The thing I find interesting is Americans always claim that countries with socialised healthcare have significantly higher tax burdens, but if you compare take home salaries between say New York and London, or San Fransisco and London, they're not that far apart.

That said, in tech Americans seem to make 50%-100% more total comp on a cost of living adjusted basis doing exactly the same job...

Agreed. US also doesn't have VAT, though, which makes a fair bit of difference. State sales taxes vary but the highest is less than half the British VAT. Individual Income taxes are what, 25-30% of total tax revenue in the UK? I know OECD average is 25%. It's about 42% in the US.

The other thing that's interesting is if you ignore private payments to healthcare entirely, the US still spends more per capita from the public purse on healthcare than the UK does. So the US pays a ton of public money and yet most of the population still gets nothing unless they pay even more.

> Americans always claim that countries with socialised healthcare have significantly higher tax burdens

That's a generalisation, although some conservatives do make the claim. It's nonsense, of course: the most other developed countries including the UK spend around a third as much per person on healthcare. Another victim of poorly regulated market consolidation (among other factors).

We've also built an open-source tax and benefit calculator for the UK, which also lets you simulate custom policy reforms: https://policyengine.org/uk