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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Median Household Income in the US is 75K. In Germany its 42K (lets round up to 50)

Tax Rates on 75K income in the US: 19% (take home 60K). In Germany on 50K: 35% (take home 32K)

What are you waiting for, exactly? America is profoundly, almost absurdly prosperous. Truck drivers here make more than software developers in many "modern" countries, even in spite of the fruits of remote work.

edit: aredox in replies has even better proof of mass American prosperity vs the rest of the world over the last 20 years. It shows 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile incomes all shooting up for the US and the major European nations mostly stagnating, especially for the 10th and 50th pct populations.

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These numbers are very apples to oranges. You also need to account for additional healthcare spending, dental, vision, pension, benefits, cost of living, expenses, costs of education etc.

I lived and worked both in LA and in Germany and while the salary sticker prices are quite different, the outcomes are quite similar. Furthermore, the "prosperity" in the US is much, much more unevenly distributed with luxury on one end (e.g. Westwood or Pasadena) and living and working conditions for others that felt more like a third world country (e.g. south of LAX felt very sketchy). And that is not even touching on the drugs and homeless problems.

Germans definitely grumble too much, but Americans overshoot in the other direction and gloss over very real problems.

Surely that's not the whole story, though.

In your example just consider what a German gets from their contribution to the state compared to the USAian. I'm particularly thinking about universal health care and free higher education.

According to numbeo.com, the cost of living in the US is 26% higher than Germany (the US is more expensive in almost every metric).

It's not just Germany that's both easier and less expensive to live in, either.

Your statistics are crude. Here is a proper analysis:

https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68...

That shows 50th percentile disposable income shooting upwards over the last 20 years and the only competition being Norway and Switzerland, and breaking away upwards from the developed country average. Again, if OP is waiting for prosperity and doesn't see it yet, they'll be waiting forever.

Add US, Germany, France, Spain, UK and you'll see the US graph incomes shoot upwards for 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile, and the other countries stagnate or even decline, even for the 50th and 10th!

America has absurd amounts of natural resources, compared to all European countries except Russia. It would be fairly rich just by exploiting them, without any advanced economy, just like Australia or Canada are. Add advanced economy on top of that, and regular Americans should be swimming in money, compared to rest of the world.

>regular Americans should be swimming in money

That's not how business works here. Money trickles up and people who worked to make it happen are living paycheck to paycheck. Only the business owners and the shareholders see any prosperity in that equation.

And not to sound too pessimistic, but many local governments would rather take the tax money and give it to Walmart, Cabelas, Sports stadium building rather than paying for stuff like school lunches or better teacher pay.

> should be

One of the resonant political messages now is that Americans are too poor to afford basic necessities.

Or rather the cost of basic necessities is (and has been) rising so much faster than income. Education, health care, insurance, housing, are all rising many times faster than 'core' inflation numbers suggest and incomes aren't even rising as fast as cpi.

That's not different in Europe. Especially housing is a problem.

Education is a problem, at much lower prices than in the US, in most places, e.g. Germany. Thankfully not in Belgium, although quality is an issue. I don't know about insurance, but most types of insurance in the US aren't a problem ... because they don't exist except for expats (which means mostly EU employees/politicians). In .be you do not get to go outside of the normal insurance if you're a normal person.

Treatments outside of what the country insures are generally not accessible at any price. There was a very famous example of that in the "baby Pia" case.

And housing is shooting up. Both rent and prices. From a lower base, sure, but still shooting up and you have to finance it from a much lower salary.

You should compare individual incomes, not household incomes. American households are large by the standards of the developed world, and single-member households are rare.

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