fjdjshsh

What kind of causes do you need? Is a documented underperformance a sufficient cause? (And I mean underperformance, but still doing the minimum like showing up to work for example)

If you earn 300k a year, what's the average tax rate you're paying? (Marginal tax rate isn't a helpful number for that)

This point is not relevant, unless your argument is that all those nice things in the EU (which I agree are much better than in the USA) arise from the bad things that the author is talking about (lack of standardization mostly).

Let me put in another way. Can the EU solve the standardization issue and still keep the nice things you mention? I don't think they are related (at least I don't see a tight link)