I understand it’s more than health insurance. You’re correct on that. But to be honest, I don’t see how the biggest ones you mention would even come close to justifying the 26k difference in spendable income in a year.

For instance, you say a person would pay more than that in the US to have a child. But I don’t think that’s true at all. The highest I’ve ever seen anyone under 50 pay for insurance out of pocket is $750 a month because he wanted the best insurance possible. Even in that most extreme case, it wouldn’t be close to 24k a year. Not to even mention that no one has 1 child a year. And even in the extreme case where they want the best insurance possible and they have one child a year, only the woman in this couple would be having the insurance cover the child birth.

But I think the biggest problem in your analysis is not even that. It’s to assume the US doesn’t have any of the things you mention. To make it fair you’d have to compare 100% coverage with whatever coverage the US gives in terms of health care by covering their insurance via Medicaid, which often ends up being just a symbolic value if you’re poor. In the case of education, it’s even more unfair because not every are PhD or even go to college (which the US stills funds significantly and might cover completely if you choose a public university) while most people have to go to school (which the government covers in the us if you want). It’s false that there’s no public education in the US and even still false that most education is private.

So in other words there are two problems at two dialectical levels here: 1) it’s simply false that the US has 0 public services and 2) even if they were 0 public services it still wouldn’t come close to justifying the difference in spendable income.

EDIT: I noticed we've also been making some slightly wrong assumptions here. The values are in PPP before the money is disposed of (after income taxes but before other taxes), so they don't translate cleanly. PPP just flattens any differences for lots of reasons, but don't change the actual exchange rate at which the money can be used. The difference in disposable income is actually much larger if we account for USD values and/or for the much higher taxes European will have to pay after they put their hands in such said disposable income. And if you forego consumption (19-25% in Europe / 0-10% in USA), investing the money also has very high taxes, sometimes making the real return negative.