It might be interesting to see what being a "citizen of the world" would be - but I'm reticent as I'm quite proud to be a citizen of the United States.

But let's be realistic here. Who would define the rights and privileges? In Germany or other European countries, you can still make a mint and yet even secretaries get vacation time that makes us look like slaves here, paid sick leave and health care that beats the pants off of us. MEANWHILE you can still make a mint as an executive (just not "more money than God" like Wall Street). Heck, I have government benefits that I took although I could make more money in the private sector because now, it's not all about the scorecard of what's in my checking account. I have a house that's larger than what I NEED (thankfully I was able to hold on to it through my divorce with repair work and refinancing).

To be honest, if you put a list of the pros and cons of Euro vs. US in front of most Americans, we might be shocked at the results. Part of that comes from the fact that a lot of people don't think the Bill of Rights was a good idea (polls showing re-worded articles of the Bill of Rights were not popular in the eyes of people who weren't told these were the articles of the BoR).

As much as I am a dyed-in-the-woll American, born here and hope to die here, I'm forced to look at how other countries have passed us by in so many ways. We used to have the tallest buildings, the best cars, the grandest public works projects, the best health care, the most class mobility. Now, NONE of that is true. One thing we CAN hold on to is that we have more manufacturing GDP (and we'll have to work harder to keep that) and that we have the most efficient work force in the country (largely because of the race to the bottom in wages while executive pay keeps going up).

Other countries took our model after WWII, tweaked it and are eating our lunch.

Just for one example, Presidents back to *NIXON* said we have to get off imported oil as we'd grown too large for our own oil resources. Have we? No. What we now have, 40 years later, is a Congress claiming that we have to eliminate grant and loan programs for wind and solar power while KEEPING the multi-billion dollar subsidies for Big Oil when they're making *record profits*.