> Housing is (along with healthcare in the US) a big part of why most people in the so-called "rich world" are in fact dismally poor, only one missed paycheck or turn of bad luck away from life becoming unlivable.
Not really.
Let's set up a quick boundary condition. Since you mentioned most people, you're talking about the lower-middle and middle classes. Let's keep the discussion on them. The working poor have it bad almost everywhere, and I think we both agree that there's more that can be done in most countries to support them.
For someone with a median household income, it's still very much possible to finding housing that is less than 25-30% of their household income. This is true even in high cost of living (HCOL) areas. Now, there are some cities or sections of cities that are unaffordable for someone with a median income, but these are very much the exceptions.
To put it simply, if you have a median household income for your country, in almost all locations in almost all OECD countries, you earn enough to follow a household budget that allows you to save 15-20% of your take home pay. If you can't save a portion of your income and you're not living off of a below-average wage, it's very likely that you either made decisions that aren't conducive to saving (e.g., you're house poor, car poor, or your discretionary spending is too high).
> along with healthcare in the US
Quality health care is expensive in most countries. The US has its own set of issues that make health care more expensive than in most other countries (e.g., population density), but it's not orders of magnitude higher. It's also offset by the higher salaries that people in the US earn over, say, the average EU state.
People will naturally spend beyond their capabilities, and the entire market is built around this (loans for everything is standard now).
The ONLY way to prevent this is to either stop offering loans or force savings in some way (taxes, etc). But apparently both those options are off the books.
> The ONLY way to prevent this is to either stop offering loans or force savings in some way (taxes, etc). But apparently both those options are off the books.
This is how the system is actually designed. Social security is a mandatory annuity/savings and disability insurance program. Many countries also have mandatory contributions into their 401K (OECD Pillar 2) equivalents.
Even in the US, where these contributions are mandatory, the tax code is set up to make them extremely desirable for the employer and the employee.
> loans for everything is standard now
Stopping this would be as simple as having an indebtedness line added to the tax code. In many countries, there is a maximum level of debt that a person is allowed to carry. Companies aren't allowed to issue new debt if the repayment for all of their current debt exceeds some percentage of their income.
It's not that consumer debt "helps to fuel" the economy; consumer debt is the only reason the economy hasn't collapsed in on itself already.
Henry Ford wasn't a good person. He was a rabid antisemite. But even he knew that he wouldn't be able to sell cars indefinitely if people couldn't afford to buy them, so he raised wages. The bosses, as a class, no longer have to do this. They can make enough fake money out of debt to keep their businesses alive. So that's what they're doing.
All this means we get artificial mediocre prosperity that is contingent on their piles of money getting bigger (i.e., all economic growth, meager as it has been, goes to them). And we know that they are willing to crash everything (or, to give an example that has actually happened, make lots of people sick with Covid-19) to keep themselves in charge and their piles of money growing bigger.
If the consumer debt game ended for some reason, the whole system would collapse immediately.
It's really not, at least when you compare OECD countries with one another.
For instance, per capita healthcare spending in the US is 11.4K. The OECD average is around 5.7K
Now, there are a lot of reasons for this gap:
1. Salaries are higher in the US. Health care workers are much better compensated there than, say, in France or Spain.
2. The US has a much lower population density. There are a lot of fixed costs with health care. There are real cost advantages to having a large majority of your population in dense urban areas.
3. The US is first to market/first to adoption for a lot of medical innovation. The R&D costs for anything health care related are enormous. Early adopters bear the brunt of these costs.
4. The US has a hybrid health care model. The two countries that use this model, the US and Switzerland, are one and three respectively for per capita health care spending.
Not really.
Let's set up a quick boundary condition. Since you mentioned most people, you're talking about the lower-middle and middle classes. Let's keep the discussion on them. The working poor have it bad almost everywhere, and I think we both agree that there's more that can be done in most countries to support them.
For someone with a median household income, it's still very much possible to finding housing that is less than 25-30% of their household income. This is true even in high cost of living (HCOL) areas. Now, there are some cities or sections of cities that are unaffordable for someone with a median income, but these are very much the exceptions.
To put it simply, if you have a median household income for your country, in almost all locations in almost all OECD countries, you earn enough to follow a household budget that allows you to save 15-20% of your take home pay. If you can't save a portion of your income and you're not living off of a below-average wage, it's very likely that you either made decisions that aren't conducive to saving (e.g., you're house poor, car poor, or your discretionary spending is too high).
> along with healthcare in the US
Quality health care is expensive in most countries. The US has its own set of issues that make health care more expensive than in most other countries (e.g., population density), but it's not orders of magnitude higher. It's also offset by the higher salaries that people in the US earn over, say, the average EU state.