legislation introduced by the directly elected body, popular proposals at least get a public debate and people get to see what they are and who is blocking them, but you still ultimately want the check on power grabs and populist nonsense before it actually gets enacted.
The hardware-based routers have low latency. Fortigate advertises under 5 usec forwarding latency for its routers. Linux kernel forwarding is on the order of 10s of usec. However, under 100 usec of latency is negligible over a WAN link, where you're talking ~5 msec latency even on a fast fiber link. The downside of hardware routing is the lack of flexibility and some performance cliffs. On the consumer grade hardware routers in particular, connection setup is handled by a low-power ARM CPU. You have limits on the number of flows you can accelerate in hardware at a time, etc.
I've got a 10G fiber connection, and I swapped out a Fortigate 100F for a server running VyOS. I had performance problems, because the 10G to 1G transition caused dropped packets at the switch. I was able to solve it by shaping the traffic to the 1G devices to handle queuing in the router, which is something this particular Fortigate can't do. (High end routers have algorithms like WRED designed to get TCP to behave nicely on 10G to 1G drops, but I don't want the noise of a Cisco in my basement.)
You can’t compare those numbers because the population in 1993 and today comprises different groups who are materially different in terms of fertility rate. Last year, the fertility rate for women with German citizenship was 1.23.
The other major change is that in 1990, you had a reunification of east and west germany. Fertility rates in East Germany were low before reunification and collapsed right after reunification. But they recovered from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. So the 1993 aggregate average is artificially low. In neighboring France, the fertility rate in 1993 was 1.7.
Also we’re looking at periods that involve dramatically different monetary policy (gold standard before WWII, Bretton Woods from 1944-1976, then the current regime).
One could argue that the defining aspect of each of those shifts in monetary policy has been to devalue the dollar further. I have a relatively basic understanding of economics though, and do understand the arguments that even if that's the outcome it's not an inherently bad one as an american, though a notable effect appears to have been massively widening inequality.
It’s not just “us” who built cities to maximize car travel. Everyone did it. Walkable european cities are surrounded by car-dependent suburbs.
The problem with your analysis is that your concept of “useful” is based on a set of priorities in your head that’s almost certainly not shared by the people who prefer to live in car-optimized areas. Cars let you travel in private, on your own schedule, without having to interact with other people. You might not value those things. Lots of people do.
This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.
Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.
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