> When you include state taxes, social security from the employee and employer, then it starts to look like much less of a difference.
When you count just the taxes we definitely pay less, especially in places like Texas and Florida. Well, I suppose there's the budget deficit and national debt to consider, though yours aren't exactly great either.
Well, except that there's a middle income trap with social security taxes. Basically, you want to be earning either a fair bit more than the social security cut-off, or to be on welfare. This is a terrible feature of our system.
> When you include health insurance and college education, Americans get much less value.
Honestly I'm starting to believe that our tertiary education system is vastly overvalued and that we can do much better for much less cost. Also, we have state schools that are very good and very cheap (by comparison to private ones anyways). I know people who have done very well in tech without having gone to school or graduated.
As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers generally have much lower prices when you have no insurance and pay out of pocket.
> I do agree with the first half of your comment. American labor laws make it easier to fire which allows employers to take more risk in hiring.
This is, on the whole, a very very nice feature. We also have better political speech rights than you. And... well, the whole Bill of Rights is a big deal, and European countries mostly don't have anything like it.
Texas has the highest property taxes in the country, so it is false to think that moving to Texas (or Florida, with their insurance nightmares) is some sort of free-money trick.
Eh, Texas has high property taxes (because they function as a backdoor income tax via the "Robin Hood" school district subsidy program), but they vary a fair bit, and there's no state income tax. Compare to NJ which has high income and high property taxes.
I think the US has more freedom of speech (although it's hard to tell without training in constitutional law over 24 official languages (25 if you want to count Welsh, is this EU, Europe, or Council of Europe? Might need to add more…) and a split between common and (multiple subtypes of) civil law), but also I think it's a difference in detail not in kind.
"As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers generally have much lower prices when you have no insurance and pay out of pocket."
I've had several chronic issues, including cancer surgery and the followon therapies, that I in no way wanted, that stretched out years, ensuring that we (the family) spent our ~$10K deductible for several years running. I've seen this with quite a few other people, as well. It is certain that we would have been bankrupted w/o middling quality corp health insurance. We have also had many $1000s in dental bills, in a year, quite a few times.
The idea that you could self finance these yearly cash flow (up to, what, $100K?) is absurd, unless you are really rich, but you seem to be somewhat price sensitive, so I dunno.
OTOH my sister-in-law makes > $500K/y as an anesthesiologist, and her spouse is a pathologist sadly making somewhat less, so on average the family must be doing great!
Yeah no, my Euro-fruends are aghast at the medical situation here in the US, and we all do view it as a massive effective tax on the unlucky that Europeans more or less don't have to worry about.
All of this is due to a) ACA, b) the whole HMO craze in the 90s, and c) long before that, ERISA, oh and also: lack of pricing transparency, and lack of incentives to users to check pricing, and so on and on.
We don't have a free market in health care unless you have no coverage, then you can actually negotiate prices. What we have is a monster, and the monster we have today is way way worse than the monster we had in the early 90s.
Not that it helps to say these things. Most of you are either a) bigtech employees with nice healthcare plans and maybe don't care that much (until you're no longer bigtech), or b) fintech employees (same), or c) too young to remember what 80%/20% plans were like back in the day (or never had a non-$WORK plan) and therefore all too willing to demand and/or accept any purported solution that isn't. I hope it helps to say these things here.
Meanwhile we've had a lot of factors pushing up inflation in medical services, so when you add it all up it sucks, but it sucks for all sorts of artificial reasons.
When you count just the taxes we definitely pay less, especially in places like Texas and Florida. Well, I suppose there's the budget deficit and national debt to consider, though yours aren't exactly great either.
Well, except that there's a middle income trap with social security taxes. Basically, you want to be earning either a fair bit more than the social security cut-off, or to be on welfare. This is a terrible feature of our system.
> When you include health insurance and college education, Americans get much less value.
Honestly I'm starting to believe that our tertiary education system is vastly overvalued and that we can do much better for much less cost. Also, we have state schools that are very good and very cheap (by comparison to private ones anyways). I know people who have done very well in tech without having gone to school or graduated.
As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers generally have much lower prices when you have no insurance and pay out of pocket.
> I do agree with the first half of your comment. American labor laws make it easier to fire which allows employers to take more risk in hiring.
This is, on the whole, a very very nice feature. We also have better political speech rights than you. And... well, the whole Bill of Rights is a big deal, and European countries mostly don't have anything like it.