If we're going to calculate like that I think it's only fair to calculate in the average American's medical cost including insurance premiums which can put quite the dent in effective take home pay.
Roughly $5k/year out of pocket, with employers posting $17k for full family coverage for very good insurance (as it goes in the US).
Health care costs in the us are the most burdensome on the working poor and lower middle class because they stay a fixed cost even as income rises. For well paid tech workers, moving to the US and going from $75k to $105k/ year (the median for the
US BTW) is probably going to be a good move economically. A roofer moving for a $30k to $40k bump is a much dodgier proposition.
An aside, I saw a great analysis a few years back looking at the increasing income gap in the US. It determined that a large part of the gap can be laid at the feet of rising health care benefits to employers. The math is simple and interesting. In 1990 worker A costs an employer $10k ($8k in pay and $2k in benefits) and worker B costs $100k ($98k in pay, $2k in benefits). In 2020 worker A costs $25k, but a whopping $10k now goes to health insurance, meaning thier pay is only $15k and saw an 87% increase even though the employer saw a 250% increase in cost. Worker B? They got went from $100k to $250 in total cost, but saw thier pay go from $98k to $290k, or a 244% increase.
The highly paid worker saw a 3x more percentage increase compared to the low paid worker, even though their cost to the employer increased by the same percentage.
Perhaps you don't find 1k+/month to be a lot, but I think it is. Keep in mind the median income in the nation, amongst working people, is only 31k/year. And that's before taxes, rent, etc. Sure, if you have two working, healthy adults in a household, they can swing 1k, but it's still a huge expense to the average family.
Everytime I look at it, the US in PPP per capita¹ is ~10th worldwide, ranking behind places like Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland. But well above the bulk of Europe including France, Germany.
The problem when comparing is that the structure of a city-state like Luxembourg or Singapore has nothing to do with big countries; and even France or Germany are like 1/5th of the US in population, much less in area, so you can't compare much, certainly not the homogeneity.
