Sure, but most people aren't skilled white collar tech workers with in demand skills who could be earning 3x post-tax salary in the US.

Health insurance is essentially free or cheap at any good tech company. EU pensions are underfunded (just like US ones) and as a high paid tech worker you're better off with maxing your 401k anyways.

If you look at the nationalities in any top US MS/PhD/MBA program, you'll find it's about 40% European, far above what undergraduate programs look like. That shows quite a few skilled workers in Europe want to leave.

If you are an unskilled worker, Europe is better as long as they can continue to sustain their social programs by taxing high earners and having defense be subsidized by the US. If too many high earners leave or the US becomes unwilling to pay for bases all across Europe, the whole system collapses pretty quickly.

However, the thing I’d be worried about in their position, is, if the safety net is actually a sustainable project in a time of declining economic growth. They’re extrapolating on 30 or 40 years worth of data and if you’re retiring in 30 or 40 years a lot can change. Look what’s happened with the austerity crisis, something EU folks usually don’t want to talk about. Personally I’d want to manage my own retirement and risk tolerance.

Anecdotal, but at least that’s my experience.

> Most people in Europe don’t want to leave.

I believe they're saying if European tech companies want to compete in business with US tech companies they need to pay their engineers more money.

By what standard?

By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company":

https://www.autoblog.com/2016/01/06/ceo-mark-fields-ford-dat...

Their software chops are certainly dubious, but there is no questioning their intent when it comes to entering the surveillance economy.

The linked article quotes the CEO, "Overall, when you look at our business, we're not only a car manufacturing company. We are a technology company. As our vehicles become part of the Internet of things and as consumers give permission to us to collect that data, we'll also become an information company."

That's marketing related to the IoT buzzword. Next week they might talk about using blockchain. The other part of the statement is that they are a "data company," because they can sell information about their customers.

The words from the CEO are the same words from a data analyst, but they each mean something entirely different.

What a disaster. I wish they would focus on simply making good cars.

What does this even mean? They don’t sell access to data. Oh! They use data to make business decisions? Well, welcome to 2004.

Have you heard of those small companies called Google and Facebook? Care to compare their market cap with Ford's lately? Do you really think they're worth that much because of their quick web search and easy friend-finding?

The only problem american companies have is dealing with the workers rights around here.