> Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here

It absolutely is. Being right (and more so, being righteous) is expensive. When you cannot afford to put your money where your mouth is, everyone knows that sooner or later you cannot or will not follow through on your words. Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.

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rconti 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.

[citation needed] mostly because I'm curious what kind of metric one uses to measure this.

From an economic standpoint, Europe stagnated behind the US coming out of the pandemic, but now it seems to be the US markets that are lagging Europe in the past year.

Militarily, my perception is that Europe is ramping up, not falling off.

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nkmnz 2 days ago | parent [-]

GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2011: ~1

GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2024: ~0.66

I will give you exact sources for the claim later once I'm back at my laptop, but rest assured: these numbers don't lie. And militarily... really? We're a joke. We cannot even defend our neighbor from being invaded without extensive US help.

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immibis 2 days ago | parent [-]

GDP, as it's measured right now, is mostly just measuring unreported inflation plus money printing.

Edit: Real wages are mostly measuring unreported inflation but not measuring money printing.

	▲	nkmnz 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wont argue that those two things don't exist, but can you show some proof that GDP is measuring nothing else than ("just") those two things, and that there are meaningful differences between the EU and the US with regard to these two things? Is there no unreported inflation and no money printing in the EU? If that were true, we'd see massive devaluation of USD vs. EUR. Also, if you don't like GDP, you can just look at real wages – same picture.