Great line in the Guardian article (post 393): “Here is a country so imblanced it has effectively fallen over.”
There are two issues with this. First, most Americans don’t tend to have large amounts of stock ownership. Second, the S&P 500 is only down 1.08%, quarter-to-date, and the global ACWI index is down 1.86%. Hardly earth-shattering.
Maybe you’re right, but there are still 4 trading days left in the quarter, and things may very well get worse before they start to improve.
How is London losing its place as the premier financial center bad for the US?
Are the 1.9 million names on the petition all from those who voted to leave? Doubtful.
Re: posts 397 and 401, I think what matters is how those voters who are making a choice between the 2 presidential candidates react. Folks might take a look at Bexit and market reactions and factor that into their November vote.
The biggest challenge for Britain, or England or whatever they become, is now that they get to set their own rules once again, how on earth will they reach a consensus as to what those rules should be?
“The leave campaign has appeared to row back on key pledges made during the EU referendum campaign less than 24 hours after the UK voted for Brexit, after it emerged immigration levels could remain unchanged.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/boris-johnson-michael-gove-eu-liars
“The Brexit figureheads had no plan besides exploiting populist fears and dismissing experts who rubbished their thinking”
Whatever the Queen says?
After all they governed themselves somehow for 1000 years before EU.
@dietz199, the US has also seen a dramatic reduction in family farms and small businesses in the past 25 years. Not sure you can blame the EU for the impact of globalization – it doesn’t take being in the EU for that to happen anyplace today.
“But like most stories that talk about increasing inequality, this one also ignores the consider the cost of benefits. For example, health care costs are largely paid for the by the employer and they have grown much faster than inflation. When total benefits are included, the gains are considerably higher than 3%, although certainly less than 181%.”
Except that you can’t eat healthcare and healthcare doesn’t give you financial security while money does. That basically means that healthcare costs have exploded. But no one feels richer just because their employer (and themselves, usually) have to pay more for the same health insurance plan.
This has started to drift into the specifically political regarding the upcoming US election. Let’s not go there. I left a couple of statements that are more generic observations. There are plenty of outlets for debating the effect of Brexit on US politics in great detail. CC just chooses not to be one of them.
“I can understand very low income getting caught in the payday loan trap, but I don’t really understand the problem with people near the median income level. Relative to Australia or most of Europe, food, shelter and clothing costs are lower in the United States.”
Education and health care costs a lot more in the US than in more socialistic Europe and Australia. That decreases savings.
Food and clothing costs are peanuts compared to those 2 big-ticket items.
While the Guardian articles are well written and I often read what they have to say, I’d no sooner use it as a primary source than the National Review. Quoting extensively /exclusively from it weakens rather than strengthens an argument.
Also, isn’t it technically possible for Boris Johnson to be UK’s PM and POTUS?
Fiction cannot compete with reality.
Has he been a resident within the US for 14 years? A little known requirement for POTUS>
@Pizzagirl said:
"One of the things that fascinated me when I got into genealogy was how arbitrary boundaries were. Am I really Polish or Russian, is my husband really Austrian or Hungarian – depends when you take the snapshot.
I would be careful of “freeze framing” the borders of European countries right now and suggesting that they are immutable, clearly distinct, these-people-are-different-from-those-folks. That’s true in the short term, but not in the long term. After all, how different was the map of Europe just 100 years ago?"
Indeed. And that map of Europe was rearranged by wars over the past few centuries. Wars where national identitity and nationalism played key roles. So I hope you understand, @dietz199, why I’m not so keen on hyping up national identity and nationalism. Indeed, the EU did try to homogenize everything. And that’s a good thing. Because if you look at the history of Europe, it’s pretty clear: when nationalism is fanned and differences between people are hyped up instead of smoothed out, genocide and killing follow.
“The Brexit figureheads had no plan besides exploiting populist fears and dismissing experts who rubbished their thinking”
And anyone with a brain who was paying attention would have known that. Lots of ignorant people who let emotions rule, though.
Another good article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/brexit_is_just_the_beginning_the_eu_blew_it.html
“The prospect of European countries rushing toward the exits should be an alarming one: For all its flaws, the EU is among the most impressive political achievements of our time. Mock the overpaid, pampered eurocrats and silly banana regulations all you want, it’s hard to argue with the fact that after a half-century of carnage that dwarfs today’s Middle East conflicts, not to mention the centuries of war that preceded it, Western Europe has been at peace for 70 years. The carrots and sticks of EU membership are also a large part of the reason that Spain, Greece, and the formerly Communist countries of central Europe are now consolidated democracies. The mere fact that you can drive from Lisbon, Portugal, to Tallinn, Estonia, without once showing anyone your passport should be considered a major political achievement. As historian Charles King writes, the EU has introduced something genuinely new to Europe—a political identity based on a set of values rather than old-fashioned ethnic nationalism.”