The median American is much richer than the median European.
That said, now that I've moved into a job that pays at least $225K per year, you know, life in the USA is amazing for me. And everything everywhere else in the world is so cheap! Why can't my fellow country men just pull themselves up their bootstraps and get a high income earner job? It's so easy! You just go to the job tree and get one /s.
But more seriously, we need to completely restructure our society in the USA before the poor and middle class violently rise up against the government and make us into what Mexico was 120 years ago.
> we need to completely restructure our society in the USA
The specific primary reason the USA is rich is that we’ve resisted the temptation to do harebrained projects like this.
USA has famously cheaper life than EU (especially gas and food). Not that I would trade places.
Also, from experience i have found vegetables to be ludicrously expensive in the USA, the same goes for beer and wine.
I did a comparison between Finland and the US some time ago. My conclusion was that the median households were about as wealthy in both countries, but the average household was 3x wealthier in the US. The biggest caveat was that household wealth includes retirement savings but not pensions, making the median Finn wealthier than the median American. I estimated that the crossover point for the standard of living was somewhere around the 80th percentile, depending on things such as local costs of living and whether you have kids or not.
After a few years in America, nominal salaries seem low in Finland. On the other hand, Finns have fewer major expenses. Their out-of-pocket costs for education, childcare, and healthcare are much lower. The concept of an emergency fund does not really exist in Finland, largely thanks to income-dependent benefits. Pension contributions are mostly paid by the employer on top of the nominal salary, making saving for retirement much less important.
I would love to only need to keep a few thousand bucks in the case that my car breaks, and even then, that's likely overkill for the actual repair costs relative to the value of the car.
I don't own a house, I don't have any debt. I'm 8 years into my career and I've just now getting to building a positive net worth. I've put off so much medical/dental maintenance because of the cost and now it'll take half of my savings to fix all of it.
I know I'm doing a lot better than many folks my age. Top 10% for my age, but it sucks knowing that elsewhere in the world, they're doing some things so much better. It's one "benefit" of the internet connected world; we can see what everyone else is doing and how others solve hard social problems. Fixing those social problems in the US though, is continuing to be extremely difficult and we're still likely decades away from catching up to parts of Europe, and by then, we'll still be decades behind what they'd be doing then.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would feel better if I didn't know the term egalitarianism.
Also access to free education, free healthcare and so on.
Over 90% of Americans have health insurance.
On a continent,-wide level it is, and US incomes are significantly higher. But US wealth levels are below most of Western Europe, including France, the UK, Ireland, even Italy and Spain. Plus Canada/Australia/New Zealand for good measure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
That said, I thoroughly disagree with the characterisation of the US as "a third world country with a Gucci belt".
