>>74116
>all of these countries are highly successful with good living standards no matter how you cut it despite having heavy regulations.
>"Gotcha!"
I explain it with pic related. It's based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) instead of normal GDP, E.G. it's based on how much the "cost" is to buy a basket of common goods as well as a couple luxury items at a supermarket and converted into international dollars (which they use USD for simplicity because everyone trades in USD more or less). It's pretty much the most "accurate" way of measuring large-scale economies as it accounts for wealth gap. On a state-by-state basis, they're poorer than more than 2/3rds of the USA. If they had US corporate tax rates instead of the relatively low corporate tax rates that are the only thing keeping business there, they'd probably be poorer than Mississippi; the state that legally redefined the mental retardation cutoff point in the US by 10 points because its average IQ was just a few points shy of it.
See page 6 of PDF related for corporate tax rates, and second pic for consumer/total tax rates. Europe has relatively low corporate tax despite consumer tax being so high, which allows them to counterbalance and convince businesses to stay (well in reality those businesses are just hiring migrants from Eastern Europe, but we'll ignore that point for now since it's not my main point).