Hoog

Oh, yes, the Netherlands [an economy that outperforms the UK on nearly every metric] is such a failed state. A better argument: the reason the UK spends a shit ton on housing benefits is because they’ve failed to get a grip on costs. It’s an effective subsidy for landlords. Expanding the housing stock with non-market rent unit is also just fiscally responsible.

BREAKING: For the first time, central banks plan to cut U.S. dollar holdings over the next decade while increasing allocations to gold and the euro, per Reuters

Germany's Chancellor Merz: We can no longer accept the extraordinarily high levels of sick leave in our companies. We are abolishing sick leave by telephone and introducing the requirement to submit a medical certificate from the very first day of illness. We know this is a tough decision. But we can no longer afford this competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work.

Good luck everyone in NYC

The thing I mostly don’t like about the euro poor framing is that Europe actually demonstrates that there is a wide range of potential GDP’s about which we can have a legitimate debate about which is better. Like, I think Europe is leaving money on the table for stupid reasons. They could eliminate all the anti-market restrictions that are making them poor tomorrow and they’d be much richer without costing themselves anything. But is Europe a hellscape? An awful place to live? I think that’s obviously ridiculous. Which I think demonstrates quite nicely that you can still create really nice places with much lower GDP per capita. So if we want to sacrifice some growth to limit immigration, then I think we can definitely do that. It’s a much better reason to restrict GDP growth than a bunch of anti-freedom market restrictions like they have in Europe. And I don’t think it would make us as poor as Europe, anyway. The United States today is great. The United States in the 1990s was great Europe is great. It’s just very obviously not the case that you have to prioritize growth above everything else. And that of course doesn’t make you anti-growth. There are a thousand other policy positions to debate, many of which have impacts one way or the other on growth. One is not obligated to support literally every pro-growth policy under a unidimensional analysis.