I can only speak from personal experience, but if you add up all the taxes I pay right now in the US, I pay a larger percentage of my income in the US than I di

I can only speak from personal experience, but if you add up all the taxes I pay right now in the US, I pay a larger percentage of my income in the US than I did in the UK, and I get none of the advantages from the UK (healthcare, pension, social care, mobility, etc. etc.) Now my salary is higher in the US than it was in the UK (despite the fact I owned the company in the UK, and I work as a software engineer over here) but that just makes things comparatively worse for the US. I used to get a larger percentage of my wages tax-free than I do here. The lower cost of living in the UK helps out here - just comparing the dollar:pound ratio using currency exchange metrics doesn't make sense when I sold my (owned) house in the UK and used that to get a 15% down-payment on a house out here in the valley. Fifteen years later and I've finally (this week actually :) paid off the mortgage on my home here. That's 15 years of mortgage payments that I wouldn't have had to make, and my house in the UK was (almost) twice the size of the one I now own here.