Yes, but for how long? And what happens after you're put to pasture?

You can earn a lot more in the US when you're young (or at least, mid-career), but you'd better hope and pray that you never get sick, or laid off in late-middle age.

I've never lived in Germany, so I don't know the problems with their system, but the US system is (currently) a "get yours while the getting is good" approach to life.

Well, if you're German that means you move to Silicon Valley, make the big bucks for a few decades, then move back to Germany when your health starts to fail.

That strikes me as trying to claim the benefits of a system without participating in the costs.

(Unless you're suggesting that salaries are so disproportionately high in the USA that you can move here, pay all of your German taxes, and still be better off. In which case, I have to ask: what the hell is wrong with economics, and why is it leading to this obvious inefficiency?

I suspect the real answer is: "you can't actually do that.")

Germany's tax system is linked to residence, not citizenship (unlike the US). Therefore if you move to the US and work there for a few years, you will not pay any German taxes during that period.

Therefore the "free rider" effect definitely exists, but I don't think it is a huge problem, because the numbers of people migrating out and in again are not that high.

If you do it quite as cynically as that, yeah, that's sounds a bit dodgy - but the more common pattern, I think, and frankly more problematic for Germany, is the one where you go to Silicon Valley for a few years and try your luck, and if you're good (and lucky), make the big bucks and stay -- for all the badness of US health care, people who've made big bucks for decades are generally by a wide margin able to secure and keep really good health care. The people who aren't as lucky (and/or good) return and take up their €45k/yr careers.

I doubt that's a serious problem, given the odds against it happening.

Seems far more likely that someone would leave Germany, earn a higher salary in the US for a while, and return as soon as a serious health threat made the disadvantages of the US system clear.

Presumably Germany has some sort of system to tax imported wealth to handle these scenarios.

No, you can totally do that if you put up with the severe inconvenience of being an economic migrant for that time.

(Immigration bureaucracy, distance from family, working and living in your second language, navigating an unfamiliar system, immigration bureaucracy, and the risk of being arbitrarily deported)

I didn't say you couldn't do it, I said it was unlikely you'd get rich in the US (true), and there's probably a system to tax you on imported wealth (as there is in the US).

While you do not have to pay the benefits for social security while abroad, you could and it's not even that much. One pays around EUR 12k / year for social security on a rather well payed software developer job (EUR 50k / year). Given a salary difference of a factor two or more, it is actually very much feasible to life and work in a US technology hub and pay for German social security. So the question "what the hell is wrong with economics" does remain.

If you think this is wrong, Poland is bordering Germany and has 1/3-1/2 the wages.

I think the answer to that conundrum is just that it takes a lot more time for things to even out than you'd think. It hasn't even been 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed.

It is exploiting the system without paying for it, but there's plenty of that going in the other direction as well - educated eastern/southern europeans in their 20s coming to Germany to work with their childhood and education already paid off, pay Germany taxes for a few years/decades and then go back to their home countries.

Germany in particular gets a lot more economic immigrants than emigrants so it probably adds up as positive or neutral.

It is totaly possible to do that. The hardest part is getting a US visa.

Yes, it's a free rider problem, and yes, you can do it provided you don't surrender your German citizenship.

I am expecting that the good times in the US will continue for 10 more years at which point I will have enough saved up to retire[0].

[0] Assume that I make 150k a year and only live on 50k a year I can put the rest into index funds. In ~10 years my money will be producing enough money so that I can quit and live on 50k a year forever. See http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... for the math/justification.

That's certainly one perspective. But some people see it as less of a "get yours"/"hope"/"pray" game, and then the US system can be cast in a different light.