> we need the US to catch up with Europe

Europe is on a path to technological stagnation and demographic collapse. There's a reason its economy is depressed, its electricity fantastically expensive, its people angry, its programmer wages depressed, and its startup scene anemic.

Europeans refuse to embrace modern technology like genetic modification and nuclear power, much less allow the flourishing of information technology. They'd rather comfort themselves with their pseudoscience and their precautionary principle and their Luddite privacy regulations than join the rest of world in imagining something better.

Europe is absolutely no model to emulate.