And if you have kids, it's like grand per kid for daycare right?
The US tech sector is _perfect_ for a single male engineer, who doesn't have any health issues. You can work 16 hour days, sleep on the office sofa and earn six-seven figures before you're 30.
But as someone who's definitely not 30 any more, with a family and health issues there is no way I'm even considering moving to the US.
I could easily triple or quadruple my take-home pay, but I'd be taking all the safeties off my, and my family's, life. Not a fan.
> And if you have kids, it's like grand per kid for daycare right?
It depends on your income. Here in Maryland, families of four making up to $70,000/year are eligible for childcare subsidies.
These numbers come from high income people who try to imagine what it would be like to be low income but don’t actually know about all of the programs the US, especially blue coastal states and the Midwest, have for people under a certain income level.
For higher income people like engineers, their employees will pay for their healthcare. Things like daycare can be a stretch, but you only pay that for a few years before the kids are eligible for free per-school. Say you have 2 kids and they need $1,500/month daycare for four years. (That’s more than I pay in Maryland which is a high cost state.) That works out to about $3,600 per year over a career. Two people working will absolutely make that much more in take home pay the US than in Europe.
On the other hand, in Finland the cost is around 200-250€ a month per child and the cost goes down with each child currently enrolled.
From ages 0-5 you need to pay for childcare, pre-school starts at 6 and that's free. Pre-school isn't 8 hours a day though, so you need to pay around 100€ to supplement it with childcare.
After that it's school, high-school and university, all free again.
High-school & university require you to buy the books though, which do have a cost, but nothing like the US schoolbook prices from what I've gathered. It's hundreds of euros per term if you buy new.
School is free here too. Most people don’t go to college in either Finland or the US. (It’s slightly higher in the US.) But the average person who does go to college graduates with about $30,000 in debt. Which they will make up for given higher salary and lower taxes in the US within a few years. The median post-tax disposable income is $15,000 per year higher in the US than Finland.
It depends on how much money you make. Here in Maryland, for a family of four making $70,000 per year, the premium is under $300/month for a high deductible plan, and under $500 for a low deductible plan. Even a family making $100,000 receives federal subsidies: a low-deductible plan is under $800/month, and a high-deductible plan is under $450/month.
We implemented a sweeping healthcare reform a decade ago now. You can't just pretend that never happened.
Going off the 2019 numbers, so pre-pandemic: 10% of Americans have a negative net worth. 30% of americans are on means-tested benefits: Medicaid, foodstamps, TANF, WIC, welfare, or section 8. An additional 20% on top of that, or more than 50% of Americans, receive federal subsidies, so do not fully pay for their own insurance.
Even for those who qualify as "with insurance", for the above specification, do not possess insurance nearly to the scale that is implied in the above quote of $2500 per month. Of the 86% insured (the number rose from 10% in 2018 to 13.7% in 2019), 20% are on individual plans with a deductible over $5000.
Fewer than 40% of Americans actually have healthcare insurance of the quality implied above -- which makes sense, because $2500 a month is actually a reasonable figure, and that exceeds wages for 40% of Americans. Reminder that 30% of Americans live at or below the poverty line, and receive government assistance for basic needs of food and shelter.
10% of Americans have negative net worth, but something like 8% of Germans have negative net worth, and Germany is a much smaller and more homogenous country. Is 10% a crazy high number? And look at Sweden's number. Is Sweden a basket case?
Fewer than 40% of Americans actually have healthcare insurance of the quality implied above
If you are free to set metric arbitrarily, you can always ensure that majority of Americans do not meet it. For example, fewer than 40% of Americans drive cars that are younger than 5 years old. Does it mean that driving is out of reach for most Americans? Clearly, it's not.
More concretely, despite that "fewer than 40%" have healthcare coverage of the sort you arbitrarily chosen, it turns out that 70% of Americans rate their healthcare coverage as either excellent or good ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar... ), and this figure has been stable for last 20 years.
The US tech sector is _perfect_ for a single male engineer, who doesn't have any health issues. You can work 16 hour days, sleep on the office sofa and earn six-seven figures before you're 30.
But as someone who's definitely not 30 any more, with a family and health issues there is no way I'm even considering moving to the US.
I could easily triple or quadruple my take-home pay, but I'd be taking all the safeties off my, and my family's, life. Not a fan.