Given the current exchange rate, that's a shocking gap between the US and Europe. People will happily sit in some traffic to make 3x as much.
But you probably won't have 4000 square foot house to store your 4 cars in.
Or more generally, you'll just have a whole heck of a lot less money, which was the point. I wonder if djsumdog was exaggerating, though, by failing to compare like against like. The numbers he quoted for US engineers represent the pretty high end. Are there really engineers in Berlin making a lot less than 50k Euros/year?
So what is the point there? So I quit and work for 3 days per week. Much less money before tax but after tax not really. I feel it is good deal to take 2 days back to life.
So if you want to live in Europe, forget about working for someone else.
I had a few interviews in Germany and The Netherlands that didn't work out, but one thing I did notice is that many European countries don't have the huge income wage gap for software engineers.
An engineer that might go for $150k in Chicago or Seattle would be about 50h ~ 55k euro in Berlin. It works it self out with lower costs for groceries, better public transportation, reasonable housing prices, etc.
The loss of salary you mention might seem bad for you, but it's part of having generally lower income inequality. The wage gaps in America (a lot of it brought on by the high demand and cost of housing and our poor transportation networks) are not good for people without tech jobs in cities that are dominated by them.