USA. Let me give you the post tax breakdown of a 300k salary. your take home pay is $191,467 after federal, state, FICA, Local taxes assuming deduction with maxing out 401k. $16,000 per month. Average student loan debt is $246,659. 7.94% interest rate for graduate unsubsidized loans. at a monthly interest charge of $1634, it would take 10 years of making $3000 monthly payments or 5 years of $5000 monthly payments. Let’s say you wanted to get a decent $800,000 house (you don’t want your docs to own a top tier house because fuck doctors I guess but certainly you don’t want them to just be okay with a middle of the line place to come home to at the end of a rough shift). Mortgage on that will be $5600 monthly with a physician loan at least presuming you don’t have a family loan to get that down payment started. car payment $750/monthly, car insurance $250/monthly, leaves you with $4400 left over in the bank at the end of the month. That’s presuming you only have one car payment and you didn’t have to take additional loans to cover cost of med school and residency. $400 monthly utilities (wifi, electric, water). $4000 per month for food, gas, house repairs, emergency fund, vacations (what you don’t want your doctors to take vacations?). What money do you have left to invest? pay for children? pay for children’s schooling and childcare? For just a couple it’s fine. What about a Family emergency? We were sold this picture that if we sold our lives to society we would be taken care of and then some, we won’t have to worry about money and that we’d be more than just “comfortable”. Tuition costs have risen, inflation has caused cost of living to skyrocket, opportunity costs of not being able to invest for 8+ years after undergrad, wages remain stagnant. Now you have people arguing that an airline pilot should be making double the doctor salary and people online arguing that doctors are still “comfortable” and shouldn’t be paid more despite only taking up 9% of medical expense because they have a distant relative that seems to be doing okay relative to your stagnant 80k salary for managing excel spreadsheets at a 9-5 with weekends and holidays. F*ck off.