As I live in Scotland I pay 40 percent tax on everything I earn over 41 thousand pounds.
I take it you went to the States ? Is it even possible for someone my age to get there to work?
The U.S. may be considered a racist hell hole, but just like everywhere else, it's really the few loudest ones that make a bad name for everyone else. On the whole, Americans are wonderful people living in a system that offers them a reasonably high standard of living for a reasonable work/life balance. They've got some issues, just like any country.
They've got a shit political system that just occasionally manages to be a beacon of light and hope to the rest of the world; a shit debacle of a medical industry that somehow has a couple of shining examples that manage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best hospitals in the world; and an education system that fails about as many as it helps, yet still somehow manages to pull out a few of the best schools in the world. Quite how this is, I'm not sure.
Don't let stereotypes and bad press colour your perspective of a culture you don't know anything about. Visit, go attend some interviews, spend time to find places there you love. Spend time with people. Form your own opinions. You may be surprised.
A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting the UK's investment by offering a high quality of life and a streamlined path through their immigration policies, pillaging UK developers and negating the billions of dollars the UK spent to get ahead.
Having kept a close eye on the development market in the UK for the past 20 years, it's becoming apparent that there will never be an opportunity to bring our skills back home.
It's no good investing in education if you don't provide the opportunity for that education to bring long term benefit to the UK. You need to keep the people once you've trained them and they're just not going to stick around while other countries salaries and immigration policies make it easy to take those skills where they're going to be guaranteed easy access to a high quality of life. Those developers are never going to come back if they face the prospect of losing 80% of their salary and their partner not being able to work for for a period during the immigration process.
This is a huge gap that the UK seriously needs to look at. There's no point in having an industrial policy that trains people if you're just going to lose a huge portion of them at the end of that training, never to see them again.