I'm from the UK and now live in California. Income tax rates aren't very different.

As a proportion of GDP, Government spending in the US is only a couple of percentage points lower than the UK. The US actually spends slightly more on public healthcare than the UK, 7.9% vs 7.3%.

Of course healthcare here is so horrifically inefficient that another 8.5% of GDP is spent privately...

http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT

Not to mention the higher level of vacation time. Starting allocation in the UK is about 25 days plus 11 bank holidays. In the USA its typically 10 days plus 9 public holidays.

The legal minimum in the UK which just about everyone is entitled to is 28 days paid holiday assuming a full time job [1]. That can include bank holidays which are 8 per year for the vast majority of the population (1 or 2 more for Scotland and Northen Ireland I think).

For example, my first job was 25 days + 8 days of bank holidays and then you could earn up to 5 extra days if you stayed with the company long enough. Other jobs were all 22 + 8.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement

It's almost as if standard and cost of living are incredibly complex equations that you can't boil down into an HTML table.

Let's throw schools in there... no use taking a 20k raise to move to Chicago if you have a child for instance. You'll pay more than that for the cheapest private school. If you want to use neighborhood schools you can move to Oak Park... and pay 20k in taxes instead...