America, You’ve Got It Better

A Rebuttal to Obama’s State of the Union Address

Oh, America! Across the Atlantic a lame duck is in charge. Obama’s State of the Union address is a rhetorical skyrocket that burns out more quickly the hotter it is. The House and Senate stand against him; the nation is divided into two opposing camps. The national debt is higher than the annual GDP. Then there’s this obscene chasm between the super-wealthy and everyone else! Streets are potholed and schools only ensure that there will be no more dishwashers who ever become millionaires.

That seems to comfort our Americaphobes. They need comforting because once again, the United States is sprinting far ahead of Europe. While a creeping mildew of secular stagnation envelops the eurozone, the United States is growing faster than ever. More jobs and fewer people unemployed: Things look rosy for Uncle Sam. Cheap oil fires the desire to spend among consumers and to invest among entrepreneurs. Industry is bringing its factories back from Asia to the U.S. Fixed technological stars like Apple, Google and Facebook are shining brighter than ever. Wall Street, recently the epicenter of a global financial crisis, has strengthened its monetary base and is again doing land-office business.

Obama, who now looks so disenchanted and ruffled, wasn’t a disinterested bystander during all this. His administration jumped into the crisis and ensured that the automobile industry and the financial sector recovered quickly. The government also established a road map for the fracking boom. With this new delivery method, the prairie states blossomed and instigated the drop in oil prices. Now, Europeans hesitate to follow his lead. Extracting poisonous gas from shale, making money from public data, doing business again with financial jugglers — all this seems unsustainable to us Europeans. And perhaps we’re right.

But it would be wrong to mimic the United States in areas where all their attempts have borne no fruit such as in fiscal and monetary policy. The burgeoning government debt didn’t nourish the economic recovery. The causes of the downturn were brought on by uncontrolled spending on the unemployed, an expensive health care system and a bloated military. And the gigantic bond purchase program whereby the Fed became the biggest creditor of the public sector? They were somewhat trickier in the eurozone because they could take targeted fiscal action, massively distort price trends and thus put the brakes on needed reforms more effectively. There’s a good reason why the United States doesn’t use federal funds to bail out individual states that are going broke.

So can we only stand idly by and watch the United States zoom past us? We have projects as well, and they’re more sustainable — like the conversion to green energy or agreements between EU countries that, if skillfully used, can foster beneficial competition between them. The only problem is we don’t believe we can do it. We get despondent and throw in the towel as soon as the first bumps in the road appear. As soon as the Americans stumble and fall, they get right back on their feet — whenever possible under their own power without any help. That’s what keeps them flexible, innovative and independent. No matter if a hurricane tears the roof off their poorly built wooden house or they go bust or bring the world to the brink of a financial crisis: They learn what’s most necessary from their experiences and look cheerfully again to the future.

But we Europeans look fearfully over our shoulders toward a comfortable yesterday and our cherished status quo because with cheap fuel, low interest rates and a central bank with full coffers we think we have all we need. But: We don’t invest because risk scares us, because we fear for the future and therefore squander it. Goethe wrote:

“America, you’ve got it better than our old continent. Exult!

You have no decaying castles And no basalt.

Your heart is not troubled,

In lively pursuits,

By useless old remembrance

And empty disputes.”

If Americans build something that turns to crap, they immediately use it as fertilizer. But our land is covered with pessimists and not much will thrive on that.