People choose to live in Europe for reasons other than money. Things money can't buy.
you either grow your own economy or become a vassal to someone else who does.
if europe keeps stagnating and america keeps posting 4% gdp growth, a day will come when the EU can pass as many laws as they like and it won't matter. it'll be like some shitpoor latin american country against united fruit.
The Chinese did it by just taking all the IP they could get as a requirement to sell in their nation
The Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax)
The capitalistic system is an addict to access to markets. Governments setup their various Guardrails to ensure that it can't entirely (i lack a nice word for this verb) their society and peoples.
This works only because EU is a relatively big and wealthy economy. If, say, Chile or Botswana tried to do the same, US companies would be like “lol, bye”. If, or when the Europe becomes just as poor as these relative to US, the incentive for US companies to stay in Europe and pay these ridiculous fines, will simply not be there, and so they will leave.
Thus, if Europe’s strategy is to impose more and more strict regulations and taxes on US companies, it must return to growing in wealth in power. Otherwise, this strategy will backfire: not only Europe will stay poor, but also the highly productive companies will exit it.
Have californians started thinking of Europe as poor?
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#differences-in-li...
and we can expect the new weight loss drugs to make a noticeable dent in that (at the cost of who-knows-what side effects, but they can't be as big a killer as obesity)
the way things are going, there will eventually be an american company with a market cap greater than the GDP of France or Germany. at that point, they'll be making the real rules.
There's a lot of power in that.
USA GDP: $26.8 trillion
EU GDP: $17.1 trillion
There's a massive impoverished underclass in the US, who are not going to be able to drive much consumption.
GDP is an incredibly reductive measure.
This map speaks volumes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...