Edit: this comment is being downvoted because I'm being facetious, but there's truth to it. No middle class tech worker in the US is spending 50-75% of their income on the list of resources in question.
Tech companies may try to solve this by avoiding employees with families and kids. "I want to stress the importance of being young and technical.. I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
e.g. if the company pays you 100K, they may have to pay the government 10K a year in tax which pays for the services, whereas in America you may be paid 120K and then have to fork over 20K for those services
(all numbers are made up obviously).
Healthcare costs in the US are always blown out of proportion. No one is paying $30k for surgery out of pocket unless they don't have insurance, which is now against the law anyway. At most, people are paying $1k per month for a large family, and that's only if your employer is cheap. If you're a middle class tech worker it's likely you pay very little for healthcare if anything at all.
The problem isn't as much the surgeries, as some of them couldn't qualify without a way to pay. But can't afford prescriptions or to go to the doctor as they should.
Childcare for pre-kindergarten aged children is incredibly expensive. If you have more than one child, it is even more so. Even with one, a parent is likely to spend several hundred dollars per month on childcare during work hours.
Public education in a vast many school districts is not covered by taxes. There are school fees parents must pay at public schools. Then there are supply lists, where parents have to go out and buy supplies for their students and their classmates, all of which go to the teacher because the funding doesn't cover having adequate classroom supplies for instruction and activities. Then there are the actual supplies you fill a kid's backpack with. And even that doesn't cover all the needs, so every public school pushes fundraising activities onto the students (and their parents) throughout the year. Add on to that that work hours do not match up with school hours, so most parents add on additional daily childcare costs to have their children at school before school starts, and after it ends until they can leave work to pick up their child.
As far as college is concerned, you're sounding definitively like a non-parent. Most kids aren't ready, no matter how much you try to prepare them, to wake up after high school graduation and tackle college funding on their own. And if you're looking out for your child's financial future, you're likely to encourage them to avoid student loans—because you're still paying on yours and are wanting to help them avoid being in their 30s with kids, paying for that college degree that maybe helped them find a job that pays enough to cover all the expenses of having a family. I know few parents who say, "Well, high school is over, and you're 18 now. Abracadabra, there's the door, good luck!"
If you're lucky to have an employer providing health insurance, sure, you may luck out with a decent plan. But far too many working parents don't have this. Then there are fees to pay for each doctor visit, well-child checkups, and OTC or prescription medications for when the kids get sick—and, being weaponized factories of horrible nastiness who spend their entire days around other such buckets of grossness, they will get sick.
If you actually have children, and don't experience what the vast majority of American parents experience, you're incredibly lucky. Many parents would love to have childcare, education, and healthcare fully covered by their taxes. If they woke up tomorrow and had all these things available to them, I'd be willing to place a large bet they'd never want to go back to anything less—even if it meant mildly lower wages that were at least able to go toward everything else in life. Parents still need to have enough money for food, clothes, birthdays, holidays, vacations, extracurricular activities, sports, and so on—whatever they determine to be part of the life they want to provide their children.
I cannot complain about what I get here for that money, though.
I think people coming from a "sunny", southern countries (like me) would mostly have other things to get used to rather than tax itself.
I'd argue you can live a far better, less stressed and more fulfilling lifestyle in most countries in the EU on 1/3rd of the income as in the US.
I would say the prices of food were at least as high as in the US, and while apartments were not SF expensive, but probably more like a small Midwestern city. Not having a car in the medium sized German city I lived in was not the deal breaker it would have been in the US, but it still was a pain. It didn't seem like the trains were really that cheap, and we also have busses in most US cities.
So in the end, I don't think living in Germany or similar at a salary equal to $50k is as nearly as good of deal as working in the Midwest US for $100k or the coasts for $150k. I'd be better off working here, living frugally a fear years, and then just taking the savings and go on an adventure without worrying about all the visa issues.