Most countries in Western Europe have the social net curse blogging them down. The high tax, high social care system only works if the country is on a good growth track. As more people turn old and retire, someone has to pay for those. With wage stagnation in most normal occupations and lack of growth, the way they have tried to tackle this is with increase in immigration, which in turn keeps wages low in low paying sectors. Also, unlike US which does integration really well, this is not true for Europe where high immigration is leading to even frictions because of lack of integration.

On top of that, tech emerging as a big industry which forms a big part of the whole economic output of a country, has led to Europe losing out to US. Although only China through thier protectionism has been safe from that.

You can see this in the commentary about UK politics, where they don't have money to fund NHS and NHS wages haven't grown which has bogged down their healthcare system. Most of the manufacturing ecosystem is completely degraded. Productivity is at a complete toss as well, as they are not even able to build high speed rail well now, which for a social net country like UK should be of paramount importance.

To combat this, they have increased taxation, either through freezing slabs or moving down tax slabs. This penalises people in high wage professions and it leads to loss of competitiveness.