Let’s just cut to the chase - are you saying the liquor prices in Europe are generally the same as in the US?
There’s no meaningful comparison to be made between Europe (as a whole) with umpteen different tax regimes etc, and the US ditto.
But there are comparisons to be made on things like rent and real estate? 
Isn’t this what the “Big Mac Index” is for? Latest I can find is for 2015.
No, not there either. You could probably sensibly compare London and New York or San Francisco for property prices, say, but much wider than that is pretty futile I think
Edit: Jeezo, 10,000 posts.
Switzerland has a GDP/capita (PPP) very similar to the US: ($58K vs. $56K); however the median quality of life is seemingly much better. For a fun read:
Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
The thing about the US, I have noticed is the division of wealth.
The rich are really rich with monster houses, country clubs, huge acreages, etc
The poor are really poor who will work for minimum wage (or slightly above it).
What has happened over the years is the middle class has shrunk greatly.
I hate to break it to you but that sounds to me like anything but a stellar deal. You could have gotten unlimited data for the same money elsewhere. Then there’s the fact that 2G is last century’s technology.
I only mention this because it’s important to know for what products and services we’re comparing costs.
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Sales tax is around 0-10% Hotel tax is a bit higher between 14-17(?)%, but I only mention this because as far as consumer items go (except sin taxes), this is the highest one I know about. VAT in the UK was like 16% when I was there and i think the same for the NL. That’s way higher than anything here in the US.
The Big Mac Index mentioned up thread (one of my favorite indexes) really is to measure Purchasing Power Parity, or how far the dollar travels in such country, i.e. exchange rates. Consumer Price Index is a better indicator of how much something costs.
Another thing I noticed the last time I traveled to Europe (Germany), goods even thought to be from the home country were expensive. For example, Hugo Boss was a brand that I didn’t wear while in law school, but I wear occasionally now, it’s way cheaper in the US. Also, I noticed that American jeans are still double the price over there. Of course there is VAT and protectionist tax measures skewing the final price, but that is true of both countries, just moreso in europe.
The EU does have protectionist tariffs that put prices up for us. One reason we want out. Believe it or not; garlic smuggling is a thing and people go to jail for it.
VAT (sales tax) is currently 20% here. It varies around the EU, with Scandinavian countries (predictably) the highest at 24/25% and Liechtenstein the lowest at 8% What varies a lot is the list of low or zero rated items. In the UK groceries, children’s clothing and books (but not e-books) are zero rated.
Many middle class French families with young children make an annual trip to the UK to buy their children’s clothes - the savings more than pay for the cost of the trip.
Spending per procedure in the US is also vastly more expensive.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-an-mri-costs-1080-in-america-and-280-in-france/2011/08/25/gIQAVHztoR_blog.html?utm_term=.ceb6fb7c287b
I spent three years in Scotland, and one of the things I noticed was that things I bought out in town generally were marked with the same prices I would have expected back in the States – but in pounds rather than dollars (eg, something I would have expected to pay five dollars for cost five pound). The exchange rate when I first got there was $1.55 to the pound, and it rose to $2.10 before dropping a bit (to around $1.75, I think). So costs ran from 55% more to 110% more than in the States.
It just depends on the country. In many countries, the US has cheaper prices on virtually everything. Some exceptions might include some processed food, vegetables, insurance, rent, health care, utilities, beer, university tuition, trains… Things like gasoline, restaurant meals and middling hotels are usually much pricier.
Partly, too, it might be what is probably called “level of luxury”? For example, except for some real antique hotels in big cities, it’s pretty much a given that a hotel room has its own bathroom in the USA. Hotels with shared facilities down the hall appeared to me to be more common in Europe. Also noted, with a lot of old villages and narrow lanes in cities, bigger vehicles are less common.
Also maybe my imagination, but auto accidents seemed to be a lot less frequent - higher bar to owning a vehicle? Lower speed in the congested cities? Gasoline was about twice as expensive.
It varies greatly, but is never as high as in most European VATs. It’s very rare for total state and local sales tax to be higher than 10%. The only European country with a VAT that low seems to be Switzerland. The rest are all at least in the high teens.
One thing to be aware of when looking at prices is that VAT in the UK (and I believe Europe) is always included in the sticker price. That forever foxes me in the USA when I get ready what I think I owe and the register flags up a higher price.
As for hotels? shared bathrooms are very rare and I travel extensively in the UK and Europe and prices don’t seem massively cheaper. I did do a lot of travel in the USA on the company dollar and off so got well used to hotel costs and I never found the USA a particularly cheap place to get lodgings.
A room in a Holiday Inn express in Munich for 2 adults and 2 kids for a Saturday in June is about £60 including breakfast and all taxes. The same for Orlando on the same day is about £75 but I know that in the USA they normally end up shoving loads of other spurious charges on top of that so I don’t know if that is the final figure. - actually I just checked and sure enough they stick a load of other charges onto that and the final figure would be 108$ or about £88
Yeah, but Orlando and Munich aren’t really a very fair pair of data points. You’d do better with Munich and Pittsburgh or Orlando and Cannes.
On the same date Pittsburgh is about £105 and Cannes doesn’t have one for comparison but Barcelona would be around £80 and San Francisco (which would be a good equivalent to Barcelona) is about £160
In any case, the point was that equivalent quality hotels in Europe haven’t seemed much more expensive to me.
Or Miami and the Curonian Spit.
Before we started traveling to Asia for work, we used to go extensively to Europe (Germany, UK, France, occasionally Switzerland). When our travel department gave us our reservations, they would brag how we would be in a 3 or 3.5 star hotel somewhere, and we used to joke that a 3.5 star hotel in the UK is like a LA 6 (i.e. rating of women). Now that we travel mostly to Asia, we don’t stay in anything less than 5 stars. In NY, a hotel without its own bathroom is something we would call a flophouse.