We are killing Europe with our own hands.
Europe will never catch up with the US if we continue along this path.
After the peripheral debt crisis of 2011-2012, Europe intensified its already suffocating fiscal rules and it imposed a de-facto austerity on crippled economies like Italy, Greece, and more.
The result of a fiscal contraction during an already aenemic growth cycle in economies with a stagnant private credit market has been a drop (yes, a drop) in real income per capita and stagnat real wages for a decade.
Italy is the posterchild: salaries adjusted for inflation have gone nowhere in about two decades as the country runs a large primary fiscal surplus rather than focusing on much needed structural reforms.
These reforms also require net spending, but European policymakers love demonizing deficits: this is crazy, because debt and deficits aren't bad per se as long as the newly injected resources are used productively!
And now guess what?
The new set of European fiscal rules are even more restrictive and tighter than the infamous old ones which killed growth since 2012.
On top of it, we keep over-regulating industries and allow for zombie companies to keep running while starving the productive side of the private sector from much needed resources.
The US is doing the opposite: fiscal deficits have never been a taboo (yes ok, now we are overdoing it a bit there), and regulation is not excessively punitive for industries.
The result has been a constant widening of the growth gap.
And I don't think Europe is ever going to catch up if we continue with over-regulation and a dogmatic demonization of debt and deficits.