thinking about how the US uses a shell game, where by privatizing all the social goods provided most other places, they can point to high salaries and high productive value and claim we're a rich country, which is true, but leave out that after every expense you have to have as like, a human who exists, I know people with low-ish 6 figure salaries who are living paycheck to paycheck thanks to previous debt or medical problems or etc
so GDP and money changing hands looks high but is largely meaningless because half of it would have been public services in any other country
It's even more interesting because parts of China kinda did the opposite of this. Subsidizing housing and healthcare let them artificially deflate wages to attract american business investments in manufacturing and tooling, and, especially, patents. It still reduced quality of life, but not nearly as much as if the wages were that low in the US way of doing things.
and then once the US was reliant on them as a manufacturing base, having moved most of their manufacturing there, China started slackening some of those and raising wages.
every "trade war" with China is the US having shot itself in the foot while falling for the bait and then getting really upset at how obvious it was in retrospect. CIA must be too busy dropping LSD and micromanaging horrifying dictators to write accurate reports.
