At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
>Your headline salary in the US is higher but disposable income is often lower
Even rough napkin math doesn't check out here. Let's say you are a senior engineer in Bay Area/SF (one of the most expensive places to live in the US, so I am not going for some outliers like Austin or Seattle where the math ends up being even more in favor of the employee), and you make $300k/yr total comp at one of the big tech companies (which isn't even that good for a senior engineer at Google/Netflix/Dropbox/Uber/etc., this is rather a low end of the comp at that level at those companies, https://levels.fyi has a pretty accurate data on compensation that matches with what I've seen in real life myself). I used one of the online calculators to see how much you take home after taxes in CA (https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...), it came out to around $7.5k semi-monthly or $15k/mo.
So you get $15k in cash every month after taxes. Let's say you want to live on your own in a new really nice 1bd apartment in the middle of the city. I will overestimate and say that you will pay $5k/mo on rent+utilities. After all of that, you got $10k left. Let's say you spend $2k/mo on food and other various random small expenses (again, overestimating here for the sake of the argument, realistically you will spend much less on both food and housing). After all of that you got $8k of disposable income left, and that's while living a very good quality of life (most engineers I know in Bay Area who make that much don't spend even nearly this much on housing and normal expenses btw, they are putting it in savings/401k/etc. in hopes of retiring early and such). Employer-provided insurance is usually amazing. My personal one is fully paid for by employer, and my out of pocket yearly maximum is $2.5k (so even in the worst case scenario, I won't ever spend more than that in a calendar year on health expenses). Also, most of the people in senior positions at those companies I listed make noticeably more than $300k/mo.
I guess the bottom line is, is there even a way in EU to have $8k+/mo of disposable income as an IC software dev? How difficult is it to make it happen? From my experience in the Bay Area and Seattle, it isn't the easiest thing on earth, and not everyone in those places makes that much, but it is far from "special" or rare.
Some people enjoy that of course. I do find the working environment better in the US, and I enjoy my work, but on most other parameters it’s inferior.