I'm not sure where to begin with this, so I'll just try to go with an example :
I know someone who is in what you call the “top 1 percent” in France, meaning he has slightly more than 2 million euros (2.2 million dollars) as a net worth. In America he'd need at least two times this amount to reach that bracket. What strikes me while reading this forum is that it doesn't sound like anything special at all in the USA. I keep seeing stuff like “I just calculated that I need 2 million dollars saved in my 401k for retirement, and probably several hundreds of thousands of dollars in case something with my health goes wrong, in the meantime I have this 100k student debt that I need to deal with, and my 2000 dollars rent, my vehicle expenses” and bla bla bla…which doesn't make any sense to me at all?
In France you don't invest to retire, you work a certain amount of years, and the government pays for your retirement until you die. So what you're saving…is for everything else obviously.
As for healthcare, why the hell should people have to pay for the right to live, breathe, be healthy? The sheer idea of letting someone die or go in debt because their condition is too expensive to treat sounds atrocious to me
Also, why would someone have to pay for education? Educated people bring added value to society in multiple ways, this is already an investment to begin with.
What about disabilities (having asperger syndrome, being dyslexic, being physically disabled), accidents, traumas, depression…people who go through that in life shouldn't just be condemned to be homeless or forsaken. In fact, while having a job is still considered very important, I feel like Europeans understand that a lot of people can't / won't have a job, and don't discriminate them too much for that. The meaning of life is not necessarily linked to having a job. You don't size up someone depending on his job, as employment is just a way to sustain yourself, bottomline. You define someone's value based on how many people cared for him in the end, how many lives he had an impact on (at least that's what I think).
Also, how can the richest country in the world have a life expectancy that is 5 years lower than most Western European countries?
I'm not quite sure how I could formulate this properly, but what it looks like to me, is that Americans need TONS more money than we do to deal with all of this…but much of it seems completely wasted. Seems like there are so many hidden costs that those very high salaries don't seem so high after all (yes, even if they're 50-60% higher than ours). Earning 40-50k euros a year in most places in Europe will allow you a decent lifestyle, I don't think the same can be said in the US.
In other words, it sounds like having two million euros is a completely different deal than having the same amount saved in America, because you could lose that money at any moment there for various reasons, which sounds crazy af to me: if you have two million euros or more in Europe, you're set for life. You can buy two very nice/big appartments/houses, you can invest the rest, you can actually stop working if you want to or take a part time job and so on…
I think it's really crazy how, even if you become a millionaire, you still need to work like a madman as being safe is a rare luxury in the USA.