Subject: Re: Spy down another 4 percent,
Hmm, as an outsider please let me ask: Why, when I visited the US, was this European shocked by finding many Americans can't afford decent housing, can at best rent one single room in a house? Very different for many European countries.

Quoting from Fareed Zakaria's WaPo column from last weekend:
"The real economic story of the past three decades is that the United States has surged ahead of all its major competitors. In 2008, the U.S. economy was about the same size as the euro zone’s; now, it is nearly twice the size. In 1990, average U.S. wages were about 20 percent greater than the overall average in the advanced industrial world; they are now about 40 percent higher. In 1995, a Japanese person was 50 percent richer than an American in terms of GDP per capita; today, an American is about 150 percent richer than a Japanese person. In fact, the poorest American state, Mississippi, has a higher per capita GDP than Britain, France or Japan."

Elan