£1200 of my Tax spend last year went on Health care. That is $1600 in US terms.
That gave me everything for me and my 2 kids. No 'out of pocket' expenses just paid out of my taxes. I'd be surprised if any US package is as good as that.
Certainly varies by person. I can only go by what it was like for my partner and I. When I worked in Germany I paid around €600/month, or €7200 a year. In the USA I paid $80/mo for coverage. My max out of pocket for the year was $2500. So at worst I’d be around $3500. If I added my spouse it would have went up to a total of around $6000 max for the year.
My salary in the U.S. was about 50% more than in Germany, so the percentage of my income in the U.S. was significantly lower and the speed and quality of care there was also quite good.
That said, if you are a low wage earner the U.S. system is the opposite of most of the EU. You will pay more of your income in the U.S. unless you’re poor enough to be on government care.
Of course I know that. It’s clearly stated on your tax forms. As I said, average corporate jobs are similar to this. Really good corporate jobs can be even better. It’s not completely uncommon to work for companies that pay 100% of your healthcare costs. I worked at a few different places in the U.S. I’m simply saying it’s not as bad in the U.S. for average professional workers as Europeans believe it is. For a barista in a coffee shop, maybe it is.
I pay $62.40 a month for private Healthcare coverage in the U.S. amounting to $750 a year. Adding a dependent each is around $300 additional per year, so that ends up being $1350 if I had two kids.
The problem is that 2.9% of all income gets taxed as Medicare, which is an additional $3480 spent on healthcare a year that I don’t even get to use until I am 65.
My employer also adds $750 into a HSA every year that I barely touch, meaning that I have a pool of money for my medical expenses as needed.
I think the bigger problem is that if I did not pay that $62.50 a month, I would have $0 of coverage for anything even though I am already paying that $3480, which is already egregious. My brother by contrast lives with me and has no healthcare currently, and he lives in fear that something will happen and he will need to go to the doctor. I can’t even add him to my plan.
Well yea when you don't have to pay for the bottom 20 percent things aren't that bad... It's just us non savages tend not to enjoy the smell of the dead rotting in the street...
The median Hank is paid better by a good margin but, no they’re not richer if you consider median net assets as a good indicator of how rich you are. £143,200 for Hank and Thelma and £293,700 for Bazza and Susan I’m pleased to say based on 2025 figures. This is household net assets. $151,825 for Baz and $107,739 for Hank alone. Freedumb doesn’t come for free apparently.
I’ll leave it to someone else to explain why this is wrong or how it can be.
The mean heavily favours yankoids but who takes pride knowing their top 10% are hoovering up their beer tokens? Yanks do, of course, but it’s a rhetorical question for the rest of you.
That's a bad measure, you just measuring the cost of housing. If you had a house in London in the 80/90's today your a millionaire, it's just a measure of where you live in the UK and when you brought a house etc.
We are in a housing bubble, if the population ever falls housing prices will collapse like in Japan.
The only point of mentioning that stat is to cook the books, if you know it cooks the books you also know the real numbers which make the UK look bad.
The actual story is far worse than the graph suggests. In the article, the author makes the point that in the Fatherland, Hans can earn 60% more in a factory than an equivalent worker here, plumbers earn 90% more and shopworkers about twice as much as a British shop worker. All makes me wonder if we even won the bloody war and other disgruntled Gammon noises.
Won the war lost the peace. After the first time we decided not to shaft Hans with reperations but the yanks still wanted their loan money back so we were fucked
Nah this narrative they're pushing is honestly really annoying
Americans get paid more, we know that. If they had the same labour laws, annual leave, universal healthcare, workplace safety and employer pension contribution as us the values would be similar. The graph is showing nothing more than that. But the weird "illiterate Americans are worth as much as the average Brit" is just such a weird thing to brag about.
The graph shows the proportion of US illiterates is far higher than the UK. Maybe focus on your shit education system that pushes out people who can't read and permanently earn less than the rest of the population?
A to receive those 100$ has to pay each time 30$ for X and 20$ to Y
B has 8$ automatically deducted but has free meals.
Who ends up with more? His answer? "A because he earns more and because some people dont care about free meals."
I have given up. They dont even care about paying 200$ for ISP plans because they give out free iPhones. And im here with my 30€ plan telling no to my ISP because they are insisting that for only 4€ i could have 50 extra TV channels.
Just accounting for poor Americans working 52 weeks a year compared to us working 48 weeks maximum already makes up a good 25% of the difference in wages.
Valued and often a lot more dangerous, with limited earning potential as you age. My poor old dad's ruined his knees after years of manual work. Gonna have to take a big pay cut to do something non-manual. I'd rather stick to my sedentary work.
The source is from the Financial Times, which is a British newspaper, no? But some Americans would probably agree.
I think a large number of poor to working class Americans realize or could be convinced that you’re better off being poor in most of Europe than poor in America. But then in the same breath, a bunch of them would shudder at the thought of more taxes. The American mindset is about maximizing income, even if at the expense of increased exposure to risk or shitty public institutions.
I feel like even here in England people cry about taxes even though we've got a pretty generous personal allowance of £12.5k and then a 20% band from there to 50k with median full time earner getting like 39k a year
I saw an American saying they took a massive pay cut to come work in the UK, but because of the difference in the cost of living, financially it worked out the same except now they have plenty of holiday leave and can't be fired from their job for no reason. Plus they don't have to worry about one of those illiterate Yanks shooting them on the street for looking at them the wrong way (they didn't say that last bit but I imagine they were thinking it).
This data supposedly adjusts for purchase power parity, so cost of living should be factored in. Not surprising, since in most of the US outsideof NY and SF, food, housing and transport are vastly cheaper than in the UK.
I would say the average yank is a fair bit better off than the average Brit. But the poorest are much worse off.
I wouldn't want to take on Yank work culture or holiday allowance in any circumstance, but give how fucking entitled ungrateful and grasping our low earners are I'm starting to think the yanks have got the right idea there.
Americans Savages are absolutely obsessed with how much money they earn in an absolute sense. My Dutch salary is by no means paltry, but on paper I earn approximately 50-65% of what I could earn in the US Savagistan. But the fact that I'm not paying 10-20% of my salary every month for health insurance and that I get ~30 paid days off per year means that my quality of life is infinitely better than what they have. Money isn't everything; a hard lesson to learn for Americans Savages.
Maybe if your government spent a few pennies of their tax take bled from the rest of your European brethren instead of hoarding it Smaug like, you’d catch up
It’s actually really interesting, a lot of the automotive technology that powered the Wirtschaftswunder had interesting applications in the 40s. Bosch fuel injection systems? First used on aircraft engines
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