Officially, the average salary in the USA is around 50 000 dollars, which means that hey, it really is one of the richest countries in the world right, that's quite a big pay check on average?…Wrong:
If you take a look at the median salary, which is around 33 000 dollars, then you'll see that half of Americans make LESS than 33 000 dollars a year, so around 2150 dollars a month after taxes are applied. When you know how incredibly expensive life is in the USA, with a median monthly gross residential rent of 1200 dollars (yes, I'm taking the median again), the cost of food, student debt, medical debt yada yada yada…well it's not nearly as good as some people believe it to be.
And to take an even clearer example, let's take France. You'd tend to think that “hey, we earn much more than they do on average right?”…Yeah, on average…which, again, doesn't mean anything : they have almost the same median salary as Americans do, 1850 euros, roughly 2000 dollars (https://expat-in-france.com/france-minimum-wage-average-salary/ ), which means that it's comparable to what a lot of US citizens make, except:
-They don't get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt
-They have a great social security
-They have tons of vacations
-Their rent is nowhere nearly as big as ours (however real estate can also be extremely expensive there too depending on the location)
Yada yada, I could have taken Sweden or Norway as an other viable example, but whatever.
The average salary in the US is WAY more skewed than in most other tier 1 countries, because at the top of the food chain, there are INSANELY super rich people, to a point where it's indecent.
So yeah, the truth is, most Americans don't make that much. The country IS super rich, but it also means that the rampant injustice is one of the worst in the entire world.
No wonder Western Europeans live 5 years longer than we do.