The gap between U.S. and European living standards has never been wider, which is discouraging Europeans from vacationing in America, Le Monde reports.

By some estimates, America is 31% more expensive. But by a measure of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, America today is 80% more expensive. In 2016, GDP per capita was $58,180 for the U.S. and $38,350 for France — a 50% gap, according to the International Monetary Fund.

By 2023, the figures had widened to $85,370 and $47,360 for the U.S. and France — a staggering 80% gulf.

Take expatriate Elias Chedid, a data scientist who first emigrated from France in 2017 to accept a job in San Francisco. “I accepted an offer at $85,000,” Chedid recalls. “I thought it was good. In reality, I’d been had,” says Chedid, who has since changed jobs several times and now earns $400,000 a year.

“In France, I could never have seen my salary quadruple,” he says. “The opportunities are fantastic. When I come back to Paris, I feel like I’m super rich,” says Chedid, who is all too happy to pick up the bill for a group outing back in the motherland.

French tourists 50 and over still recall paying $1 for hot dogs in Central Park, $30 for motels in the Midwest and dirt cheap blue jeans.

Today, a cab from John F. Kennedy Airport to Manhattan is $95, including tolls.

The Metropolitan Museum no longer allows tourists to enter for free, instead charging a mandatory $30 per person. Even a frugal dinner for two at a modest Italian restaurant in midtown will exceed $200, if you don’t forgo the wine.

Americans Abroad

Conversely, for Americans, buying a property, traveling in Europe — or even retiring in France, Spain, Greece, or Italy — has never been so affordable.

“You can buy a home in France or Italy for the price of a truck,” as CNBC reported earlier this month.

“I started discovering these incredible properties that were for sale in smaller towns and villages for $50,000, $75,000, $100,000,” says American developer Tommy Sikes. “The cost of living is literally 50%.”

There are no restrictions on foreigners buying properties in most European countries, but financial planners caution that it is important to carefully budget and consider the cultural divide before taking such a major plunge.

As for whether you could continue to collect Social Security benefits if you retire abroad, the U.S. government says it is possible in most cases. However, Americans cannot collect Medicare or Medicaid overseas.

Capitalism

One of the main reasons why French and European economies have retreated compared to that of the United States has been the success of the U.S. economy and the soaring market capitalization of its leading companies.

“Donald Trump’s presidency [was] marked by an economic acceleration reminiscent of the golden age of corporations, the ‘Gilded Age’ of the late 19^th century,” as Le Monde puts it.

Axa director Ramon de Oliveira says: “The takeoff took place in the middle of Obama’s second term. Trump inherited his recover and accelerated it. With his unbridled fiscal policy and low-rate monetary policy, it skyrocketed.”

U.S. market capitalizations are “unimaginable,” with Microsoft worth $3 trillion. Apple earned $94 billion in 2023; Microsoft, $72 billion; Alphabet, $62 billion; ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, $55 billion each; and Meta, $40 billion.

Unsurpassed American ingenuity continues to dominate emerging technologies: SpaceX in space, Tesla with electric vehicles, and Texas with wind and sun. In addition, despite the clean energy initiatives of President Joe Biden, the U.S. is still producing more oil than Saudi Arabia.

Measuring the European Union’s and United States’ GDP as a percentage of the world economy, there has been a complete reversal of fortune in the past decade.

In 2013, the EU’s GDP was equivalent to 23.5% of the world economy, surpassing the U.S.’s 22.1%. In 2023, those figures, were 20.5% and 26.3%, respectively.

So, while Americans, justifiably, lament the 30% rise in prices in the past eight years — 17% alone in the past three under Biden — to Europeans, the United States has a far richer, enviable standard of living.

“Purchasing power means something,” says Loriane Lafont-Grave, a French philosophy doctoral student at the University of Chicago. “In the United States, earning between $100,000 and $400,000 [a year] isn’t extraordinary. It is in France.”

Lafont-Grave is correct; 20% of U.S. households earn more than 20%.

Thus, for many European tourists, prices in the United States are a shock, and America has become a travel destination priced out of reach.