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Western countries are experiencing a decline due to a combination of high taxes without perceived return, an unsustainable cost of living, a deteriorating standard of living, a lack of community, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness for the future.
The video explores the 'push factors' driving people to leave Western countries, beginning with the issue of high taxes. The host argues that despite significant tax burdens, public services like education are failing, and citizens feel they receive little tangible benefit. This is compounded by a societal trend where many individuals focus on personal wealth accumulation rather than collective improvement, leading to a disconnect between those who work and pay taxes and those who own assets and pay less. The system is perceived as inequitable, benefiting elites and asset owners at the expense of the working class.
Another significant push factor is the high cost of living, which forces many to spend disproportionate amounts of their income on basic necessities like housing, often leading to a reduced standard of living. The host criticizes policies that import labor to boost the economy without addressing the needs of existing citizens, exacerbating housing shortages and driving up prices. This economic extraction benefits asset owners, while the middle class is eroded, leaving a stark divide between the wealthy and those struggling to survive. The video suggests that corporations, driven by profit motives, will continue to increase prices, making life increasingly unaffordable.
The declining standard of living, characterized by widespread homelessness and a perceived disregard for citizens' well-being, is presented as a critical issue. The host points to policies that restrict housing construction, artificially inflate property values, and contribute to homelessness, questioning why such a fundamental problem remains unsolved in technologically advanced nations. Furthermore, rapid societal changes and a weakening sense of community are leading to a lack of attachment to place, forcing people to move for economic reasons. This is coupled with a profound lack of hope for the future, stemming from economic uncertainty, declining birth rates, and a sense that society devalues young men, leading many to 'opt out' or seek opportunities in developing countries.
The video concludes by highlighting the pervasive lack of hope as a primary driver for emigration from Western nations. This hopelessness is linked to economic instability, the rising cost of childcare, and a societal shift away from supporting families and young people. The host suggests that Western societies are mirroring trends seen in countries like Japan, with an increasing focus on end-of-life care over supporting new generations. The consequences include a future with fewer resources, deteriorating infrastructure, and a potential decline in essential services due to a lack of available labor. The host expresses personal hope in extracting wealth from the declining system to relocate to a place that better aligns with his values.
People are leaving western countries due to several 'push factors' including excessively high taxes that don't seem to provide adequate public services in return. The cost of living has become unsustainable, forcing many into precarious financial situations and eroding their standard of living. A sense of hopelessness for the future, coupled with a decline in community structures, also contributes to this trend.
The primary push factors include high taxes without perceived benefits, an unsustainable cost of living that makes basic necessities unaffordable, and a declining standard of living evidenced by issues like homelessness. Additionally, rapid societal changes are weakening traditional community bonds, and a pervasive lack of hope for the future discourages people from staying.
Yes, the high cost of living is a major reason people are leaving western countries. Housing, in particular, has become prohibitively expensive in many areas, forcing individuals to spend a disproportionate amount of their income on rent or mortgages. This financial strain significantly reduces their overall standard of living and ability to save or plan for the future.
High taxes are a significant push factor for emigration from western nations, especially when citizens feel they do not receive sufficient public services or societal benefits in return for their contributions. This perceived inequity, where asset owners may pay less than those who work, fuels dissatisfaction and prompts people to seek countries with a more favorable tax and benefit system.
The standard of living in western countries is declining due to a combination of factors, including unsustainable costs of living, deteriorating infrastructure, and a perceived lack of governmental care for citizens' well-being. Policies that may inflate housing costs and a focus on asset owners over the general population contribute to widespread dissatisfaction and a reduced quality of life.
A significant lack of hope for the future is a major driver for people leaving western countries. Economic uncertainty, the rising cost of essential services like childcare, and a societal feeling that younger generations are devalued contribute to this pessimism. This hopelessness leads many to seek better opportunities and a more positive outlook elsewhere.
Buying a home can be a trap because it significantly limits job hunting flexibility, especially in a volatile market. The financial commitment of a mortgage can require an unsustainable number of work hours. In many areas, real estate cycles are on a downswing, making current prices potentially unfavorable for buyers.
Some viewers suggest that many Americans are miserable due to factors like workplace pettiness, political division, and a general sense of dissatisfaction. This misery can manifest as anger, uncompromising attitudes, and a competitive drive to be more unhappy than others. This cultural aspect contributes to the desire for some to leave the country.
The middle class in America is perceived by many viewers to be gone or severely eroded. This is attributed to economic extraction that benefits asset owners, rising costs of living, and policies that exacerbate housing shortages. The result is a widening gap between the wealthy and those struggling financially.
The US State Department does not specifically track the number of people leaving the country. While exact statistics are hard to gauge, anecdotal evidence and searches for digital nomads and expats suggest a notable trend. Some estimates suggest thousands may be leaving in the first half of the year.
Many people are drawn to Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries for a better quality of life and to escape the economic pressures of Western nations. While language barriers and lower local wages can be challenges, expats often find ways to overcome these. The appeal lies in the opportunity to truly live rather than just work for basic survival.
0:08 Hey YouTube, Alex here. I'm here today in Benji Kitty Park in Bangkok, Thailand, and I wanted to come to you today with a video discussing the push factors as to why so many people are leaving Western countries. Point number one is high taxes.
0:23 I know some people are already thinking, 'Oh, high taxes, well, you want to live in an educated society, right?' The problem is the outcomes for the public education system are dismal. I went to public schools; it was not a great experience. I look at the dysfunction and the damaged people that came out of that system. Many of them are having real problems as an adult. Numerous students I went to school with have serious legal issues, serious relationship issues. As far as education goes in the public school system, even though it's paid for by tax dollars, I never received any personal finance education. I didn't learn anything practical in my public school education.
1:07 You'll hear me say this a lot: nobody really wants to fix the problems in the United States anymore. People just want to make enough money so that the problems don't apply to them. 'Hey, I don't care if all these people are uneducated as long as I can live in a gated community and have things delivered to me. I don't have to deal with all that.' I don't have to deal with the slums, which is a thing that's returning to all the Western democracies. You see slums and all the Western democracies, places that are rundown, dilapidated, high population density, pollution, trash. We could go on and on about that.
1:39 In terms of high taxes, you have that 'you need to pay your fair share' crowd. What this has resulted in is that high earners, people who earn a lot from a job, pay a lot of taxes. And people who own assets pay much less in terms of taxes. People are frustrated because you have a lot of people that make money without working that also don't pay into this system. And on the opposite end of that, you have a lot of people working and paying into the system but not really having a lot to show for it.
2:07 There are plenty of people that love the trappings of civilization but they don't want to participate in civilization. On the other end of that, you have people that don't want to pay taxes. And you ask them, 'Well, how do you plan to bring that into reality?' 'Well, I watch Fox News.' So you watch Fox News, and that's how you're going to avoid taxes. 'What are you going to do to make up for the limited funds?' 'Well, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to participate in society.' That's what it's come to.
2:36 On one hand, people who work a lot pay a lot of taxes. And then there's a large population of people that just own everything and don't pay any taxes. So you have people that are busting their behinds, that are struggling to get ahead because of things like layoffs designed to help those asset owners. On the other hand, you have the asset owners that are like, 'You know, this BMW is not enough. I want a Rolls.'
3:04 I say this because I have friends that are immigrants. That's why I don't necessarily agree with the anti-immigrant sentiment. It's like, 'Okay, well, a lot of those people come over to the US and work in high-paying jobs and, as a result, pay a lot of taxes.' Pay 40, 50% of their income in taxes, states like California for example. Without those people, one, all these services would go unfulfilled, right? Your immigrant doctors, your immigrant engineers, your immigrant lawyers, all these positions would go unfilled. Nobody would pay for the upkeep of the country because the asset owners don't want to pay for that stuff.
3:39 They want to enjoy it. They want you to have a road so that you can deliver their luxury goods. Do I have a problem with high taxes? I don't inherently. I think that what would make a lot of people happier is if they felt like they got something in return.
3:55 If I wanted to get my tax dollars back, by the way, this isn't financial advice. I'd be buying Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, these different publicly traded defense companies where a lot of our tax dollars get funneled right into these companies through being able to sell defense equipment. What would be a more fair and equitable system is one in which the asset owners would contribute to the system that protects the value of their assets and allows for them to earn so much of our hard-earned dollars that are spent on things that we need to survive.
4:29 But yeah, all this talk about, 'You just need to go major in this or that and go get a good job if you want to be wealthy.' You're much better off starting a business. Now, not everybody can start a business, and that's why I think the system should be more equitable, more fair. Businesses are limited by the population, and in much of the world, the population is declining. So how that changes the economy, I'm not sure. But if your business relies on an ever-increasing number of people, I don't see how that's sustainable in a world where very few people are having kids.
5:00 In summary, if you want people to stop leaving the Western countries, then what you would need to have is a situation where one, the taxes are lowered, or two, where the taxes are done in a way that is for the benefit of society as opposed to the benefit of the elites and the asset owners.
5:21 As a side note, this is a little bit dark, but some people will say, 'Oh no, people are rushing into the West.' Haven't you seen when people don't have children, they're effectively opting out of the system? They're essentially leaving. When they're gone, there is no lineage, there is nobody there to replace them. There is no future for their line. So even those people that say, 'I'm going to stay here and make a bunch of money,' that don't have children are in effect leaving. They're just leaving at a later date.
5:49 Number two point here is high cost of living. I've beaten this drum so many times, but I'll beat it once again. We see that in the Western democracies, many people are paying, paying like 50% of their income for substandard housing. Roommates are now replacing the studio apartment as a way to save money. This shows no signs of slowing down because anytime the Western democracies want to boost the economy, they just bring more people in because the people are consumer worker bots. You're going to consume at least this much, you're going to output at least this much. I don't care what you look like, I don't care what your culture is, just come on in.
6:29 You're going to boost the economy, you're going to make sure that we have the things that we want, that I can go and I can have my cheap fruit because I don't want to pay a high price for these things. So we'll just interchange you and use you such that we can still have this high standard of living without helping out the people who have no choice.
6:51 I often talk about this. People say, 'Well, we need to help these other people.' And I'm like, 'What about the people who have no choice?' You've got a lot of people who don't have a choice of living in the United States. They are only US citizens. They don't have the money to go overseas. They don't have the resources to get out of there. For better or worse, they're stuck there.
7:12 Now, this video is not to rail against immigrants. Obviously, look at my skin color. I'm the child of immigrants and grandchildren of immigrants. But at the same time, you have to wonder, is this system sustainable? I think it is not sustainable to treat people this way. The Western democracies no longer care about their people. They no longer value their people. They look at their people as interchangeable.
7:36 You will see the high costs of living continue to go up in our lifetimes because these policies that contribute to the high cost of living are not going away. They benefit the asset owners, people who own real estate, who own all this stuff. All these policies benefit those people. The high cost of living has eliminated the middle class. You have people that can't afford to go to work and stay at home, and you have people that are wealthy and can afford to do whatever they want, and not much in between.
8:03 And so people will say, 'Oh well, how do you know the prices will keep going up?' All the data about our society is available for purchase. So if you're in business, you are a large company, you can calculate exactly how much you can charge for everything, and you'll charge the maximum. We see this with hotel prices, we see this with food prices. Everybody that's in business at a large scale is tasked with delivering maximum shareholder value. Their job is to make as much money as possible.
8:34 So they use this information to extract as much wealth as they can from society. That's why you have a bottle of Coca-Cola, what's essentially a bottle of sugar water, costing like $2.50 because they know there's a section of our population that the only thing they have to look forward to every week is Friday night where they go to the adult beverage store and they get their Coca-Cola and they get their adult beverage and they mix together. And that's all the joy they have to look forward to in the week. And so we can charge them more and more for that because they're not going to ever have the money to go on an international vacation. They're not going to have the money to get a great education where they could get some kind of corporate job, which is soul-sucking, but at least they've got some extra money to enjoy.
9:22 That's an example where you see that things are priced to the maximum of what people are willing to pay. Once again, I'm not saying everybody should be drinking Coca-Cola. I think Coca-Cola is not good for your health, but I think it's an example where you see that something that doesn't really create a lot of value for society, that doesn't really help people self-actualize or make their lives better, that can command a significant amount of their purchasing power because they're not doing it just once. I mean, I've lived with people who have an adult beverage problem; it's not just a one-time thing. This is a thing they're doing all the time. This might be the only thing they have to look forward to.
9:57 The only thing they have to look forward to in a normal work week will the high prices come down? No, because corporations have to deliver year-over-year growth and profit. They will keep charging higher and higher prices because as long as some people are capable of paying or willing to pay, then you can just keep charging more. And okay, just don't pay. Sounds great. Let's just not pay. Try not paying for housing, try not paying your property taxes, try not paying your car payment, try not paying for your parking, try not paying for your food, try not paying for your insurance payment. Oh, just don't pay. Well, not paying means that your life will just start falling apart. We can't all just not pay.
10:36 I mean, we can't all just live in tent cities and eat bugs. The only way I was able to save enough money to come to Thailand was that I lucked out and got a decent corporate job in California. I lived in a cockroach-infested apartment, basically spent as little money as I could. I didn't go out, didn't have a social life, didn't leave my apartment unless it was to go to the office, and I did that for a year. I was able to save up some money to come over here, but most people are not willing to do that. Most people do not want to live in a building with pest problems.
11:09 It did have rent control, which was nice. Ultimately, I got laid off from that job as the interest rates rose. The company needed to move toward profitability, which meant getting rid of a lot of people. I was included in those layoffs, and not having significant experience, only a couple years of experience, I struggled to find another role. I think it was like 12 hours after getting laid off, I booked a one-way flight here to Thailand, and I've been here for the last year. It was a great decision. I spent about a third of what I spent in the United States living here. I live a much happier life. It's a lot more pleasant place to live, and I dread the day that I have to go back to America.
11:46 Number three is the declining standard of living. Now, I know some people would tie this in with point number two, which was the ever-increasing cost of living. By declining standard of living, I look at things like homeless encampments in all the major cities, the border crisis where we have these human rights violations happening with people who are being taken advantage of and mistreated, many of whom are women and children who are defenseless. It's absolutely disgusting that any of this would happen in the Western world, but here we are.
12:15 Going back to the homeless encampments, a lot of people blame the homeless for their own circumstances. I would point out to those people that there are plenty of policies that make housing hard to come by. We talked a bit about the mass immigration policies that are haphazard, but we also would need to talk about the NIMBYism, right? There are a lot of policies in the Western world that prevent the construction of new housing. This is to increase the value of property, increase the value of assets, make them in artificially short supply.
12:46 I posed the question: Is housing such a conundrum that the Western World, responsible for many technological and medical innovations of the last half century, is incapable of solving this problem? Is housing that complicated that we can go to developing countries that have much more affordable and plentiful housing, and yet in the Western world, it's just this mesmerizing problem that nobody can solve?
13:11 Now, I do think that the homeless population is used as sort of a stick in the 'carrot and the stick' scenario to show people, 'Hey, if you don't work, if you don't grind it out for the system, this is going to be you. You see this guy over here that lives in a tent and uses public bathrooms to shower and shave? That could be you, so you better be careful.'
13:33 Finally, at one time, the homeless encampments were limited to San Francisco, Los Angeles. People said, 'Oh, just avoid the major cities, it won't be an issue for you.' But nowadays, many of the small to medium-sized cities also have a homeless problem. When my grandfather worked for the local police department in my hometown, their policy was to buy the homeless people a one-way bus ticket to Florida. They just dumped the problem on somebody else.
13:57 But now the problem is so widespread that while the nice areas don't have them, every single city has a section of homeless encampments. Even in the medium-sized city that I moved to in my mid-20s just for a couple of years to go back to college, even that city now has homeless encampments. The conservative people there get mad, 'Oh, why is this liberal mayor helping these people out?' It's like, 'Dude, these people are a dime a dozen. There's so many homeless people, they can't ignore the population anymore because you can't just send these people to recycling plants and turn them into productive members of society.'
14:32 Point number four: rapid change resulting in a lack of community. Some of this has been spurred by technology, some of this is also just societal changes. Most of the working-class people in my hometown have left. They can no longer afford to live there. They've had to go seek places that either have a higher salary, which is what I did. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and you have other people who have to go seek out a lower cost of living because they can't afford their rent anymore.
14:59 Because of this worker-consumer bot phenomenon, you have people who no longer have attachment to one place. For me, I have very little attachment to my hometown beyond my friends there. Aside from my friends, I have no interest in ever living there again. And if it weren't for my friends that live there, I would never go back to my hometown. I have a lot of painful and unpleasant memories there that I don't want to repeat.
15:18 But not only that, I would have nowhere to live. So if I were to go back to my hometown, I would find myself homeless pretty quickly. And when I went to other people, adults in my social circles, and I mentioned, 'Hey, I found a job in California, I'm going to move out there,' they'd say, 'How could you live out there? You can't stay here. How could you go out there? It's so expensive.' So, wait a second, I should stay here and be homeless, or I should go out there where I have a job that's going to actually pay my bills?
15:45 And so you have all these people that give terrible advice that because they come from a wealthy family that has assets that allow for them a very comfortable standard of living without working, they don't understand why you would want to go contribute to some other economy, contribute where you're actually going to be rewarded for your work. No, they want you to sit around and be poor and miserable so that they have somebody to feel better than. 'Look at this chump, he works for $15 an hour, meanwhile I have $100k a year in rental income. What a loser.'
16:16 Oh no, loser, don't go over there and make all that money. I want you to stay here. I want my pizza. And so you've got this issue in Middle America where nobody wants to address the change, so they get dragged by it, kicking and screaming. I personally have lived in four different locations in the United States and cycle between them as necessary. When I found a high-paying job in California, I moved out there. When I lost that job, I went back to Tennessee for a few weeks before I came to Thailand because I'm in my prime earning years. I am applying to jobs back in California because there is such great opportunity there, and that's the most likely shot I have at making enough money to eventually permanently leave the United States.
16:55 Finally, when I did visit my hometown recently, I asked my buddy, 'Hey, do people still hang out? Is there still a social circle here?' And he explained to me that when he goes out, he never sees anybody he knows. People basically stick to themselves. A few people who are still there typically have inherited or are going to inherit housing from their parents. If you're not in that position, then there's not much reason to stay.
17:19 The final point in this heavy topic is five: the reason that so many of us are getting pushed away or feel pushed away is that we don't have hope for the future. I do recommend if you are struggling with your well-being, please contact the appropriate resources. This video, while I understand it's a bit ranty, it's a bit negative, that I need to get these thoughts out of my head now.
17:43 The first point that I'll make in regards to the lack of hope is the decline in having kids. I think that a lot of people are not having kids because they are uncertain about the future of the economy. They don't feel that they can provide a good standard of living for themselves, let alone extra people in the form of dependence.
18:00 Another would be the growing homeless population, people that have essentially given up on moving forward in their lives. You've got a lot of people who had their own struggles growing up and they're thinking, 'Well, if I had those issues and what was supposed to be a much more prosperous time, what would it look like to try to replicate that lifestyle today?'
18:22 While I have some sense of empathy for the child-free movement, you could even say I'm part of it. The child-free movement wasn't a thing 100 years ago. Why was it not a thing? Well, people actually got a benefit from having kids. A lot of people lived on farms, and each extra kid was an extra pair of hands helping out on the farm. Now we all live in cities where, rather than helping out, kids are often regarded as expensive by a lot of people.
18:47 I'll throw in another Naval quote here. Naval talks about how safe societies devalue young men until the wolves are at the door. And I think that's what we're seeing now, where we have all these extra young men in the West. Two-thirds of young men in the West are single, and society is like, 'Look, we don't know what to do with you. We can't legally get rid of you, but we can create these policies that make it harder for you to have the positive emotion needed to move forward in your life.'
19:13 I think what we're starting to see now is all of these young men who don't foresee themselves being able to...
19:19 Don't foresee themselves being able to start families, check out of the system. You see this with the passport bro movement, you see this with digital nomads, you see this with expats, you see this with all these different communities that are a result of all these problems in the West. What would it take for people to have hope again?
19:38 You'd probably need to see something like the plague that affected Europe in the, I think it was the 13th century, where you had substantial population decline. People could demand higher wages. Hey, look, you don't have that many of us, so if you want us to help you out, you're going to need to pay up. That actually corrected things for a while.
19:55 And of course, 700 years later or so, it seems like we're running into the same issues where people are being taken for granted by the powers that be. People are really feeling like there's a boot on their neck. Post-60s, you had a lot of people opting to live on the fringes of society, opting to not get married, to not have children.
20:12 Now you have people totally opting out of society. You have people that are moving to the developing world, Southeast Asia, to Latin America, some parts of Eastern Europe. And you never would have heard of that happening 30 years ago.
20:25 30 years ago, if you told somebody, "I'm going to move to Colombia," they would have looked at you like you were insane. Why would you move to Colombia when it's got all these problems going on, all these crime issues, the social unrest? And now we see a lot of these issues in terms of social unrest coming to Western democracies.
20:43 If you've worked in the medical industry lately, you can see that Western society has moved away from prioritizing support for births and people having kids, toward end-of-life care and taking care of senior citizens. This is not too different from Japan. I think Japan is ahead of the curve, and the Western democracies are following Japan in its footsteps.
21:03 What are the consequences of this lack of hope? Well, I see a future in the Western democracies that is much less plentiful, much less resource wealthy. You're going to have a lot of older people who are not capable of doing hard labor, manufacturing, or construction, or the trades.
21:19 Things will just start to disappear. Things that used to be considered normal will become luxuries, things like having a toilet that works, having roads that are well-maintained. All these things that require maintenance and upkeep will falter when you don't have people to do the work.
21:36 This is another area where immigration is not a solution because we see the birth rate of immigrants drops after like one generation. People become more secular and realize, what purpose do I have in procreating when I don't have a religious compulsion or a cultural compulsion to do so?
21:53 They look around and they're like, "Oh wow, all these people that don't have children, they have so much more disposable income. They can sleep in on the weekends. They can take some free time to call up some old friends or go engage in an activity or a hobby."
22:07 So this disincentivizes people from having kids, which reduces the resources available for parents. You don't have economies of scale. It's why childcare is so expensive. It's why diapers are so expensive. The fewer people that need those things, the smaller the market is, and a higher premium can be charged for that.
22:24 Contrast this with video games, which are cheaper than ever because more and more people find that it's an affordable hobby. It's something they can do at home. It's something that can be done for as little as an hour, for as long as 12 hours, and it's accessible.
22:38 It's accessible to everybody. It doesn't require a dramatic lifestyle change. It's one of those things that's for everybody. Used to be kind of a nerdy thing, now it's commonplace for lots of different kinds of people to play games.
22:52 Now, how about me? Do I have hope? Yes, I have hope. I'll be able to make enough money in the United States to suck enough dollars out of the declining system to take that money, go somewhere else that I'd prefer to live and enjoy the rest of my life in a place that better aligns with my values and preferences.
23:12 Is it a foolproof solution? No, it's not, but it's the best I've got. I know this video has been heavy. Let me know what you think down in the comments. Do you agree with these points? You disagree? Do you think I'm full of it? It helps to generate interesting dialogue or discussion when we talk about these things.
23:28 Give us a thumbs up if you did like the content. Finally, subscribe to the channel down below if you want to see more content like this, and we'll see you next time.
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