> The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.

This sounds great if you're the type to have a family. Otherwise, seems like you kind of get screwed?

Only if you consider the pure $ value. US colleagues that have come to Australia, have gotten sick and um-ed and ah-ed about visiting the doctor because they are so used to the high costs.

If I even notice something weird that freaks me out I go to the doctor. Mental health care, physiotherapy, certain tests and imaging. You get a yearly allocation to use up. GP visits are all "free". I never have to worry about it and I don't want the less fortunate to worry about it either. I would never want to live in the US. I cannot imagine how much extra stress and anxiety I would have without that layer of support.

I agree with you on the stress. I only visit the USA for funerals now. I just had 3 root canals and crowns done last year, it cost me $750 at a high-end dental office. I think that would get me 1/2 of a root canal in the states.

THIS. It's incredible how much stress some people are willing to endure by not having good free healthcare.

Compared to what? In California I was paying a full 35% effective tax rate on top of something like 3000 a year in health insurance/deductibles and still had a sizable homeless camp on my street. Plus if I wanted to go back to school for an advanced degree the cost was a joke.

In the US you can definitely bring home more dollars in absolute terms, but I've found if you actually compare total life costs and standards of living you end up at fairly similar % between SV and Europe.

There is no such thing as “free services”. You paid for them through taxes. Also you need to factor in vat and everything else being expensive due to taxes. Dont get me wrong, denmark looks great, but as many “rich” west eu countries the country is rich but the people arent.

And you need to factor in that Danish people do not need to pay for health services.

$50k after tax in Denmark needs to pay for fewer expenses than $50k after tax in USA.

So it is not a valid comparison to just compare income tax and VAT.

In this case Denmark ends up not being more expensive for a nice middle class life. It's just that ill-informed people thinks otherwise. Quality of life in Denmark is higher: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...

>high pay gets heavily taxed

>So very wrong [...] 40.2% tax rate.

What!? That's definitely high, man.