Also, the comparation should take into consideration PPP.
$300 000 pre-taxes in US is not 3x $100 000 after-taxes in EU. Especially if you adjust for other factors.
But it's more about peace of mind. What if I lose that high paying job? I'll suddenly be in trouble for medical fees. Or income for that matter.
That kind of security is really great to have. I wouldn't want to live in a country without it. The US has a kind of "every man for himself" attitude. It feels like it stems from the 'frontier' mindset. You can climb really high but also fall all the way down. And that's fine, to each their own. But it's not for me. I'm happy to just have enough to live comfortably and have a nice job and not have to worry too much. This is also why I'll never be an entrepreneur. I'm very happy being a salaried employee with the lower income but the rights and stability that come with it.
This is the most significant and initially intangible difference between US and EU healthcare. It takes a while to realize that in the US you are a source of money and a cost at the same time. At literally every step of the treatment process, everyone you meet will make it clear, either straight up or through an extreme efficiency, dehumanizing the whole process and leaving little room for a holistic approach to medicine, which is still predominant in the EU. The doctors in latter will actually spend time with you and if they figure problem is elsewhere, send you off to another specialist. In contrast, you and your insurer will be milked no matter what in the US.
Even if you do, for anything more serious, especially emergency, you still use the public health care. And you won't get a massive bill because an ambulance brought you to an out-of-network hospital.
The private healthcare is for regular outpatient care and, as such, substantially cheaper than the cost of insurance in US + all of the co-pays, coinsurance and out-of-network bills.
Source: EU citizen in the US since 6 years.
Is this true? Taxes in the US are pretty high if you have a high income, and remember to include state and local taxes, and property taxes.
> the things you get in return, like pensions or healthcare aren't as attractive at that income level
Perhaps, but it's also attractive that _other_ _people_ get those benefits because ultimately the level of stress everyone else is under has an effect on your quality of life, one way or another.
An experienced software engineer might take home, after taxes, $15-20k/month in my US tech city. High-quality health insurance for an entire family is on the order of $1-2k/month, assuming you had to pay for it yourself. If you are a FAANG-level engineer, not only are you not paying for that but you are being paid twice as much.
The cost of health insurance in the US is a real concern for the lower half of the middle class. Software engineers live in a completely different universe of concerns.
So even for a very well paid software engineer, health insurance could effectively push you up 3% as your effective tax rate. Plus all the headaches that go with it.
If anything the contrast is even more stark across the EU
Qualified doesn't mean you can churn out so many lines of code or have X years of experience at a company or whatever, it means you have right kind of experience. To a big company like Facebook or Google, someone from SV who has a few years in the local industry has more relevant "experience" to the position than someone in London with 10 years at a financial firm.
Not sure why people are still confused about this. But it seems many still don't understand it. The funniest thing is when people try to concoct some sort of fairness argument to explain this, or equally hilarious is when they try to come up with a fairness argument to condemn it.
Different markets have different prices due to differences in supply and demand in those markets. Want developer salaries to be much higher in the UK? Create an environment where a bunch of big tech companies all want to massively increase hiring there. Salaries will go up. Want developer salaries to be lower in Silicon Valley? Get most of the tech companies to leave. Salaries will go down.
One can say that ultimately the reason why Silicon Valley wages are so high is because there is a productive ecosystem that was so beneficial to the creation of tech companies that there was an explosion in demand for local tech labor. That ecosystem consists of easy access to credit and VC funding, existing networks of suppliers and vendors, existing mentorship networks for engineers and entrepreneurs, stable regulations and enforcement of contracts/property rights, together with sufficient local talent to pull off the difficult job of company creation.
London didn't have that to the same degree, and so has a lower demand for tech labor with correspondingly lower wages.
Well, yes, but the topic under discussion is whether the market is "developers that can commute to the local office" or "developers they can work on that timezone" or "developers anywhere," which all have different implications for the market clearing rate.
This probably isn't true. A quick googling indicates the average software engineer salary for Oklahoma City as being in the 70-80k USD range, while a similar googling says the number for the UK is around 50k GBP, which is...68k USD.
The median software engineer salary for the US as a whole is 110k USD according to the BLS, so even cheaper areas like Oklahoma City won't be super low.
Post tax, I'd expect the US advantage to increase in raw monetary value, and the cost of living in Oklahoma City is probably very low for a sizable city, but of course the UK would offer superior benefits.
US upper class in a wealthy area is very different from US lower middle class in another. And the same goes for Europe.
I'd list them now, but that would just invite the European Defense Squad to come out and tell me how all those problems are specific to Munich/Bavaria/Germany, ignoring how the original comment I was responding to was generalizing the same way.
The truth is that there are some things you can generalize okay on (e.g. healthcare being cheaper in Europe than the US, or the US having poor public transit), but many things really are specific to the particular European country at least. Biking, for example, might be amazing or completely terrible depending on the part of Europe.
There are upsides to the US, but when I realised that I could never see myself retiring there I realised it made no sense to spend my working life there, even if the salary would be higher.