Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

You forgot to mention that this quality of life is bought with debt and deficits that have been running for the last 30 years.

Look at what's happening in France for proof that this is just not sustainable. The US has a massive advantage tough,their currency is the global currency accepted and needed everywhere that is backed by the US army. Much less so the Euro.

The cost of all these social programs has to come from somewhere and currently the majority of these costs are shouldered by the middle class that is being squeezed to the max and speaking as someone from the middle class, I can assure you that having a couple of extra weeks of holiday and more job safety (if you are into that sort of thing) is not worth 55% to 65% of my gross income.

Even universal healthcare is crumbling now.

At some point the EU will need to get it's productivity up and become competitive once again or all this quality of life will have to go as it won't be financially possible to continue on this path.

> So at some point they have to start cutting expenditure and paying that debt off.

They don't have to cut expenditures at all. Since the Fed controls rates, they can manage the debt by adjusting interest rates. There's nothing preventing them from driving interest rates below 0% and being paid to accept money. And the Fed can buy T-Bonds at below market rates and slowly destroy excess money in the economy in a controlled fashion.

Something to keep in mind is that US government debt is integral to the economy. It's a stable way for entities hold US dollars as cash, and it's the only mechanism for them to hold large sums of US dollars in cash.

It's fine (and expected) for US government debt to continue to increase forever, it's just a number in a spreadsheet. The only real risk is the potential for a default. But even then, if you have $4 trillion dollars, what are you going to do with it instead of buying t-bonds? Exchange it for Euros and risk the impacts of currency fluctuation? And what will the buyers do with those dollars? At some point, someone is going to want to bank those dollars in savings, and that means buying t-bonds (directly, or indirectly), and the risk of default merely becomes a factor in an equation for the holder.

That's the gist of it, especially since the "IT revoluion" (for lack of a better word) seems to have cooled off in the early 2010-ish, i.e. exactly when the shale revolution started doing its thing (and, no, I don't count the recent AI hype as being worthy of getting called as "revolutionary"). That shale revolution has also come with big opportunity costs reductions, because the US didn't have to geo-strategically care about the Middle East and the oil there all that much, at least not as much as to send real feet on the ground there, with all the associated costs.

With that said, there's also the danger of the US following on Britain's steps from the 1980s up until the 2000s, i.e. to rely on this shale/oil bonanza and not care about (internal) structural reforms that are in dire need of being enacted. At some point the shale money will not be there anymore (the shale gas will have run out, the world's car-fleet turns to electric en masse etc), and if the Americans don't carry out the necessary reforms sooner rather than later then that future "no more shale-gas money" moment will come at a very, very bad time for them. I said it's similar to Britain's situation because things started going downhill there as soon as the North Sea oil&gas money started thinning out.

Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "monetized in the US stock market"?

I'm not GP, but they probably meant "realized" (not "monetized")