Scott Lincicome tells of Europeans visiting the U.S. for the World Cup and being awestruck by American abundance. Four slices:
As briefly mentioned in my last column, World Cup tourists’ repeated astonishment with everyday American abundance has become a viral sensation—and in a very good way. Seemingly not a day goes by without some happy foreign soccer fan raving on social media or to the press about quintessentially “American” things—free drink refills, bottomless chips and salsa, ginormous sports stadiums, fancy cars, big houses, ranch dressing, frigid air conditioning, shiny hospitals, etc.—that we consider relatively mundane features of daily life in the United States. (Buc-ee’s, Costco, and Texas Roadhouse have been particularly big hits, and for good reason.)
These viral posts have delighted American onlookers and captured endless media commentary on how the foreigners’ innocent—and often hilarious—observations have helped unite a divided U.S. and remind us locals of just how good we have it. In an era of endless grousing about the U.S. economy—reflected in various surveys of American “sentiment” and sometimes even justified—the ongoing episode has been a welcome, optimistic change of pace and a loud, folk-libertarian reminder that a nation’s capital, policies, and political class are most definitely not the same as its communities and citizens.
The scenes have also raised several noteworthy economic policy points—some good, some ominous—that deserve more attention.
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For starters, the amazement of relatively wealthy foreigners—you don’t take weeks off touring America if you’re dirt poor—at relatively middle-class American environments is real-world evidence of our nation’s immense everyday wealth.
The timing couldn’t be better (and, no, I’m not talking about the A/C-less heatwave in Europe).
As The Economist just documented, earlier this year Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and several other elite economists got into a heated (and very wonky) online debate about whether Americans’ living standards really were zooming ahead of those of our European counterparts. The main point of contention was how to measure individuals’ purchasing power in both places, with one approach showing an increasing wealth gap and the other (Krugman’s) a relatively steady one. You can see the difference in the chart below: Using a constant “purchasing power parity” adjustment shows France’s GDP per capita—a standard way to measure individual wealth—to be declining versus that of the U.S., while using a “current PPP” adjustment shows little long term change, and thus a different wealth narrative…. Hilariously enough, thousands of European World Cup tourists—along with ones from Japan and other countries, too—have performed just that test, mere days after the economists proposed it. And the result is an absolute rout for Team America.
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Admittedly, the World Cup visitor story isn’t all wine and roses, and there are—as noted—some less-optimistic policy lessons buried in here, too. For one thing, all these visitors are a stark reminder of the economic and geopolitical value of foreign tourism—and its recent, policy-driven decline here in America.
As we discussed last year, one of the more interesting and unfortunate results of Trump’s tariff wars, deportations, and related overseas antagonism (threatening to invade Greenland, calling Canada the “51st state,” etc.) has been foreigners’ independent retaliation against U.S. goods and services. And tourism—a U.S. services export—has been the trend’s most conspicuous victim. According to a May 2026 Congressional Research Service report, in fact, international visits were down in 10 of 12 months last year, with the only increases coming before Trump took office (January) and due to an abnormally late Easter (April).
This drop, in turn, hurt lots of American businesses and likely reduced U.S. economic growth last year by billions of dollars:
According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2023, travel and tourism (both domestic and international) accounted for approximately 3% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), a nonprofit organization that advocates for and researches global tourism, international visitor spending in the United States was approximately $176 billion in 2025, a 4.6% decrease from 2024. WTTC further noted that GDP for the travel and tourism sector increased 4.1% globally in 2025 from 2024 but grew 0.9% for the United States.
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Relatedly, all these good vibes are a nice reminder of one of the ways that trade—in this case both foreign tourism and global sports entertainment—can help encourage peace. As I documented in a 2020 paper, a wide body of research finds that heightened foreign trade can meaningfully reduce (but not eliminate) the chances of armed international conflict through several channels.
Also writing about foreign visitors’ pleasant surprise at American abundance and generosity is Peggy Noonan. Two slices:
However many [visitors] there are, we are hearing from the young ones as they fan through the country to venues down South, out West, in Texas and Utah. They are seeing an America they never imagined and have made now-famous videos about how shocked they are—in the most positive sense. They expected a dark and brooding nation; they discovered a sun-filled magnificence. It’s so big, so spacious, has such wondrous shops, the best food and absolutely wonderful people. The videos have flooded TikTok, Instagram and X, and they speak with the wonder of 18th-century explorers who discovered an unknown indigenous people on a brilliant new continent.
They couldn’t stop talking about it. Texas barbecue, ranch dressing, endless refills—in England, asking for a refill is like “asking for a second mortgage” said one video—huge portions, 24-hour gyms, Buc-ee’s, Costco, Chick-fil-A. Football stadiums, air conditioning, the sheer variety—all the hot sauces, and 50 states with different rules. Strangers smile and ask how ya doin’. Among my favorites: seeing them delight in yellow school buses, which they thought only existed in movies.
A young man in his 20s, with wonder: “I would trade my Canadian passport for American citizenship without hesitating a single second. Some states have no state income tax.” Here, he said, a young person can compete and succeed. A British woman about 20, driving through a suburb, asked to be adopted “by anyone in the USA as soon as possible.” With Britain’s housing crisis, you “have to live in a cardboard box for your first house.” She’s driving past homes here, finding their prices on websites, is staggered by the bang for the buck.
One video has a German tourist telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that back home he’d gotten “a lot of negative views about the Americans in the last five years,” but had discovered “the people are amazing, so welcoming, the culture is amazing.”
A young Englishman in his 30s: “The media portrays Americans as rude, lazy, all of the above, and it’s further from the truth. . . . The amount of hospitality and kindness . . . and pride Americans hold is truly like no other country I’ve been to.”
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Why have the visitors’ views mattered so much to so many of us?
First, there’s a funny thing about America: We’ve never not cared about the approval of other nations, and in this are unlike other nations.
Second, when you live inside something—a country, a way of life—you inevitably stop seeing it. Walk by the same work of art for 30 years, you won’t really “see” it each day. The young European arriving at a Dallas Costco or a California In-N-Out Burger sees a small marvel of organization, scale, of possibility. For you it’s just Tuesday. You’re used to it. They made us see it again.
“AI’s biggest impact may be making workers more valuable” – so argues Mark Jamison. A slice:
Consider the technologies that transformed the American economy during the past century. Railroads expanded markets. Telephones and then the internet accelerated and expanded communications. Electricity revolutionized production. Bar-code scanners transformed retailing. Each innovation altered the nature of work. But their most important contribution was making people more productive.
Artificial intelligence appears to be following a similar path.
Across industries, companies are using AI to handle routine tasks while enabling employees to focus on higher-value activities. Telecommunications companies are deploying AI to monitor networks, identify cybersecurity threats, and improve customer service. Utilities are using AI to inspect infrastructure, predict equipment failures, and improve safety. Transportation firms employ AI to identify maintenance needs before breakdowns occur and to reduce accidents caused by human error.
In finance, AI is increasingly becoming basic infrastructure. AI is competing with Bloomberg terminals, which once transformed how financial professionals gathered and analyzed information. AI helps workers process enormous quantities of data, identify patterns, and evaluate alternatives more quickly than ever before.
Arnold Kling agrees with Bryan Caplan’s impressions of UATX.
Joseph Mikowitz, from Toronto, has this letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:
As a Canadian living in a democratic socialist country, I envied the true democratic nature of America. Its Founding Fathers created a unique entity, a land of human expression, freedom, creativity and individuality. Yet as America is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary, the Founders’ creation is at risk of being destroyed. Socialism and America’s independence are mutually exclusive by definition, practice and ethos. Socialism sets out to impart the governing body’s rules on society, and, consequently, nonconformists are deemed deplorable. That’s exactly what America broke away from in 1776.
[Gabriel] Zucman wants a coordinated global minimum tax on billionaire wealth, designed explicitly so that there’s nowhere left for the superrich to move. He admits frankly that the whole point of his international coordination plan is to defeat the mobility problem. If wealth taxes are global, the thinking goes, they finally work as intended.
Not so fast. It’s easy to count up lost tax revenue after taxpayers move away. There is also a less visible, but no less real, behavior change from people who stay home (by choice or because there’s no better option).
The effect showed up in Denmark, where decades of tax records—covering people who by and large stayed put during its wealth-tax era—show dwindling levels of wealth accumulation when more of it is taxed away. Nobody had to leave the country for the effect to show up; the incentive to save and build wealth in the first place had simply shrunk.
Inside the businesses of the wealthy, there’s an avoidance channel that requires no moving van. When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn’t go back into payroll or business expansion.
Make no mistake, the non-wealthy will suffer from this tax too. As wealth taxes diminish saving and reinvestment, the capital stock that workers depend on for tools, equipment, and business expansion stops growing as quickly as it should. Wages rise when there’s more capital for each worker to use, so the slower buildup eventually means smaller paychecks for people who would never pay a wealth tax. This effect compounds for decades, so a modest annual drag turns into a substantial gap by the time anyone notices it in the data.
