And I don't just mean taxes. Cost of living, housing, healthcare, insurances, transportation, social security, all of these things are so vastly different outside the US. It's pointless to compare US salaries to those in France or India.
It's even different inside the US. For example, my company currently pays all health care costs for me (in addition to the salary). But as I understand with many other (small?) companies you have to pay for the insurance yourself.
The correlation between company size and amount of insurance premium paid by the company isn't very strong in my experience, at least for tech companies. The smallest percentage I paid was at the smallest company, actually.
It's got more to do with the attitude of management, but oddly, even the companies that pay all or almost all of the premiums don't seem to discuss that.
Are you sure? You need an income of over 300k Euro to reach 42% taxes in Germany. Not saying, that you are not making that much. But sometimes people get confused between marginal and average tax rate.
The highest step is 42%, but overall you pay much less. On the first 8k you pay nothing for instance, then you pay some 20% on the next 20k or so, and so on. The last step is 42% for everything above 200k or so.
It's not that different for some situations in the US. When you add federal, state, county and township personal & business taxes for me (self-employed), it comes out to around 40% of my income... and once I spend any of it, the sales tax is 7% here.
Where do you get those numbers from? If you're taking the top tax bracket, don't, that tells you absolutely nothing about an individual's effective tax rate.
In NYC you will pay about 50% of your gross income if you are just barely qualify for the marginal top tax bracket. Of course these numbers mean squat for your own personal situation:
Federal - ~25% effective, not marginal
State - 8%
Local - 4%
Payroll - 13% on the first 100k or so. 2.5% on the rest.
