We Learned to Receive, Not to Earn

We learned to ask and to receive, not to earn, and now the people who ran up Europe's bill are the people who must pay it.

Europe and the West drifted left because voters of every kind learned to take what the state gave without asking where it came from. The bill is now due.

For two generations the winning offer in Western politics has been the same: more services, more transfers and more protection, paid for by someone else or by a later year. Europe's governments now owe about 83 percent of EU output, and France, Italy and Greece owe more than their economies produce in a year. This column traces who ordered the spending, what it bought and who is paying, and it argues the thesis only as far as the numbers carry it.

THE BILL

Eurostat reported on 21 July 2026 that government debt stood at 88.9 percent of GDP in the euro area and 82.9 percent in the EU at the end of the first quarter. Greece owed 143.5 percent, Italy 138.9, France 117.6, Belgium 109.1 and Spain 101.6.
Social protection benefits took about 27.3 percent of EU GDP in 2024, roughly 4.9 trillion euros, 0.6 points more than in 2023. Finland (32.5 percent), France (31.9) and Austria (31.8) spent the most.
Defence went the other way. The EU-14 spent about 2.6 percent of GDP in 1989 and 1.8 percent by 1998, according to a Bocconi policy paper. Eurostat put general-government defence spending at 1.2 percent of GDP in 2018, on a narrower definition. NATO's EU members reached 2.5 percent only this year, after Russia's invasion.
The Draghi report of 2024 found that EU firms pay two to three times the US price for electricity, and that the EU's output gap with the US had doubled in about twenty years, from 15 to 30 percent in nominal terms, according to a BDI summary. Draghi called the EU's regulation a way of "killing our companies" and asked for 800 billion euros a year of extra investment.

WHO ORDERED IT

The largest items are not the ones most argued about. Old-age benefits, mostly pensions, are 41.5 percent of EU social protection spending, and health is another 29.7 percent. That is the spending voters of all parties defend, and the old vote in large numbers. Both the left and the right took a share of the credit.

The United States is not Europe, and its right governs it. In fiscal 2025 the federal deficit was about 1.8 trillion dollars, 5.9 percent of GDP, and debt held by the public reached 99.8 percent of GDP, according to the CBO and the Joint Economic Committee. The president who signed that budget ran on cutting waste.
Industry left under governments of both colours, and business made the decision. Autor, Dorn and Hanson estimated that Chinese import competition destroyed about 1.5 million US manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007. Later re-analyses find a smaller effect, and the authors did not claim that trade policy alone caused it.

THE NEW VOTERS

Germany. In 2025, 5.31 million people received Bürgergeld: 2.80 million German citizens and 2.51 million foreigners, according to a reply from the Federal Employment Agency. Foreigners are about 15 percent of the population (our division of Destatis figures). About 700,000 recipients are Ukrainian refugees.
The vote is the missing link. We found no survey that compares benefit recipients' own vote with that of other groups. The French Muslim vote for the left (69 percent for Mélenchon in 2022, per Ifop) is documented, and it is the closest we have to a measured case.

THE WOMEN'S VOTE

The claim that the female electorate pushed the West left needs care. In Britain women voted more Conservative than men up to the 2017 election, according to the British Election Study, and the gap was rarely significant between 1974 and 2015. In the United States Gallup finds that women aged 18 to 29 are 15 points more likely to call themselves liberal than young men, five times the gap in 2000, with most of the change on the women's side. Critics of the Financial Times analysis that popularised the finding say the trend is exaggerated; one academic study found small to moderate gaps that differ by country.

Pay. The argument that employers would hire only women if they were paid less for the same work is a serious one. The best Danish data (Kleven, Landais and Søgaard) put the long-run earnings loss after a first child at about 20 percent for women, and found that children explain about 80 percent of the remaining gender gap in 2013, up from 40 percent in 1980. That is a gap in what women and men do after having children, not evidence of unequal pay for equal work.

WHAT IS NOT PROVEN

That any one group of voters caused the debt. Pensions and health care cost far more than welfare, and the voters who defend them are mostly not recent arrivals.
That women voters moved the West left. The gap is recent in Britain, disputed in America and small in much of Europe.
How immigrants vote overall. The French Muslim figures are not the same as all immigrants, and we found nothing on naturalised voters in other countries.

Nobody voted for the debt. Everybody voted for what created it.

What follows is the editorial view.

THE VIEW FROM THIS DESK

The politicians sold it, but the voters bought it, and they did so for decades, in every country and under every flag. The left offered more and the right, once in office, kept what the left had built, because the pensioner, the civil servant, the farmer and the businessman who wanted a subsidy all voted for it too. A parliament only spends what its voters allow, and Europeans and Americans allowed it for two generations while saying that the money would come from the rich, from the future or from Brussels. It came from their own pay and their children's.

Responsibility rests with those who had the vote. Voters asked for services without asking what they cost, and for defence without paying for it, and they punished every politician who named the sum. The politicians learned from that, and the voters have no one else to blame. A democracy gets the budget its citizens are willing to read.

WHAT TO WATCH

Interest costs on French and Italian debt against their defence budgets in the 2027 budgets.
Whether the EU's defence target of 3.5 percent of GDP is met without cutting pensions or health.
Whether Germany's Bürgergeld reform changes the share of foreign recipients, now 47 percent of the total.
Whether the gender gap in Gallup and the British Election Study survives the next election.
What US voters do with a 6 percent deficit under a government elected to cut one.