As a European I feel like both those concepts (big money jobs or big money startups) are a USA only concept.
Anywhere else in the world that has those kinds of options? China maybe?
Anywhere else in the world that has those kinds of options? China maybe?
The impact of unions is far-reaching and can be seen in everything from the salaries of grocery chain CEOs to startup stock option allocation for early employees.
Here in the UK, it's not uncommon to come across articles in major publications about a CEO's pay being multiple times higher than the average employee and you look at the number its peanuts compared to the US.
And when you factor in the municipal bus network, a $40k salary at Klarna in Stockholm is basically the same as a $350k salary at Stripe in the US.
Not to mention in the USA, god knows what cookies might be put into your browser by any random cooking blog, without warning.
If you’re going to use that sort of reasoning, then you don’t get free anything other than air.
Yes, it’s paid for by taxes (or through insurance depending on country; yes we have cheap private insurance here). Thank you for bringing that to our attention, our feeble European brains were unable to deduce that on our own.
On the other hand, the insurance costs ~15% of income with a cap, so it has an element of solidarity to it - if you earn less, you pay less, and children and non-working spouse get covered without extra cost.
There's also Medicaid if you're poor of course.
Your public health insurance rate in Germany is based on your annual income up to €59,850 (i.e. you pay the same whether you make €59,850 per year or €200,000 per year). At the maximum rate, you usually pay €807.99 per month for health insurance (including the average extra fee of 1.6%, which varies slightly by insurer) if you're a salaried employee.
In addition to the public health insurance you also pay for public nursing care insurance, the rate of which depends on whether you have children or not and are older than 23. Assuming both of you are self-employed, have no children, are older than 23 and have not opted out of public sick pay (which for employed people giving birth includes a combined 14 weeks of pre and post-natal leave known as "maternity protection", or a combined 18 weeks for early births or twins) and assuming the same average of 1.6% for the extra fee, you indeed pay €977.50 or just above $1000 per month each.
For the record, if you're self-employed, the absolute minimum you have to pay for public health insurance is €158.43 (without sick pay) plus public nursing care insurance plus the variable extra fee. This basically assumes your income is at least €1131.67 in any given month even if you make less than that: you can't pay less than that as long as you're self-employed unless you switch to a private insurer instead.
Another issue for self-employed people is that because your insurance rate is paid by you in full (unlike salaried employees where 50% of it is paid by your employer and your rate is adjusted automatically if your salary changes in either direction) your rate is much less dynamic and will often have to be adjusted retroactively. Public health insurers are legally only allowed to adjust your insurance rate based on your tax returns which means even if you magically manage to file your taxes in January of the following year and the tax agency immediately processes it, you may end up having to backpay (or be refunded) the difference for an entire year if your rate changes. If you are self-employed and not incorporated, you can file quarterly tax advances and the insurers are allowed to use these to temporarily adjust your rate until the final tax return is available but once you incorporate you're stuck in the worst of both worlds.
As this hopefully illustrates, there are many problems with how the public health insurance system works, especially for self-employed people and founders (and especially people who can get pregnant as it's not common knowledge that "sick pay" includes "maternity protection" and self-employed people often opt out of sick pay because it's an easy way to cut costs), but pretending our public health insurance is "not cheap" is a bit dishonest.
To reiterate for emphasis: if you pay a combined 2000 USD together per month that means the two of you each make at least 60k USD per year and you will not pay a single cent more for health insurance no matter how much more money you make. Arguably this ceiling is the main problem and if it were abolished, the rates could be considerably lowered for everyone else. The insurance rate is very painful if you're self-employed and make less than 60k EUR per year. It becomes increasingly less painful the more you make beyond that and that doesn't seem very fair.
My point is that the German system is not a magical system of free healthcare. Rather, it's financially backed by charging a considerable chunk of earnings.
As a side note, the idea that the employer pays 50% of the contribution is a political slight of hand - an employee's labor covers 100% of the health insurance payment.
There IS No healthcare in this dump of a country. I am looking at flying to Barcelona to have her seen, and moving out of this dysfunction as soon as possible while I'm at it.
In Europe you don't go bankrupt on healthcare because you just die.
Yeah, yeah, anecdata, but right now I'm liking the "I get an appointment quickly and pay lots of money but that's OK because I earn lots of money" model more and more.
True, but there's no stress due to possible crazy variations in prices, "in network" - "out of network" garbage, etc. When people talk about "free healthcare", what they're really saying is: "out of pocket healthcare expenses are very small and always capped at a decent level, and I have access to healthcare even without a job".
> At least there is a chance in the US to make generational wealth for a middle class, but no way in hell in Europe.
https://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/49849281.pdf
TL;DR: The US has worse social mobility that many equivalent Western European countries.
What the US does is amazing marketing for their big outliers (and amazing marketing for everything, even piles of rocks in a desert, for that matter). I.e. 1 person in 100 million becomes a billionaire and suddenly you'd think 1 in 10 000 people did it :-)
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
The US is in 27th spot, after 21 (!) European countries.
But the quintiles aren't the same.
A good example is Canada vs the US vs the UK.
The top US income quintile is 153,000 USD.
Canada is 131,000 CAD (98,000 USD).
The UK is 87,000 GBP (105,000 USD).
So you could have less social mobility in the US (going from 1st to 4th quintile) than Canada (1st to 5th), but end up better off financially.
But the WEF reference for the grandparent uses a "social mobility index" which includes such factors as: "Adolescent birth rate per 1,000 women", "Pupils per teacher in pre-primary education (%)", "Extent of staff training (1–7 best)", "Internet users (%)", "Meritocracy at work (1–7 best)", so it's clearly quite subjective when it comes to "social mobility".
Sorry, I'm European but this is just silly.
There's no way $40k in Sweden buys you equivalent quality of life as $350k in the US, even when taking all the welfare state factors into account.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sweden for the most part sucks these days but part of that is the idea that you can lounge through some average free education and then get $350k while leaving early on Fridays.
Yes, some Americans are born wealthy and some have a lot of privilege. Everyone else, at least that I've known, works at it. Often for 15 years. Then they might get $350k, or laid off.