As most things, the comparison is dependent on what state of life you’re at and your preferences.
My percentiles are based on Payscale data.
Of course this varies state by state, but generally for tech, you net more in US on the average even when you pay for everything that you get with taxes in EU. Starting salaries even outside fang could easily be in like $130k in areas that aren't tech hubs and don't have an inflated COL - in EU this is unheard of.
Starting salary in US for SDE is probably like 100k. Going of single income tax filings your approximate aggregate tax rate will be ~%15. if you have state income tax, prolly like ~20% aggregate.
In Germany you would start at something like $70k and get a 42% tax rate afaik.
So right there you get more than twice the money left over after taxes.
Living costs would probably be close to each other, rent is probably cheaper in Germany cities but groceries and goods are more expensive.
And health insurance and costs are a small percentage of the salary.
The only big difference is that in US you sort of need a car, but again, with monthly cost of a finance for a car you are still not hitting
The biggest difference in cost comes when you start having kids - in US you pay closer to 25% income for all things child related, so that eats into the extra money real quick. For outside of tech, if you make middle class salary in the 70k range, you are much better off in EU, because a lot of things are heavily subsidized.
Wealth inequality for instance is something that permeates political discourse. Americans don't give a shit about it at all. Making society nicer for everyone and not leaving anyone behind.
In the short term, Europe is much better at this than the US, but the long term sustainability of the European welfare state will be under serious threat over the next 50 years due to the horrible demographics of most European countries
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Spain
Massive bulges over 40 that will require support from a shrinking base of young people.