30% is just federal. State can add between 0%-10% on top of that. So depending on where you live it may be very close to Germany. Then there's medical insurance, which is usually paid out of a portion of your paycheck. It's optional, but it would be a poor risk/reward tradeoff for even for a young healthy person to not at least have a high deductable plan, which will be another 3-4% of $200k.

I'll mention this not to disagree with your overall point, but because I've seen it be a source of confusion for some people. In the US federal income tax system, the marginal tax rate varies depending on the tax bracket each dollar of your income falls in.

That is, someone making $200k would pay 10% on their first $9,950 of income, 12% on their next $30,575 of income, and so on. They'd only pay a rate above 30% for the last $35,075 of their income.

You can plug in numbers and locations at https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes to get a sense of how this plays out.

I think the parent above you is talking without taking out taxes. For 90K, you would pay (taxes+health insurance + pension+unemployment benefit) ~42%. So at the end, what you see in your account ~52K/year. This is as a single person. For family/kids, you can make little bit more.