Most of my comments stem from personal experience; the assumption is that you are comparing someone who makes a similar amount of money here.
> I take 6 weeks off (vacation) per year to sail in the Mediterranean and to SKI in the French and Swiss alps. This is fully paid and it would be highly abnormal if I did not take this time off.
Americans differ from you in this aspect, but it's a cultural difference. It is very common for people to take 2-week vacations, and somewhat common for people to take two such vacations per year.
> My wife was paid her full salary for 6 months to have a baby. The government would have mandated a minimum payment term if that did not happen.
Again, America has a cultural aversion to paying such generous benefits. I've seen people take 3 months off after having children. I have also seen new mothers come back to work part-time while transitioning to working full-time over the course of an additional couple months. Overall, it's comparable.
> I never have to worry about healthcare, it's just there and it's available all the time regardless of employment
If you are employed and making 174k in the USA, you are in the same boat: you do not have to worry about healthcare costs as you are covered.
> None of my children have ever participated in an 'active shooter drill'
Elected representatives who are meeting constituents do not get stabbed to death here. Stabbings in general are somewhat uncommon compared to shootings. America is more violent, but it doesn't generally affect people in the wage bracket that we're talking about here. A lot of violence is perpetrated by poor people on other poor people, usually in connection with narcotics.
> I went to a top tier University and only paid 3000 GBP per year. The government gave me thousands of pounds without expecting repayment. The government gave me thousands of pounds and said they will write it off if I can't pay it back before 25 years and they won't ask for a single penny if I earn below a certain amount. When they did start taking repayments, it was a small amount extra on top of my income tax. The interest rate is also very low to the point of it not really mattering.
America has fallen behind the other rich countries in this regard. But America also offers a much larger menu of choices in what kind of school you attend, and what type of experience you have. All that choice comes at a cost, and the high wages for computer science grads makes the increased college costs moot: you can earn it all back without superhuman effort, and student loan burdens rarely cripple the lives of people who get lucrative employment.
The amount of choice available to the American consumer beats anything the UK can offer, hands-down. This is true irrespective of how much you make: this type of variety and plentifulness for everyone is unprecedented outside of the US.
