Exactly on point, Europe is feudal and always have been. It is actually the reason why USA was "invented", when people who were fed up with the system left to start anew.
I studied, lived and worked in high demand field all my adult life in Europe, am in my mid 30s and have nothing really to show for it. Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions. And health care... lol.. ok - it just about works, but as you can imagine anything public is prone to corruption and lowest passable quality
Seeing USA, the last bastion for people who could make something out of themselves by real work crumbling and crawling to its death is disheartening.
> Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions.
Marginal tax rates in California are also around 50% as well (above or below, depending on income). Houses are certainly in the millions.
But on top of this you get to pay separately for extremely expensive health insurance and education, things that in most countries are very reasonably priced or even "free" (not free since it's paid for by the taxes, but at least you get services in exchange for your taxes, unlike in the US where you pay the taxes and have to pay separately for all the services).
I'm not an expert on this but a quick check online and I found tax brackets for California:
$35,000-$80,000 [25%]
$80,000-$170,000 [28%]
I'm just going to let you know that in Europe (Austria) personal income of 32,076 to 62,080 is taxed at 42% rate above 60k is taxed with 50%. And this does not include social and health insurance that is mandatory...
To give you TLDR of the European experience, you look at the gross salary, multiply by 0.45 and this is the real money you would see landing in your account, .. enjoy .. :)
whether the gained wealth from exploitation of people outside of USA allowed more mobility between wealth classes inside of USA - that would be a complicated discussion for me
I was merely pointing out the fact that it was possible to ascent to higher wealth class in USA with regular 'honest work' some years ago, whereas in Europe this is in general impossible due to taxation schemes designed to suck the life out of anyone who decides to work as opposed to being born an 'aristocrat' inheriting money, land etc...
I studied, lived and worked in high demand field all my adult life in Europe, am in my mid 30s and have nothing really to show for it. Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions. And health care... lol.. ok - it just about works, but as you can imagine anything public is prone to corruption and lowest passable quality
Seeing USA, the last bastion for people who could make something out of themselves by real work crumbling and crawling to its death is disheartening.