Other countries have social safety nets. The US has debt.
As of May 2024, the US economy looked pretty good on paper.Inflation was a big fat zero: Prices did not rise at all on average last month. Unemployment was 4 percent — a rate lower than at any point in the Reagan, Obama, or either of the Bush administrations — and the economy added a healthy 272,000 jobs. Wages have been growing faster than prices for months now.But Americans don't seem particularly psyched about the situation. Consumer sentiment has improved since last year, when it plummeted due to anger at inflation, but the most recent report from the University of Michigan gives a sentiment estimate of 77.2.That’s just an arbitrary index, but it indicates that Americans feel about the same as they did in the spring of 2013, when unemployment was about 7.5 percent and the economy was still struggling to recover from the financial crisis.