Neither, mostly. Or both. Let me see if I can usefully elucidate.
In the short term, the stress originates in the fact that the pay sucks; even if you work as hard as you can all the time and get all the hours you can handle, you still barely get by in the best of times - and one serious medical issue, for example, is more than enough to wipe you out financially for good.
In the long term, these jobs entail extensive physical labor, and it takes very little time to realize that there's eventually going to be a hard limit on your ability to continue to do such work - especially if you work as hard as you can all the time and get all the hours you can handle. Sooner or later, you're just going to be too old and too beat up to continue, and the longer you do this kind of work, the higher your risk of the kind of injury whose repair costs will wipe you out as I describe above.
And even if you beat all the odds and never get sick or get hurt, what happens when you can't work any more? Funding even a minimally feasible retirement runs to the mid- to high six figures at best, and doing this kind of work all your life, you're lucky to top out at fifty thousand a year - and that's if you can get such work at all, when illegal day labor is so much more cost-effective.
So you're pretty much screwed both ways, when this kind of work is the best your abilities enable you to find. You don't make enough money to provide a stable life for yourself and your family, and when you run up against the physical infirmities that come to us all but most quickly to those who use their bodies hardest, you cease being able to make even that much, and then what the hell do you do?
Thanks for the answer. In most of the EU your healthcare costs are mostly covered by the State and, if you become unable to work, you usually get some kind of disability pensions. But I understand that, without this kind of "insurance", there is a lot more stress even in jobs where you don't have big responsibilities.
Do you really think that, if we spent more on our armies, you would spend less?
Anyway, I'm not saying that our system is better - for example, here it's more difficult to find a job, and wages are usually lower enough (also because of the taxes necessary to finance the welfare state). What I was really thinking about is how much having to worry about medical expenses and retirement money changes the stress level in certain kinds of jobs.
I think that if we spent less on our armies, we'd have more to spend on the sorts of social benefits Europeans regard as table stakes and pride themselves on having.
In the abstract sense, it'd also be curious to see what effect on those social benefits would result from a termination of the security guarantees which the US has extended to an ever broader fraction of Europe since 1949. I'm not so cruel a man as to actually wish such an outcome on anyone, but I certainly would like to see the people charged with the responsibility of governing my nation take an interest in the wellbeing of my nation, rather than investing so much expense and effort in defending an entire continent which can barely be moved even to a token expression of gratitude, much less any actual quid pro quo, in exchange for it.
As regards the remainder of your comment - yes, without social guarantees of medical care and a livable retirement, life is much more stressful than it would otherwise be, and this additional stress is inversely proportional to socioeconomic standing, with an exponential term in the function. Is this really such a novel thought as your comments here make it seem? I find it obvious beyond the point of triviality, but I suppose someone who's never actually lived with it might not previously have had cause to give it any consideration.
Yes, the fact that we can take for granted some things that you don't was exactly my point. Here, when you think about getting seriously sick, what most people think about is the loss of health - the loss of money comes very far behind.
Regarding military spending, I'm surely grateful of NATO - especially during the cold war - but I think you're severely underestimating European defense capabilities and, most importantly, needs.
Let's say that for an act of magic NATO went away tomorrow and a EU-only army or alliance had to be created to replace it, and let's say we didn't even increase military spending from the current level. Who would/could attack such EU alliance?
The only neighboring power that would have the resources to even think about it is Russia, but then again - with current spending and capabilities - Putin would have exactly zero chances of successfully invading the EU. Just look at the size of our combined armies and the difference in economic potential (in case of a prolonged war). This, even without even counting that France (here I'm making the UK magically disappear as an ally too) has enough nukes to make such an invasion an act of folly, and that several other EU countries could easily develop nuclear capabilities if required.
Of course you're free to disagree, but my very strong impression - as someone who also has some family in the US - is that this "we can't have good, affordable health care because of NATO" is just a very convenient way for your politicians to put the blame elsewhere. The US is so rich that it could easily give EU-level healthcare at EU costs to everybody, but then doctors, insurance companies, big pharma and everybody related would need to be less rich, and all other high-income people should pay higher - and not even so much higher at that - taxes, as it happens in the EU.
You could do that even without cutting military spending which, by the way, is mostly geared towards the ability to project US power overseas wherever and whenever it's needed, not to protect Europe from Russia. I don't have the numbers readily available, but I'm pretty sure that your 11 carrier strike group cost much, much more than all your troops stationed in Europe.
Well, hell. I've been arguing against NATO for years, for much the same reason as I've tended to argue against the scale of our military expenditures in general - namely, that it's an obsolete waste of money better spent elsewhere. You're right about the cost of our carrier groups - what's worse is that, in any war with a serious opponent, they're just going to be gone, because they have no meaningful defense against mass attack with supersonic cruise missiles. That's why I want to see them scrapped in favor of something cheaper and more defensible - that, and as a means of helping restrain the tendency toward ultimately counterproductive military adventure that's been so much a feature of US foreign policy, regardless of who happens to be in power at any given moment, for a century or more. And quite aside from the fact that I actually do believe these are worthwhile ends, this argument is much easier to make go, with people who aren't in any sense progressive, than the one where we look out for people because it's the virtuous and compassionate thing to do, and hang the tax rate increase and medical-sector profit cuts.
(Does this sound hypocritical of me? Perhaps it does. On the other hand, if I have to choose between some notion of my own personal ideological purity on the one hand, and on the other acting in ways which make more likely a state of affairs in which poor kids don't die of toothache and one mishap doesn't render entire families destitute...)
Unfortunately, because I've tended to avoid the news lately, I had not previously been aware that Trump's lately been arguing that NATO is obsolete and overpriced as well. This makes it an impropitious time to advance the same argument myself - even if the damned Johnny-come-lately happens to benefit at this moment from the broken-clock principle, it's hardly wise to associate oneself too closely with whatever he happens to be saying, whether by accident or otherwise. I'll have to keep a closer eye on that in future.
I see your point. Anyway, I don't think that NATO by itself adds a significant amount of expenses on top of the national, "non-NATO" military expense of the participants.
Regarding Trump, IIRC he already changed his mind about NATO being obsolete, the point now is "just" that the allies should spend more.
I see 14.5% vs. 4.1%, US and EU respectively, in the 2015 figures listed there. US and EU GDP being roughly equal, this works out to an absolute factor of ~3.5x as well as a relative one, which strikes me as fairly significant.
To be sure, US military spending isn't purely motivated by our concern for our NATO commitments. But, considering that the US contribution constitutes by far the lion's share of resources available to the alliance in both absolute value and percentage of GDP, it seems to me that much more effort is required, than you exert here, to argue that the termination of such commitments, or even simply the reallocation of significant funds away from US military expenditure, would in no material way affect spending priorities among the EU nations.
Please notice that the 14.5% refers to the "central government" (ie, federal) budget. It doesn't account for the fact that much of your public expenditures are done at the state level - here in the EU, "centra government" means Germany, UK, etc.) nor the fact that, with lower taxes, your budget as a % of GDP is of course lower.
Wow, USA is pretty terrible place to live. Here cashiers and such actually ARE stress-free jobs. Managing people is always bigger PITA than just smiling all day on the customers ...
In the short term, the stress originates in the fact that the pay sucks; even if you work as hard as you can all the time and get all the hours you can handle, you still barely get by in the best of times - and one serious medical issue, for example, is more than enough to wipe you out financially for good.
In the long term, these jobs entail extensive physical labor, and it takes very little time to realize that there's eventually going to be a hard limit on your ability to continue to do such work - especially if you work as hard as you can all the time and get all the hours you can handle. Sooner or later, you're just going to be too old and too beat up to continue, and the longer you do this kind of work, the higher your risk of the kind of injury whose repair costs will wipe you out as I describe above.
And even if you beat all the odds and never get sick or get hurt, what happens when you can't work any more? Funding even a minimally feasible retirement runs to the mid- to high six figures at best, and doing this kind of work all your life, you're lucky to top out at fifty thousand a year - and that's if you can get such work at all, when illegal day labor is so much more cost-effective.
So you're pretty much screwed both ways, when this kind of work is the best your abilities enable you to find. You don't make enough money to provide a stable life for yourself and your family, and when you run up against the physical infirmities that come to us all but most quickly to those who use their bodies hardest, you cease being able to make even that much, and then what the hell do you do?