[rayiner]

> 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.

[theshrike79]

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.

[rayiner]

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.