I’m an American living in France for the past two years and cannot wait to move back to the USA. The taxes are so extreme and salaries so low that no one can even invest in the stock market. If I stay here, I will be able to leave virtually nothing to my kids when I die. The EU can take its 5 weeks of vacation and go fuck itself.
On the other hand, it's absolutely fantastic to have a young daughter and have her virtually not impact our finances at all for many years, between clothes/toy gifts from friends, gov subsidy, free healthcare, free education and low levels of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses on after-school activities, plus knowing I won't burden her financially either as I happily live out my retirement on a decent pension.
I may not leave her a lot of inherited wealth, but she may also not really need any to have options.
(That said, my personal frame of reference for why this is better and wonderfully stress-free is years lived in South Korea--that ultra-low fertility rate has reasons--, not so much the US.)
“may not need any to have options”. I hope you’re right, but hoping the EU continues to prosper over the next 20-30 years is not what i’d call a plan. The future is unpredictable.
I think this is the fundamental cultural difference between countries like the USA (and Australia) vs most of the EU.
Folks here expect and trust the state to provide for the future, private provisions are easily dismissed as unnecessary. As a result of this the median household wealth of the area I live in is 5x lower than my home country of Australia, despite incomes (adjusted for purchasing power) not being drastically different.
Whether that trust is wisely placed we'll have to wait and see[1]. However I do need to narrow that down a bit, it's not the whole EU, mostly France/Germany. There are other nations moving ahead with private pension schemes etc and much higher household wealth (Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands).
1. My main concern is government investment is inherently slow, politically charged, and pathologically risk averse vs the private sector. This means in the aggregate, over the long term, private household investments will out perform.
This is entirely a problem of putting all of eggs in one basket. Or rather, only having one basket in which you’re allowed to put your eggs. The German pension system is already insolvent, and I suspect it’s not the only one. European welfare states are great n’all, but it would seem they were set up when the going was good and populations were growing. Now with stagnation, they don’t look much like staying solvent and populations don’t have anywhere else to turn
The German pension system is completely insane. There is no fund backing it, and disbursements already exceed contributions to the tune of 127B EUR per year (which is subsidized from the general budget) and the gap is only growing.
Probably explains a good chunk of Germany's and the EUs anemic growth. Simply put, that's 127B EUR that can't be spent investing in the future and growing the economy.
> I won't burden her financially either as I happily live out my retirement on a decent pension.
What is a decent pension and where it will come from? I'm projected to get a decent SSA pension (bigger than a median income in top tier EU countries), but I am not counting on it. What gives you confidence that government will be able to support you through retirement?
At the current trajectory of the EU though, don't count on it. She will regret you guys not having built up an inheritance for her, considering that EU tier 1 and tier 2 towns and cities are being rapidly bought up by American private equity.
Source is me. I worked at a major PE firm in a past life doing exactly that. Also check who's the new landlord at many European cities - Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Copenhagen.... More often than not it's either of the two American investment firms which start with B (and I worked at one of them). European real estate is highly attractive to hedge fund investors because of stable growth and low volatility due to forced undersupply - much better for them than actually working for their 2 and 20 paycheck.
and this I think highlights a really big difference in perspectives: how do people feel about equality in origin, opportunity and outcomes? As an upper income Canadian I'm getting pretty tired of paying for all that equality, and I think Canada is not yet at the same level as most European countries. My kids may be the first generation that should leave Canada for opportunities.
I understand why one would prefer the US way, but these are some weird arguments.
I understand why you would want higher net income to enjoy a wealthy life, but for "investing in the stock market"? I also understand why you would want to earn more so that your kids can have a better life, but why "after you die"?
If anything, the latter can be turned into an argument for the EU way. Your kids don't need you dead, they need you to be alive and caring. So you have vacations so you can spend time with them, public education so that they have the skills to help themselves, so they don't need your inheritance, and healthcare to keep you alive even if your "stock market investments" are at a low point.
What’s even nicer is if kids don’t need their parents to leave them an inheritance just so they can afford a roof over their heads.
The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy, which was doing economically terrible when I visited, didn’t even have a fraction of the homelessness problem as in the U.S.
"The U.S. is filled with homeless people." is a popular, completely unsubstantiated statement from people who live elsewhere. Everywhere is filled with homeless people would be more accurate.
I caution against trying to compare homeless statistics internationally.
The definition of who is homeless and how they are counted varies dramatically between countries to the point where comparing headline numbers is largely useless.
> The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy, which was doing economically terrible when I visited, didn’t even have a fraction of the homelessness problem as in the U.S.
Interestingly, these are not unrelated. Italy's housing prices are very low because of how badly it's doing economically.
Not that closely related. Much of homelessness is still not a housing price issue, and housing price issues are partially but not completely remediated by a contraction in the economy.
And also... no -- homelessness is one bad problem, but there are other problems. Bad economies cause a myriad, including declining healthcare availability and reductions in life expectancy.
> Correction: the west coast is filled with homeless people due to democratic supermajorities. Most of the country is extremely clean.
This is such a bias tinted view of reality. There are homeless in all parts of the country including suburban and rural areas. You find the majority of homeless in cities because that is just where people in generally are so if by most of the country is extremely clean you mean most of the country is extremely empty and void of life then yeah.
But you don't find massive unhoused homeless encampments (which is really all that matters for most people) in all cities. The problem is of a completely different scale in East coast, Midwest, Southern cities.
Let's just ignore the rural areas and suburbs. Let's even ignore party (since most big cities are democrat run at this point).
Even with all of those things held the same, the West Coast cities are still uniquely bad not just in the people without permanent housing but also their lack of ability to do anything.
This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
> This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
That isn't a democrat problem, indeed the unwillingness to build new things is, by definition, a conservative tendency to "leave neighborhoods as they are".
Historically Seattle's city council was full of "conservative democrats" who didn't rock the boat much and who worked well with local businesses. The city council may be willing to build bathrooms for any gender, but no way in hell are they willing to rezone "historic" neighborhoods. However they've had no qualms about building large amounts of shelters in minority neighborhoods, devastating many of them. Likewise the police don't bother shutting down open air drug markets in Chinatown, but I'm pretty sure if a few dozen dealers and several hundred customers congregated on Queen Anne the crowd wouldn't last long.
Show me a republican candidate who is willing to run on the platform of "extreme property rights, get rid of all zoning except for heavy industry, do whatever you want on your land." The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
No city in the PNW has had anything resembling a conservative anything for many decades. The people here are so out of touch with the rest of the country, it's a bit worrisome honestly.
> The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
I mean... you're ignoring the largest Republican state for what reason exactly?
But anyway, I think a lot of zoning policy is set by the state.
For example (and this is frankly why efforts like DOGE are necessary), it is simply true that politicians of both parties will seek to maximize their power. State codes typically grant cities zoning powers. They don't have to. But most do. Thus, one can expect that any politician will wield that power.
I've never met a politician who didn't fully exercise their power. Those who do become folk heroes like Cincinnatus -- so rare is the accomplishment.
At the end of the day, we the people simply need to remove the power from the state, one way or another. If DOGE works, it would provide a good model for how this could happen.
From my perspective, I think that every decade, the citizens should elect a 'deregulation' committee whose only power is to remove regulation. Or, randomly pick a group of 12 people to sit on a grand jury to eliminate laws periodically. That's their only power, and they'd be anonymous. Maybe that'd work.
> No city in the PNW has had anything resembling a conservative anything for many decades.
Up until a year or two ago Kirkland had a long standing (and well respected) republican on its city council. Small r republicans used to hold multiple positions in the PNW, but after the party purge post 2016 the Republican party in Washington State has done nothing but run absolutely unelectable candidates. They used to run candidates who ran on a fiscally conservative platform and who didn't engage in culture war stuff.
But aside from that, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are two different axis, and historically Democrats in Washington have been rather fiscally conservative.
The Seattle city council worked very well with the local businesses communities and they were adverse to adding new taxes.
While the council's behavior has changed in recent years, the history is that up until less than a decade ago, Washington was rather purple when it came to actual policies.
Hell the super liberal local independent newspaper used to put some small r republicans on their voter guide now and then.
Cities in the midwest and east bus their homeless to the west coast. California tried to do the same but turns out people really like the weather.
As far as they lack the ability to do anything, you're right. Cities are NIMBY trapped and unless they fix that they won't be able to make any real progress on the problem.
The Guardian did an article on this about a decade ago when this claim was still popular and found that this was not the case. Cities like SF bus more people out than are bused in.
Because nobody wants to live in the south, midwest and east coast.
The west coast was a great place to live, people moved there, they didn’t build enough housing, people lose their jobs and can’t afford rent, they go homeless.
I don't want them to die. I would prefer they be warmed and kept alive in homeless shelters, but city governments are uninterested. For example, my city of Portland built a suitable building for a homeless shelter (well the county did) and immediately left it empty for 10 years until a private group bought it and is now running a shelter. Meanwhile, Oregon state is preventing them from running it at capacity, and the county is pulling funding.
They don't care. Meanwhile, 100s of millions were spent on tents.
Again, this is a simple problem where we fix it by funding homeless shelters and getting people off the streets. For a while, due to Oregon's incorporation of Martin v Boise into state law, police weren't even able to force people into a shelter. It's honestly insane.
100's of millions spent on tents? Please, where do you get your information? The expected cost for tents in FY 2025 is $230,000, paying for approximately 6,500 tents – or about 0.05% of the total Joint Office budget. Plus, they halted the tent procurements after commissioner Gonzalez protested earlier this summer.
Daycare in my city in the US is around 30k a year.
The city just dismantled its gifted program for schools, so if your kid is a high achiever plan on another 40k a year for schooling.
Even swim classes have a huge waitlist and are expensive. Any type of children's activity is absurdly expensive due to the high cost of living.
Housing is absurd, if you have a couple kids plan on spending 4k a month on rent for a place in a nice neighborhood.
Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings and that is it. Americans are, by and large, not even able to save up for retirement, with zero hope of leaving anything to their kids.
Tech worker salaries are a small bubble in all of this.
I've lived in LCOL, MCOL and VVHCOL cities in the US. Just because everything is outlandishly expensive in the bay area, that doesn't mean the same is true everywhere in the country. In large swaths of LCOL and MCOL areas, your money absolutely goes further in all the areas you listed.
I would suggest, though, that if you didn't grow up in the bay area and have family property here, as a relocation target it should be considered similar to gold mining. You're moving here for work because of the amount you can save [as a result of ludicrous tech compensation] and then use elsewhere, not because it makes sense financially to actually be living here.
I'm not in the bay area! I'm in Seattle, which used to be the cheap west coast alternative to the bay area!
I'm third generation here. Although I'm remote, my wife's job is tied to a location here. We both want to live someplace with a strong international community, access to an airport with lots of overseas flights, and that is a reasonably large population center. (IMHO Seattle is still small, and we are lacking many things for it, although that has gotten better over the last decade or so.)
The only other locations that meet our criteria have either garbage politics or garbage weather. (not that I'm happy with Seattle's politics, but at least our city council is mostly incompetent and a little bit malicious, as opposed to mostly malicious and a little bit incompetent!)
So you want to live in what would be an extremely desirable area but also have the cost of living be very low, and feel like you have a high quality of life while you have a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of your community.
> So you want to live in what would be an extremely desirable area but also have the cost of living be very low, and feel like you have a high quality of life while you have a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of your community.
I don't want a super low CoL, but I realize that housing prices have gone up in excess of what they should have due to restrictive housing policies.
Seattle used to be 1/2 the price of the Bay Area, or less! Engineers here earned less than in the SF, but we were OK with it because the QoL was great at a much lower cost.
But the city and surrounding areas refused to upzone, to such a degree that the state legislature finally had to force the issue, but even then the laws passed are too little too late.
The reason for the high CoL is lack of construction, plain and simple. Getting simple residential permits can take half a year or more, environmental regulations have limited what even homeowners can do with their own houses, and the majority of the city is still zoned for only single family homes.
The high price of building means that daycares can't open (too expensive to justify), and workers in all fields demand ever higher pay just so they can afford rent, which drives up the cost of everything.
For the last decade we've built 1/2 as many houses as we've had people moving to the city, and a large percent of new dense construction is rental only, which means money leaving the city and residents not building up any equity (or long term stake) in the city.
> Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings and that is it.
Per the US government's own BLS, the median household has >$1,000 leftover each month after all ordinary expenses. Americans may not save much but it isn't for lack of available income.
Medians mean nothing in a society that has a bimodal distribution of wealth.
America is full of people who are working a job and a half (with a good chance both are 30hr a week jobs that offer no benefits, and may have "flexible" scheduling where the employee is called in to work different computed selected shifts each week), and people who are working in offices earning good money.
In the middle you have some people working trades still.
We switched over from a manufacturing economy that made things and gave people stability and enough money to raise a family to a "service" economy, and then we started telling everyone working service jobs that "those jobs aren't real careers, so of course you are being treated and paid poorly!"
Right. And the vacations are something you ‘give’ your kids too. You won’t lie on your deathbed and think: “I shouldn’t have taken my kids to Vienna that summer. Should’ve put it all in Vanguard ETFs. Man what a bummer.”
If your kids appreciate your money more than your time is when you know you screwed up.
heck, raising your kids is the one and only tasks which should really count in your life (if you have children ofcourse).
Wealth can dissapear in an instant, and considering the stability of the world seems to be only decreasing, raising and seeing your kids grow up seems far more important than investing in the stock market to me.
first the government will take 50+% of everything he leaves to his kids. if there is still significant funds that he leaves them they will 100% become bums.
he should spend every penny he’s got to spend every minute he can with his kids - especially while they are young. and his kids will say the same.
not noble at all - naive, dangerous and downright stupid thinking
If you will have under $7M in your estate, the slightest is literally nothing. You will not owe a penny of federal estate tax.
If you have over $7M in your estate, it's worth consulting an estate planner, but the basics look like gifting and establishing trusts while you are alive (and ideally while the exclusion amounts are high).
The current exclusion is $13.61M per person, or 2x that per couple and set to drop down to $5.6M in 2017 dollars on January 1, 2026.
If there's a chance that you'll have over $7M and die in 2026, the slightest is gift some of it now [directly and/or via trusts or 529 plans] while the estate tax exclusion is still $13.61M and file form 709.
Leaving money to your kids isn't a bad inclination or anything but I don't see why it's the be-all end-all. Maybe my parents will leave me some money when they pass, or maybe not, I'm certainly not expecting or planning on anything. I hope they spend what they can to enjoy their life while they're alive.
Not to mention, you cannot predict the future and you might lose your wealth outside your control.
wealth is only able to grow if the state and society itself is stable, otherwise you might have worked for naught, and lose everything in the process thanks to war/climate change/economic depression etc anyways. (my SO's family lost all their wealth in world war two for example, and i am talking generational wealth here).
Raising your kids to be able to stand on their own and deal with the harshness of the world is far more important in my opinion.
Is that not a false dichotomy? I make quite a lot of income and still have lots of time with my kids. At least as much as I'd have anywhere in Europe, I bet. It is not a hard requirement to make good income that you sell your soul to the corporation.
Original post talked about 5 weeks vacation each year. I suspect the assumption is that working hard in the U.S. would not allow for that 5 week vacation.
Therefore that's 5 less weeks with the kids each year — or about 1.6 years total by the time they leave home for college.
It's not technically 5 weeks, but I'm American and get 24 days (96% of 5 weeks) of PTO plus 7 company-chosen holidays. And I take every one of them, even if some are just "I'm not working the next 3 Fridays, because I want to putter around the house."
We start with 19 + 7 days and get 1 extra day per year of service until 5 years. (We also get a 4 week contiguous block once every 5 years.)
Several years ago (when I was a manager at Google) one of my employees needed to relocate overseas in order to facilitate coming back under a more preferable visa type, and they were looking at options. For the same role where they were earning $135k base in Mountain View, it was going to translate to about $115k in London, $155k in Zurich, and only $89k in Paris. They chose Zurich and ended up staying there for over five years before moving back to the bay area.
It can't be overstated how much of this is cultural. Quality of life is simply less materialistically driven in Europe.
If Americans give up on home ownership and luxury items, they too can enjoy a European quality of life; living in an 800sqft rental and enjoying a rich social life.
Americans are much lonelier than their European counterparts.
In addition, lifespans in the U.S. are declining even post COVID relative to their European counterparts, largely due to increases in “deaths of despair” (drugs, suicides, etc).
The idea that Americans have a “rich social life” is not true relative to Europeans. Even the church going etc. is for most people forced upon them as opposed to something they want to do, as evidenced by the increasing number of people saying they’re faithless but onto church anyways.
That doesn’t mean that people with rich social lives don’t exist or even that the lack of such a rich social life is a problem for a majority of people.
What it means is that the U.S. broadly isn’t doing as well as Europeans and further things are getting worse.
I always wonder what would happen if you took these studies and actually broke down the US into units the size of the European countries we're being compared to.
It's easy to make a study that shows that the US has more X than some number of European countries—you just compare the entire US to all European countries and then cherry pick the ones where we do worse. But the US is a big place with a lot of variety in living conditions—even if you just broke down the results by broad geographic region rather than state, you would get dramatically different results than taking the US as a whole. What happens if you compare loneliness in the South with loneliness in Denmark? Or what about loneliness across the entire US with loneliness across the entire EU?
this is true but less and less so… I am European living in the US for the last 30+ years. spend my summers in europe and noticing each and every year that this culture is slowly dying. playgrounds where hoards of kids used to be are mostly deserted, mobiles and social media are slowly taking over the lives of europeans too. this may be difficult to see if you are not looking hard cause european cities get A LOT more tourists than US cities (tourists are on their phones too :) )
I have no doubt that materialism and consumerism is eroding social life in Europe too. My point is primarily that the US is way ahead of the curve on this, and it explains much of the difference.
I have a lot of friends who went the opposite direction of you, and chose a cheaper but more fulfilling life in Europe.
Instead of making 200k a year in the us, they make modest salaries and rent 100-year-old farmhouse flats that Americans would call a slum. They drive economy cars and spend their ample time socializing or outdoors.
My personal opinion is that Europeans simply place a higher priority on social interaction and incorporate it into their daily lives. Many of them have more modest financial aspirations, and don't expect to ever own a house, vacation property, or boat.
I basically explain this by comparing my life (US of A) to my sisters (EU). My sister makes great money - my sister spends ALL of this great money. she lives paycheck-to-paycheck which in US would mean she is poor, in EU she is living large (just came back from UAE, heading to Kenya in a couple of weeks, January Macedonia and Austria…). I make 789x what she does and put away 60+% - been doing this for 25 years now, almost done with working though
Do people honestly think Americans don't have rich social lives? Just because we socialize differently doesn't mean it isn't rich. Most Americans seem to prefer church groups, and small friend and family gatherings at their homes rather than going out and mingling in urban entertainment districts and bars.
Europeans get most of their perspective on US social living conditions from the terminally online, who are disproportionately likely to have no social life. The average American living in, say, the Midwest doesn't show up in the anecdotes that stereotypes are built around.
I'm an American and it definitely seems like we are in a significant and worsening loneliness crisis. I have no idea to what degree any of it is unique to Americans. Social connectedness, socialization rates, and companionship have all been declining for quite a while now. Lot's of potential causes and theories about it. [1] is a decent overview.
Like personally I'm doing great, and so are a lot of people I know, and I'm sure you as well. But I think a lot of Americans are struggling badly with their social lives.
#1 Reason is likely the urban fabric of places being non-walkable & car dependent. It's a physical structure that doesn't lead itself to spontaneity and new connections.
I recommend reading Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000). American civic and social engagement has been declining in almost every measurable way for 50 years now. There is no way to deny this.
The largest contributor according the book's surveys and studies (and I love saying this) is television outcompeting in-person fun. Car dependency is a factor, but IIRC was factor #2 or #3. While this ranking was true at the time of publication, I would wager that time spent on "screens" is likely factor #1, #2, and #3 now.
I would wager that many people are fleeing their hometowns to socialize in cities not because they're walkable, but because the density of people increases, allowing you to have better odds meeting real humans who haven't been lost to the allure of the indoors.
Go for a walk where? On the side of the stroad? With your friends who live 10Km away and have to drive to meet you because there's no public transport?
My take is that Americans like to make infrastructure an excuse for everything when it really boils down to priorities and preferences.
10 km is a 20 minute bike ride if you're not too obese to fit on one. 10 minutes if you pick a coffee shop, pup, or Park that is halfway. Unfortunately, most people prefer Netflix and the fridge which is even closer
in 89.65% ‘going for a walk’ is not possible unless you want to walk in circles around your house 76km away from the first tree/park/coffee house… you may though go for a drive in a pickup :)
Maybe if you're living in the Alaskan wilderness, but pull up a map of San Francisco, Austin, or Denver and you'll find a plethora of parks, coffee shops, and pubs. That doesn't stop people from sitting at home watching Netflix alone
lol america to non-american who watch a lot of movies might be SF, Denver, Austin… and even in those urban areas (which is not typical America) most people would need a serious drive to find a park (I used to live in Denver area, walking to a park would have been like 110k steps :) )
Strange, I pull up downtown Denver and I see like 20 parks within a square mile.
However, this kind of whataboutism illustrates my point. There's a near infinite number of places humans can congregate to enjoy each other's company. It can be a park or a coffee shop or a pub or your kitchen table for tea.
The fact that none of these are suitable demonstrates that the desire to get together is not there.
downtown Denver can house minuscule part of the population of the Denver metro area - only those affluent enough to afford it. America (again) is not downtown Denver or downtown SF or downtown anything...
hasn't this always been the case? most european land and cities has been densly populated for centuries.
Also, a lot of american homes seem to need space for luxuries which are simply weird for many europeans.
A bathroom per bedroom for instance? Why not share a bathroom with the entire household,and have a seperate small toilet instead?
American kitchens also seem really large compared to most european one's i have seen, but they also seem to have a more social function then what kitchens are used for normally. (preparing food)
> The taxes are so extreme and salaries so low that no one can even invest in the stock market.
There's a special "retirement plan by actions" (PEA) with lower capital gains tax, and the reason why most French people don't invest in the stock market is mostly lack of education around it. For most, real estate is the main way of investing/saving money. The stock market is dangerous and you can lose everything, and many have personal references (their parents/themselves bought stock from efforts such as the Eurotunnel that failed, financially) to that effect.
How would your situation change if you didn’t have to account for US income tax while living abroad? Does it offset at all due to agreements with France?
Idk why you think your kids should get your money when you die. If they didn’t earn it then they should get a small amount and have to work for the rest, just like everyone else.
Because I earned it and that's how I want to spend it.
Did a charity work for my money? No. They just supposedly will (but possibly not) use some of it for something aligned with my interests. Just like giving my money to my children.
After a certain stage, parents are working knowing that the value they are generating will be passed down to their children, it is no longer for them in their lifetimes, but their employer and society still benefit.
If parent’s work beyond what they can spend in their lifetime is not given to the children, who would continue to choose to work? Already in Canada you can exceed 50% tax rate and many adults who could see more patients, write more books, take more cases, do more work, choose not to as the marginal benefit decreases.
Ok, but then you end up with children who don’t need to work for as long because they have a head start. And so on until you have oligarchs who are born eating caviar and will never have to work.
1) Sorry I didn't list other reasons in order for you to understand that there is more than one reason it's done. 2) You bringing up feudalism is still completely random lol. I get you're trying to make the point "just because something was done in the past doesn't make it a good idea", but the contrary is also true - just because something was done in the past doesn't make it a bad idea. Using your logic, I suppose we should stop cooking food since it was done in the past and everything done in the past is akin to feudalism lol
You can't leave money for your kids in the USA unless you have several million dollars lying around, because health care will eat up all of your savings in old age.
There are gaps in Medicare coverage. There's long term care that isn't covered by Medicare; people can self insure, or purchase separate coverage, or many rely on Medicaid which requires exhausting assets first.
I've watched both my parents go through this, with significant chronic health issues. They had good private insurance on top of Medicare, they routinely had $10-30K annual itemized deductions for health related expenses that were not covered by their insurance. And that was with a daughter who is an MD who invested a massive amount of time and effort to get insurance to cover as much as possible.
Is that satire? The last time I seriously looked at moving to Europe, it was a pretty fundamental part of why I aborted the effort. Unless something has changed recently, for software engineers income is vastly better in the US.
I care about income as a proxy for quality of life, not as an end in itself. For me, the quality of life I get in Europe for X salary is better than what I would get in the USA for 1.5X salary. Ymmv
I agree, YMMV. But the average software dev salary in western Europe is half what it is in the US. The guy in the US can buy better insurance than what is provided through taxes in Europe, and still have way more money to invest in their future and increase their quality of life.
Have you seen the steep exponent on the US debt? You won't be able to leave anything to your kids if you move to the US either. Might as well enjoy 2 weeks vacation, rather than 2.
