Meanwhile you know little about tax system in Europe and you just blindly apply a ratio to an average taken from a picture.
In France, raising a family or marry someone who earns less than you will reduce your income tax, unlike Germany for example.
About teacher's pay, if you look into the details, you will find that the french state motto is "Do as I say, not as I do". All the annoying employment law do not apply when the french state is the employer. As such, the brutto/netto salary ratio for teachers is bigger than other employee. But the main perk is not salary, it is the 2 month summer holidays and job for life, and of course free healthcare and pension plan.
> One teacher’s union put it this way. A retiree with a 40 year career in teaching might have finally attained a salary of 3,200 euros a month. Right now, they would retire with 2,281 euros a month, but after the reforms, that would decrease to 1,803 euros.
Here in Anne Arundel county Maryland (which is kind of a middling state in terms of tax and public employee benefits), teachers with a bachelors degree earn $45,000 to start going up to $65,000. Pension benefits from the Maryland state employee retirement system after a 40-year career (to match the calculation above), would be $32,000. But Maryland teachers are also eligible for Social Security. At that salary range, that’s be an additional $25,000 per year.
People have this idea that lower salaries in Europe are made up by the better benefits. That might be true for low income earners, but it's mathematically impossible for that to be true for above-median earners. Europe has more benefits and a flatter income distribution, but one of the costs of that is significantly less economic production.
Even factoring out corporate profits and the income of the top 1%, the U.S. economy amounts to about $47,400 per person. For France, its about $33,600.[1] Given that French taxes rest mainly on the bottom 99%, and provide a more generous safety net for the poor, it's literally impossible for an above-median person like a teacher to be anywhere near as well off, even accounting for benefits, in France as compared to the US.[2]
[1] This is based on looking at the current accounts for the various countries. I estimate $2 trillion in top 1% income and $1.9 trillion in corporate profits for the U.S., and $188 billion in corporate profits and $139 billion in top 1% income in France. The latter calculation relies on the reported figure that the top 1% earns 10% of all income in France and 20% in the U.S., but assumes that personal income as a share of GDP is similar in the two countries.
[2] Note that the $5,000 extra that Americans pay for healthcare compared to the French will reduce that gap somewhat for the average worker. But since we excluded corporate profits and top 1% incomes from the calculation, most of that extra money is going to be redistributed to incomes of bottom-99% healthcare workers.
About teacher's pay, if you look into the details, you will find that the french state motto is "Do as I say, not as I do". All the annoying employment law do not apply when the french state is the employer. As such, the brutto/netto salary ratio for teachers is bigger than other employee. But the main perk is not salary, it is the 2 month summer holidays and job for life, and of course free healthcare and pension plan.