Fareed Zakaria: 'The American Dream Is Better In Europe'

November 6th, 2011 11:11 AM

The European Union might completely fall apart any day now as the countries in that region implode under their massive debt.

Despite this, CNN's Fareed Zakaria offered another America-hating love letter to the struggling continent Sunday actually claiming, "The American dream seems to be thriving in Europe not at home" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

FAREED ZAKARIA: I've been thinking about Occupy Wall Street, which is now occupying a number of other cities in America, and wondering what is it really about? The protesters don't like bank bailouts; they feel the 99% have been hard-done by and they're protesting what they see as inequality. But America has always had more inequality than many countries.

I think the underlying their sense of frustration is despair over a very un-American state of affairs: A loss of social mobility. Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

TIME magazine's Rana Foroohar has a great cover story this week that highlights that social mobility in American is declining. She points out that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of our socioeconomic spectrum, you have only a 17% chance of making it into the upper two-fifths. In other words, moving from the bottom to the top. The data now show that it is much easier to climb up the ladder in many parts of Europe than in the United States. Rana Foroohar points out that while nearly half of American men with fathers in the bottom fifth of the earning curve remain there, don't move up, only a quarter of Danes and Swedes and only 30% of Britons do. In other words, the Europeans do much better. The American dream seems to be thriving in Europe not at home.


Really?

Then why is America ranked second in international median income behind only Luxembourg?

Why is America ranked 29th in cost of living with it being far more expensive to survive in virtually every European country than it is here?

And why is America ranked fourth in the United Nations Human Development Index which incorporates things like health, education, social mobility, and standard of living? In Europe, only Norway and the Netherlands rank higher.

Something else the Occupy Wall Street-loving Zakaria ignores is that income inequality in America isn't anywhere near as bad as it is in three of the fastest growing economies on the planet: Brazil, China, and India.

As NewsBusters reported last month, the average person in the bottom five percent of the income scale in America is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants.

But none of that matters to Zakaria, for he is just another America-hating media member that for some reason has been given his own nationally televised program to spout his pro-everybody but us nonsense once a week.

Imagine having the gall to brag about Europe as the EU teeters on a total implosion with countries like Greece, Italy, and Portugal on the verge of insolvency.

It's this kind of fact-bereft reporting that is fueling the anarchy spreading our nation.

When it really turns violent and people end up killed, I hope folks like Zakaria will feel some sense of responsibility and think twice in the future about aiding and abetting populist movements against their own country.

Or, if they really hate it here so much and there's so much more opportunity in Europe, why don't they move?

Nobody's stopping them.