Unions will not gonna like what is coming for them. They are potential source of geopolitical uneasy. A lot of unions people didn't trust their leader anymore, they are forced to take a pay cut and give up on benefits, their pension funds once again screwed. They should just hire GS to manage their pension fund.
Good point, but you missed something. Europe's prison population is miniscule compared to the US, and they don't have as many active duty military either. The US has about 20-25% of the world's (counted) prison population. Nothing to sneeze at when you don't count the prison pop as unemployed. Factor that in, and Europe has always been the same as the US or maybe even better.
More like 1 in a million as Keynes put it: "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose......" --John M. Keynes, Consequences of Peace (1919)