Agreeing with the premise, and giving a UK perspective. I have a quite poor standard of living. I earn 50,000 pounds per year as a graduate electronics engineer, but the problem is that I was earning 50,000 pounds per year 10 years ago and in that time tax has gone up, rail fares have gone up 37 per cent and the cost of living has gone up. It takes me an hour and a half to get to my work commuting, so 3 hours per day, and I've tried living in different places and its always the same. Usually my engineering jobs are located outside the major cities and theres no public transport links to them, or quite commonly, no proper footpaths or cycle paths.
I've become de-skilled and a bit de-motivated. there is little real innovation in engineering in the area of the north of England that I live in but I cant sell my house as the market's gone flat and to get somewhere nice to live, I had to buy a doer-upper and doing it on your own in your spare time aint fast. I've lived with no central heating for a year, fortunately now have installed it myself. It does make me laugh though because the media is full of how poor people on benefits are and I'm a graduate engineer and have been living in a damp house with no central heating that I've been fixing myself, just to try and live in a nice place. And the only reason I was able to afford it is because my wife has been stuck on 50,000 a year for the last 10 years too. We both do things around the house ourselves because on our salaries as mid forties professionals, we don't have a lot of cash to spend on skilled tradespeople to do the work for us. And this uses up energy we could be doing in our jobs, although we both are careful to remain competent, as we can't risk getting sacked.
I've actually been quite lucky in my career as most of my colleagues that I started in my first graduate engineering job have been made redundant and had at least 6 months of unemployment at some point, and mostly lost all their savings at that time and had to rely on their wives' jobs to pay the mortgage. Quite a few of them have had to relocate to the London area, but thats very, very expensive to buy property in.
I love engineering and my job used to give me some chance to design as we had a new product, but for the last few years all the investment has gone into the spectacularly unsuccessful and rather incompetent sales team. A year ago, a new manager was appointed superior to me - I wasn't invited to apply for the job - and as seems strangely common in Britain, he has no degree and some kind of management diploma. He's useless - he spends his time avoiding questions in meetings, blaming other people for delays, asking us to give constant reports on our work that he doesn't read and doesn't have the technical knowledge or competence to understand and surfing the web to find yet more consultants to do the work he ought to, and waste more company funds. My workplace is full of managers who work from home most of the week or go home early and come in late. One was sacked last year for misappropriating company expenses. I've read the sales spec/tenders that some of the sales team have prepared, and they are full of spelling and grammar mistakes, badly written and disorganised, and don't stack up well against our competitors.
I did spend 6 months working in Germany as a contractor for a large company, and I loved it, and should have stayed there, but its difficult to relocate as a contractor to a foreign company, and I didn't speak German. I did at least feel that engineers were respected there and I had a good standard of living - I could get the s-bahn to work and it was cheap and efficient, whereas no matter where I've lived and worked in the UK, my commute to work has been a nightmare. 20 minutes in the s-bahn, lived in a nice semi rural village with low crime just outside a large city.
I think the whole of the UK has become a bit depressed now as the government doesn't seem to know what its doing with its self inflicted Brexit, we have had austerity for years but despite that the economy is still doing terribly compared to the german and dutch economies, and our politicians are mainly corrupt or incompetent - yesterdays' news had a story about an MP who had resigned for shouting abuse at a journalist. the journalist had been trying to question her about her employment of her son at public expense as her assistant on 50,000 a year, despite his recent drugs conviction.
Interested to hear what tax rates are like elsewhere - I pay an effective 50 per cent tax on any pay rises I get, although its a progressive tax rate. It doesn't encourage you to work harder. I also have council - property - tax of around 4 or 5 per cent per year. My house cost 350,000 and thats pretty average for the area, and we could only afford it because of money from previous ones we had done up and sold. If I was living right next to my work, I'd probably have to pay 400,000 or more for something not as nice, but I'd also have quite high levels of purchase tax and moving expenses. And then theres no guarantee the company wouldn't move or go bust, both of which have happened to me in the past.