For a tiny banking nation or petrostate to be rich is unsurprising.
But when it's half a continent, the world really ought to take out their notebooks and go into full copycat mode - at least as far as economic policy and attitudes are concerned.
That being said, the policy of austerity implemented during the Euro crisis was pretty catastrophic and arrested growth prospects for a whole generation.
It was an austerity policy in name only given government debts have only continued to increase since then. There's a demonstrated correlation between high government debt and lower growth.
Folks, please leave your notebook in your bag and search elsewhere for a role model.
There’s plenty that’s wrong with America, but there’s no other country within the same order of magnitude of scale (or, hell, expand that to either a population of 50+ million or an order of magnitude greater, even) that has long term prospects as promising as the United States.
China’s on the verge of demographic collapse. Europe, as much as I love to visit and would probably enjoy living there, is more or less the definition of sclerotic. Every other country that excels at both human and economic development is too small to move the needle. Yet the United States remains, overall, a pretty darn good place to live and a magnet for talent and capital all over the world (to say nothing of its own beyond-bountiful resources).
Just off the top of my head, I guess my short list would look something like this. I grant some, maybe all, of these have drawbacks, but these are the factors that I personally value and what I would miss by moving to any of the other places I’ve visited or of which I’m aware that seem like delightful places to live. 1. The sheer number of incredibly unique large cities (and the correlating lack of a single city that dominates national culture)
2. The ethos of individualism
3. The national park system
4. The sheer amount of diversity (racial, ethnic, national origin, religious, regional, etc.)
5. My personal access to, and quality of, healthcare (I grant that this is highly, highly subjective)
6. Other Americans (believe it or not lol)
7. Higher educational system
8. Economic dynamism and opportunity
9. Our foundational documents and subsequent amendments/improvements thereto
10. Our national tendency to do the right thing (after, of course, exhausting all other courses of action)
11. Approximately 10 trillion different regional cuisines (have you seen the number of strongly held opinions about different ways to smoke and serve meat?)
12. Every type of natural beauty imaginable
Not saying we have a monopoly on any of these! But I like where I live and think it’s a pretty cool place.
> As luck would have it, the US achieved that right after conquering Iraq
Yes? A whole of of things happened back. I’m really not sure what are you implying here? Did they secretly ship Iraqi oil to the US and pretend it was extracted there?
> What petrostate should we liberate to becone self-sufficient
Uhm.. Libya? Or did everyone already forget that?
Yes, of oil and gas, and they're not producing as much as they could, for environmental reasons. They're holding off on production.
> And I think they're quite environmentally conscious.
They are, they could produce more.
Similar story for the UK and the Netherlands with North Sea gas.
> Also isn't Germany burning coal at record rates right now?
Not record rates, standard rates and declining very slowly (2023 is actually better than 2022, shown here):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...
They did mess up the transition with the early decommissioning of nuclear power plants, corruption is probably to blame.