Tucker Carlson Discovers American Tourists Are Rich

By Dominic Pino

Thursday, February 15, 2024

 

Tucker Carlson makes two classic American-tourist mistakes in his recent video from a Russian grocery store. He sees things in a foreign country that he hasn’t seen in the U.S. and concludes that those things are therefore unique. And he mistakes the purchasing power of an American tourist with the purchasing power of a Russian.

 

There are numerous funny things about this video. For example, he says he is buying what a typical family of four would get for one week of food, then buys a bag of flour, something most people buy infrequently, and something which he initially cannot distinguish from a bag of sugar.

 

Carlson gives away that he has never been to Aldi because he is impressed by the system on the Russian grocery cart where you have to put in a coin to release the cart and can only get the coin back by properly returning it. Aldi uses that system in this country.

 

He is also blown away by the store’s shopping-cart escalator, which is something you can find in U.S. stores with multiple stories. The Target in Merrifield, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., a city in which Carlson has spent a fair amount of time, has one.

 

A quick online search turns up other shopping-cart escalators in Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Metairie, La. The Chicago video is from 2008, so these aren’t even new. Cartveyor, one company that makes them, is based in Milwaukee. Most grocery stores in non-urban settings only have one story, so they aren’t necessary most of the time.

 

He’s impressed by the fresh bakery section in the Russian store, something that even discount chains such as Lidl have in the United States. He’s wowed by Crimean wine. There’s an entire independent blog with dozens of wines from several countries sold just at Costco in the U.S., and Trader Joe’s is well known for its wines under $10.

 

After checking out, Carlson is floored by grocery prices in Russia. He said in the video that a cart of groceries that he thought would cost $400 actually cost $104.

 

Americans will frequently be impressed by how far their money goes in foreign countries. It’s expensive to travel abroad, but once you actually get there, a lot of stuff seems really cheap. That’s because American tourists benefit from a strong dollar, and they have high incomes by global standards. It doesn’t really tell you much about the quality of life for people who live in the foreign country.

 

That’s especially true the past few years. In 2022, the dollar was trading at 20-year highs relative to other currencies. It’s down slightly from that today, but it is still very strong.

 

The reason for this is largely higher interest rates. When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, it increases the returns for Treasury securities. The higher returns mean more foreigners want to buy Treasury securities. But Treasury securities are sold in dollars, so foreigners demand more dollars to buy them. That raises the “price” of the dollar on international exchange markets, giving Americans more purchasing power abroad.

 

People can make Carlson’s mistake in more innocent ways, such as by vacationing in a sunny, warm place such as Greece and thinking how nice it must be to live there because everything is so cheap. And it is cheap — for Americans. For Greeks, it’s a much different story.

 

In an actual country-to-country comparison of income or consumption per day, the median American is almost four times better off than the median Russian. That accounts for inflation and differences in the cost of living, and those are medians, so they aren’t affected by outliers.

 

Naturally, when you go to a country where you’re making four times as much money as the median person — and probably more than that considering most tourists will have incomes above the median — you’re going to be able to live like a king. That’s why foreign countries’ tourism industries love it when the dollar is strong.

 

Russia must be loving these videos that Carlson keeps putting out. But his amazement at the prices of Russian groceries doesn’t demonstrate Russia is doing something great. It demonstrates that Americans in foreign countries are rich.

 

Why don’t more Americans move to foreign countries then? First, most jobs that pay American incomes do not allow people to live in foreign countries. (For the few jobs that do allow it, some Americans have moved to Mexico City, for example, where they can buy very nice houses at Mexican prices.)

 

Second, most people know that what they might see on vacation is probably not representative of everyday life. And it’s just not worth it to most people to uproot their lives and live in a country that speaks a different language, uses a different alphabet, has high rates of alcoholism and suicide, lacks democratic institutions, persecutes religious minorities, and is waging a genocidal war on its neighbor — even if their income would land them in the upper class.