[1] - yup, I've seen "well funded" startups searching for top talent willing to work for €36k/year
When you include employer-side taxes (social security and medicare) and the several tiers of tax (federal, state, local, property tax, sales taxes, various weird shit like hotel taxes) the tax rate in the US for middle-class is not very different from that in Europe. Where the tax schedules differ is that, in the US, genuinely rich people can avoid paying. Working, middle, and upper-middle class people pay just as much in tax in the US as they do in the EU.
The US does have about 5 locations where developers can make more than anywhere else in the world. The Bay Area and New York are among them, but they're also ungodly expensive (house prices over $1 million). In the rest of the US, prospects aren't any different from the rest of the world. The $80-100k entry-level salaries are not happening in "middle America". Those are usually being offered in the Bay Area or New York.
For the record, what actually makes the middle class poor in the US is not taxation, but the Satanic Trinity: housing, healthcare, and education costs. Even "good" health insurance is garbage with more holes than rotting cheese, and college tuition can easily top $40,000 per year.
It probably is slightly better to be a really good (top 5%) programmer in the US right now, but I don't think that's for purely economic reasons. I think the advantage of the US is that it's easier to get venture capital, so there are more experimental ideas. It's probably easier, in short, to get a good job here... but the difference in compensation is probably not enough to justify moving over here unless it's a much better job.
Many of these taxes are regressive and decrease as a percentage as your income goes up. For example, I believe that Social Security tax is only assessed up to about $110k.