I think nothing in Europe beats London. Of course, the rents are insane, but if you don't have a family and are willing to live in a shitty place (maybe with flatmates) with a commute, it doesn't affect you as much.
The biggest problem with that is that a lot of companies don't like to contract out management, so you're options may be somewhat limited (and if you choose full-time employment instead, you go straight into the maw of 40% taxation).
False. You have to be very senior, but you do not need to 'typically' be a manager. There was a spreadsheet a few months ago on HN showing that with RSUs, most of the top tech companies pay above this for their higher level (non manager) engineers.
>It's less than $300k, but contracting taxes in UK are about 20%
Wow, contracting taxes are higher in the US, maybe it is a comparable if you can make 150k+ doing consulting work in the UK!
The justification in Europe is that governments want to encourage entrepreneurship (and contracting counts as entrepreneurship), hence lower taxes. I wonder what's the logic behind the US situation.