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Comment by ceeplusplus | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this misses the difference in taxation vs. the US. You pay almost nothing for healthcare at any tech company and pay much lower taxes (both income and sales tax). So European offers are still much less competitive than the US.

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The difference between UK and some of the Western-EU countries is already significant enough. No need to go straight to USA.

Not so sure, as a junior in the UK I got a raise moving to Spain of all places... from London.

Probably because you are at a senior level in that market. Few eu countries can compete with the uk in terms of pay and modern tech.

Working in Berlin tech, I found London salaries not that interesting considering the cost of living is easily 2x of Berlin.

Well to be honest london is not an ideal place to live in. But thanks to remote contracting and london rates, the uk market can be quite attractive.

The money in London is in contracting.

That is when you manage to find a flat to rent in Berlin after queueing with 100 other people?

If you have a family it’s probably 4x. 65-70K in Berlin are roughly equivalent to 200K in London.

Standard contract rate in London is ~500GBP per day, which is incredibly high compared to most of Europe.

62.50 GBP = 75.7 USD per hour is “incredibly high”…?

Yes. If your country does not have one of the tech companies mentioned in the article then $75 per hour is a fever dream.

"Competitive" is highly relative. It might not be competitive to you, but I'd rather have less money and save a ton on not having to use a car, and not paying thousands of dollars for each hospital visit when I had cancer.

In Poland most software engineers (at least the senior ones) are self-employed due to fiscal reasons. It means paying either a 19% flat tax rate with the possibility of cost deductions, or outright 12% (no deductions then).

You can also apply for an "intellectual property" tax relief (called IP Box), which is somewhat tricky, requires legal assistance and requires patience, but it can drive your income tax rate down to a mere 5%.

Of course this is self-employment, so you don't get paid sick leave or holidays, and labor law doesn't protect you (not really a problem in today's IT market) - however you still have full access to healthcare just like on a regular job contract.

in some states. On a salary of £120,000 in the UK, you'll take home 60% of your pay [0], meanwhile in California on $145,000 [1] you take home 63%.

The real difference is that it's very hard to be paid 120,000 in the UK.

[0] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...

This is a bit misleading, because on £120k salary the employer has to additionally pay £17k of employer's NI which comes from your salary budget. So in real terms you make £137k and your take home is about 53% (and it's get worse as your pay goes up as you are losing personal allowance and your take home quickly becomes less than 50%). It does not account for Apprenticeship Levy. It's a quite nasty way for the government to hide the true level of taxation from employees.

There's always a hidden cost. There's also the fact that on 120k an employer is required to contribute 3% and likely does so via salary sacrifice which changes the numbers again.

The number I picked for California is also on the higher end, other states are lower again. All thats to say a direct general comparison isn't possible but it's not right to claim that the west has a higher tax burden either the numbers are dangerously close in many cases.

The UK handles this quite well, the same author as this post also wrote this: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1511394247500566533

There can be huge tax advantages in the US compared to Canada or the EU. My effective rate in California is 24% because I can file my taxes jointly which isn't possible elsewhere.

It depends on the country. In France, you definitely gets lots of tax advantage getting married, and in many cases 1 person earning X is not so different than 2 people getting x/2 after tax.

That is definitely not true in the UK, at least when I was working there from 2011 to 2017.

It may not be possible everywhere but it’s certainly possible elsewhere (my wife and I also file jointly in Germany).

TIL: https://www.diw.de/documents/dokumentenarchiv/17/81949/stein...

> The real difference is that it's very hard to be paid 120,000 in the UK.

Interesting. I recently turned down the opportunity to interview with a UK company because the compensation target was 120,000 pounds and I flat out told them, "that won't even get me out of bed in the morning." I have been talking with quite a few UK recruiters over the past few months and what I am noticing is that a lot of recruiters and headhunters in the UK just don't have access to the upper tier deal flow that pays the 200K salary. My current recruiter is under a strict "don't come to me unless they either have a super interesting problem in a revenue positive, stable company for 200K or a boring problem for 250K in a post-seed start-up." I have a standing offer with a company I don't want to work for for a little over 200K base compensation, so that's the target any recruiter has to hit. The work is out there, it just takes a while to find.

Thanks for the link to the salary calculator, useful to know what my take home will be when I am ready to make the move.

You can pretty much list the highest-paying UK companies on levels.fyi. There's FAANG, Bloomberg and a couple of other financial/trading companies. The financial companies are the only ones to engage external recruiters.

But on the other hand raising a family is probably a lot less expensive in Europe on average.

A common criticism is that “but you get so much more for your taxes in Europe”.

I have a counterpoint - you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US. I’d rather keep more of my take-home pay and do without certain services, or better yet choose the provider (and quality / expense) of such services if I want them.

Somehow the bureaucracy in the US is still massive, so I can only imagine what far higher tax rates in Europe enable.

Tax rates at the higher taxed states in the US (like California) are actually not lower than in western europe while still not providing you with all the services western european governments do.

I live in Massachusetts, and somehow we actually have fairly low taxation (5.25% flat tax) despite our reputation and being deep blue politically.

I average about 30% total taxation in a high tax bracket. If I was trying to avoid taxes on real wealth I would move to Florida for 6 months and do the other 6 in Boston (as have many friends of mine).

Why people keep paying California / NYC tax rates in software dev jobs makes no sense anymore.

I think MA is probably the state with the best "bang for buck" in terms of what the government provides per dollar of taxes paid.

NY is comparatively insulting to reside in, because the government is so wasteful/corrupt there and is therefore capable of providing so much less (not to mention its legendary ability to stall legislation indefinitely).

Meanwhile WA has no state income tax at all, so it's even better for high earners.

Advantages for the bay area are its weather and much larger tech ecosystem. Main advantage for NYC is being a 'real' big city with all that entails (night life, better transit/walkability, other urban amenities).

For high earners it's still higher in EU, about 50% vs 40% but yeah it's not that significant.

Be aware that those 50% in the EU usually include social security, unemployment, health care and taxes, not just taxes on your salary. Also, it's less than 50% in praxis, 50% are just easier to calculate in your head.

Those 40% in California also include:

- Medicare (65+ healthcare), social security (retirement)

- California taxes: disability, unemployment, and for low income people, Medi-Cal covers healthcare as well

The biggest US government expenses are the military and overcomplicated inefficient social programs (Medicare, food stamps, Social Security).

Moreover, the logical extreme of this argument is to just not have a government at all. I don't need bridges because I don't drive. I don't need the fire department because I am careful. Etc. It doesn't make sense, and the truth is that some things either best administered centrally, at scale, and protected from market forces, and/or the inefficiencies of central planning are still better for society as a whole (even if not for you) than the alternative outcomes that would arise if you rely on various market-like systems.

The brightest minds don’t go into government bureaucracies - they don’t get respect, don’t get paid, can’t get shit done, and a myriad of reasons why they go private instead. The best-staffed departments are those that have a symbiotic relationship with the private sector, like the SEC, where doing a government stint raises your value in the private sector significantly.

Because we have seen endless waste and corruption in our central planning, I no longer want them running or planning anything. If there was even a single government service that made even a semblance of efficiency and effectiveness then perhaps that one could remain. But overall it’s been an endless slide to shittiness in our public institutions.

> Because we have seen endless waste and corruption in our central planning, I no longer want them running or planning anything. If there was even a single government service that made even a semblance of efficiency and effectiveness then perhaps that one could remain. But overall it’s been an endless slide to shittiness in our public institutions.

Citation needed on this FUD.

Any "slide" is more likely due to punitive funding cuts in agencies like the IRS or due to corrupt leadership (including some presidential appointees) at agencies like the FCC. If anything, the Biden administration has been refreshingly high-functioning in its basic capacity as the executive branch of the federal government, regardless of how you feel about his public statements or policy agenda.

I'm not saying you're not correct wherever you are, but it's important to recognize that there is a significant cultural aspect in this. In the US, you would be entirely correct: talented people don't go into the government and thus the public sector is filled with subpar employees. In many EU countries, the government has more prestige, thus it attracts more talent and so it works better and gets more prestige. It's a feedback loop in both directions.

I can point to a great many effective government services in my own country in western Europe for example.

Government services can work - but at what cost?

We routinely had multimillions public projects to build crappy website for our universities.

It was something the students could have done better for less than 100k.

After you factor in all the corruption and inefficiency caused by not having competition, you can end up paying a high multiple of what is reasonable.

> I don't need bridges because I don't drive

Why should you pay for it? Let those who need it or stand to make money out of it to pay.

There are alternative systems, we never had the freedom to try them outside of emperors / feudal kings / governments coercion: http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

This book has about the same information content as The Conquest of Bread: a lot of interesting ideas and idealistic speculation, and not a lot in the way of practical instructions for organizing a robust large-scale society.

Edit: It's worth remembering that the earliest highways in the USA were privately-owned toll roads. And that the first mass transit systems were privately owned railroads. There is a lot to be said for free markets and the price system! But there is also a reason that these pieces of infrastructure ended up under the government umbrella.

The logical extreme of your argument is communism.

I'm not even slightly accusing you of advocating communism, but rather, pointing out that the logical extreme is irrelevant.

Not at all. My argument is that some things are better when centrally administered to some degree, and that "I don't use it therefore I shouldn't have to pay for it" is itself an extreme and somewhat antisocial position to hold in general.

Your mistake is imputing reasonableness to yourself and extremity to your interlocutor.

> you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US.

Not really in my experience. You get to choose between providers in your insurance network, but I've lost count of the number of times my preferred provider wasn't in my network. On top of that, the insurance company has to sign off on many diagnostic tests even when my doctor wants to do one.

I'm experiencing this right now with chronic pain associated with an old injury. My doctor wants to do an arthrogram, but my insurance won't approve it without doing a full course of physical therapy first and doing any kind of motion with this injury is excruciatingly painful. I have to literally suffer through 12 weeks of PT in order to get the imaging I need and I have what many would consider to be great insurance. I don't really have any (good) choices here. I can pay for the imaging out of pocket or continue to suffer. This is a uniquely American problem.

Might it not be possible to have your doctor write some "PT not possible"/"PT may result in additional injury" note? Failing which, is it possible to speak with someone higher up at your insurance company?

I do not know your background, but if you have sufficient resources (well, mainly money) it might be easier to contact an injury/similar lawyer and have them represent you to talk, and perhaps go to the legal dept of the insurance company. I am sorry for what you're having to go through, healthcare is unfortunately far from perfect (even outside the US).

My doctor conveyed my situation in his request for the imaging and was denied. I'm basically going to my PT appointments and doing nothing because the treatment is painful, which is wasting their time and resources. It's cheaper to just commit this waste than to talk to a lawyer because the insurance company represents its shareholders, not its clients.

I'm not saying that healthcare is perfect outside of the US, but a common argument for the US system is this idea of "choice", which is ultimately just a set of dark patterns that create the illusion of choice.

How much does imaging cost without insurance?

Well, providers don't have to disclose transparent pricing so it's hard to say for sure, but Google says between $1-3K.

As someone who pays taxes in Sweden and don't plan on having children, I would probably not choose to pay for 480 days parental leave per child, subsidised day care and child allowance payment to the extent they exists today if I had a choice.

You do want to incentivize people having kids though if there is not sufficient immigration. After all, who's going to pay your retirement?

How does it work in countries with slightly lower incentives? Are there other ways to get people to pay for my retirement? Maybe by attracting well educated immigrants?

If you were in the UK you would get a PT appointment 6 months in the future and told to rest and take painkillers (which you buy yourself). Or you pay out of pocket for a private specialist to actually get help.

The situation in New Zealand is similar. There is an infinite demand for health services, so our public health system is busy, so you go on a waiting list. The UK and NZ spend about 10% of GDP each (~$4kUSD/capita).

The well-off pay for health insurance which will get you faster service, and the very well off just pay privately.

The first site I looked at for a private arthrogram was ~USD1050 (Single joint or region Arthrogram including Gadolinium) https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=mri+private+price+list+sit...

For more expensive procedures, some NZers travel to Asia to get medical procedures. The prices in Asia including flights and accomodation can be very affordable for the middle class, depending on what needs doing and how much risk you are willing to take.

Here in the UK chronic pain treatment is a farce. You get to go to meetings where they tell you to soldier on and if you can't, well try harder then. So there is a huge illegal market of opiates of all kinds and deaths are soaring. If people can't get prescription and can't stand the pain then where do they go? Dealers. Big pharma has a great grip on the government so things like medical cannabis are out of question. Fortunately it has been legalised a couple of years ago, but it is only available on private prescription after you have failed "traditional" therapy. If you are unlucky, you are looking at spending £300-600 a month out of your own pocket.

> my insurance won't approve it without doing a full course of physical therapy first

This is the case in socialized systems as well. For example I need a monoclonal antibody injection regularly (MSRP $1500/dose) and in European systems I would need to prove that topical steroids and immunosuppressants did not work first before trying it. Just like Europe, I pay $0 for the doses, because the drug company has a program to cover my copay ($100/month) and the insurance company "pays" for the rest. No way the insurance company is paying MSRP, so that $1500 is definitely a fake price.

Also you have to consider that the US is subsidizing these European countries by paying for their defense. If France, Germany, and Italy had to pay for military expenditures necessary to defend against Russia then they would not have the budget to pay for such extravagant social benefits. European NATO countries have long been underfunding the military below NATO spending requirements.

> Also you have to consider that the US is subsidizing these European countries by paying for their defense.

Also global drug development.

US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dolla...

Let's say that I want to have better train infrastructure. How much will it cost me to build that, according to your thinking?

I would rather a private company build it, or in a public / private partnership, so we at least have some semblance of breaking-even if not a small profit.

Our current train systems are so woefully wasteful, inefficient, prone to breaking down, and so on that simply giving the same corruption more money would be extremely unwise.

I see no real reason why public transport must be necessarily profitable. It's a common good that tax payers enjoy. You'll have profitable legs, but you'll also have legs that are used by a few folks from a village who need to get to the city once a week, and those will never be profitable. A private company would probably not build there.

Because without the need to be profitable, you get gross incompetence, corruption, and waste. See: California HSR, BART expansion, NYC subway expansion.

The power of the market forces private businesses to offer quality service. A privately run subway would never allow drug addicts and thieves run rampant on the train like they're allowed to in NYC and the Bay.

Pro tip: if I feel scared for my life or property at any point during a transit, you've already lost against a car.

Per mile, cars are by far the most life threatening form of transportation.

But those deaths are 1) rational and 2) avoidable by defensive driving. By rational, I mean they make sense - drunk driving, unsafe driving, and speeding [1]. By contrast, you never know if someone on the subway is a mentally deranged person (frequently experience this on BART), a robber out to take your shit, or just someone who's being aggressive because they're trashy (also frequently experience this).

Per mile, cars make me feel the safest. And that's what matters for what I (and others) end up selecting for my form of transportation. Obviously, I'm probably never going to die on the subway due to a train crash. But I could be seriously hurt or my property taken from me - and it wouldn't show up in the stats as caused by the subway because it's just another crime that happened to occur there.

Have you really never been unsettled and felt unsafe due to mentally deranged people at night on BART/NYC subway?

[1] https://www.idrivesafely.com/defensive-driving/trending/most...

There's "unprofitable"*, safe, quality public transportation in hundreds of European towns and cities, suggesting the common cause of those issues is not the "lack of profit motive", it's uniquely American.

* Unprofitable meaning, they don't earn enough revenue to pay for the service to run. However, they do provide economic benefit to the area far in excess of their government subsidy.

Exactly, public transit doesn't need to be profitable. IIRC there are studies showing that unprofitable public transport is positive for economy and profitable if you'd look at it as whole economy in general.

Better than Germany? Not much... it's a train wreck (ha!)

Even if (which it almost certainly isn't) what you claim is true, the point of paying taxes is not just about what you immediately, materially gain but (a) to support people on lower incomes and (b) to fund things like R&D projects (e.g. the www is a result of state-funded CERN) and infrastructure which would be too expensive to build personally (e.g. roads, railway tracks to ship goods to ones house), etc

The corollary is that you live like a king in a country where people could be billionaires or they could be poor, desperate, with untreated mental health issues, nothing to lose, and a loaded gun.

On the global scale, I wouldn’t say the US is a beacon of progress and happiness. It’s better than many bottom tier countries but far from top tier countries (which aren’t as liberal, for the most part)

What top tier countries?

The US is the wealthiest country in the world by miles. It's had the highest GDP every single year for over 100 years continuously.

That amount of capital is phenomenal, and part of why Americans enjoy salaries 3-4x higher than even Western Europe in most professional work - Tech, Medicine, Law, truck driving, etc.

And that money allows you to work your way up, and buy your own property, etc. which is almost impossible in much of Europe, Canada, etc.

> The US is the wealthiest country in the world by miles.

True, but the point is that most of that wealth is highly concentrated. Hence why the US is not the beacon of happiness and progress.

Balderdash.

The median net worth in the US is $125,000 for a household. It's €50,000 in the Netherlands.

Yes on economical metrics. But in happiness, life expectancy, education, equality, prisoners count, literacy, and many other things that arguably matter more in life than $$$ then the US is quite lagging compared to other developed economies.

Yeah, and for most working professionals you get sweet FA.

Like here in Sweden we pay 40% income tax, 25% sales tax and still have to pay about $30 for each doctor visit. Dentistry is not included in the state health coverage. Neither are annual checkups of any kind, so diagnosis can be difficult and slow, etc.

In Sweden, those taxes are just going to those who are lucky enough to have first-hand subsidised apartment contracts, or have loads of children and live off the barnbidrag. Especially asylum seekers (failed or accepted) that get both of those for free, and never have to work or integrate with society.

The only major benefit over the US is the semi-decent trade unions which mean full-time work is quite stable and with good vacation allowance.

I am not disputing what you're saying about your healthcare system, but if you get hit by a car, I would guess that nobody will be afraid to call an ambulance for fear of the cost. The same cannot be said of the US, where people with emergencies take ubers to the hospital.

You might take an uber to the hospital in Sweden too, out of convenience, but not out of fear for being stuck with a $1000 bill.

> The same cannot be said of the US, where people with emergencies take ubers to the hospital.

It's a bit ironic as a couple of months ago I had to call for an ambulance here in the UK when I found someone extremely unwell and they told me I should call an Uber and take that person to A&E myself, because they don't have free ambulances. Then at A&E they had over 3h waiting time for majors. You pay fortune in taxes and you get crap service. Often you have to go privately to see a specialist and you can't deduct that money from your taxes.

The anecdotes from supposedly-superior socialized medical systems in Europe always throw cold water on USA leftist dreams. The left here has been saying it’s a utopia for a fraction of the cost for decades. The reality is so much more complex.

I mean, I'm a leftist in the EU, it's just that the system isn't working due to cuts and mismanagement, and unfortunately the "left-wing" parties here are more concerned with identity politics and policies benefiting the lumpen rather than the proletariat (mass immigration, social housing for criminals, etc.).

I support universal healthcare, but I think a lot of Americans don't appreciate the benefits they get from the sheer wealth of the USA. Salaries are so much higher, and health insurance covers much more at good companies, etc.

Europe pays ~10% of GDP to healthcare and you say it isn’t enough money “due to cuts”.

USA pays ~20% of GDP and the left says it’s “too much” when compared to Europe.

How much would you expect society to pay? Clearly it’s less than 20%, as that’s society being robbed, and more than 10%, as that’s healthcare being cheated. What is the correct percent?

I'd rather it be closer to 20% for sure. Healthcare is incredibly important.

But tax mismanagement is a huge issue, my home country and my resident country have sent billions of dollars to Ukraine for example whilst we still don't have enough housing, have people going to food banks, etc.

Same for accepting tens of millions of refugees and so on.

Healthcare spending of the UK is at the OECD median and is just 80% of the EU15 median. The UK also has an aging population which means its spending needs to drift upwards over time.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

I mean I could tell almost the exact same anecdote from when I had to have my appendix out in the US. The key difference is that I ended up with a fucking insane bill to pay at the end of all of it.

Plus the NHS was better historically. The conservatives have been playing starve the beast with it, and Labor is about as impotent as the Dems are in the US.

Either way they still spend less and have better outcomes, so that part at least isn't very complex.

Is it at-all possible that either

1) it isn’t the conservatives but a larger systemic issue

2) healthcare is, like all services, a market-based system where the highest-skilled gravitate towards the private sector, the highest-wealth gravitate to the private sector, and the poor / poorly skilled / the selfless use the socialized system that can never serve the needs of all the people at a below-market cost?

I doubt you'll see this, but the anecdote is untrue: an ambulance is free in the UK.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Ambulances are free in the UK.

Good luck finding an ambulance in EU

You often need to find your own way to the hospital

How many choices do I have in the US where I can live, shop, eat, travel, etc. without owning, insuring, maintaining, and fueling a car?

A well run government subsidized system still has choice and competition. In belgium I can choose what school my kids go to, even though all of them are subsidized to the point of costing very little. I can also choose what hospital to go to, or what doctor to see, and that visit will always be subsidized by the public healthcare system, while doctors still are self-employed and can set their own rates (higher rates means I pay more myself). In both systems there is little administration, because the system works the same way for everyone and is straightforward.

Sadly in the USA, any hint of allowing “choice” with public schooling has you labeled a heretic by one side of our two-party system. While leftists despise monopolies in all business, they worship monopolies when it comes to schooling, no matter how expensive and how terrible the outcomes.

There are things money can't buy. It's hard to list things without getting too political, which I don't think this is the right forum for, but there are fundamental differences in European politics vs American politics, and no salary, as high as it might be, can change that.

To me, freedom certainly is one of those things money can't ultimately buy (I'm talking about 99% of the population, not billionaires), and I'm saddened to see it's been going downhill on both sides of the pond for the last 20 odd years. There are differences, but both are unequivocally evolving towards more authoritarian, controlling regimes. And that's a shame, because everything else (health, education, labor, social, even happiness) suffers from that foundational loss.

Taxes in EU can be high or low depending on where you leave and whether you're employed or work through your own business.

Tax rates can go from 5% (Maltese company + Portuguese NHR scheme) to 60% (high earning employees).

High tax Europe doesn't make any sense if you ask me, you're not getting much for it.

Infrastructure (roads, public departments, police) and public healthcare are terrible in most of EU for the average high earner. Nordic countries are way better in that regards but it's too cold for me to even consider those places.

USA healthcare is comparable to the best private healthcare available in EU.

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