Alright, I need to clear some things up because I wasn't specific enough in my initial post. My apologies.
The figures I listed were the Median equivalized disposable household incomes for the U.S. and Germany in PPP format. What they show is the median annual income of a citizen in each country after adjusting for the difference in the price level of goods in the countries to make them equal to each other and after subtracting taxes and mandatory contributions. Generally, non-cash income such as government provided health insurance and education is not included. Private health insurance cost U.S. citizens $1300 per household when this data was collected, so if you assume the average household contained two people (an almost certain underestimate), you would subtract $650 from the figure for the U.S. to get a Median equivalized annual income (PPP) of $26,022 in the U.S. and $20,337 in Germany. This would leave the "average" U.S. citizen with over $5,000 more annual income to buy goods and services at the same exact price the "average" German would be paying for them.
The amount of income a person has to buy any goods and services with is a well established measure for "standard of living". Of course, there are other things that may affect a person's standard of living such as: crime rates where they live, the quality of the air they breath daily, the laws regulating what they are able to do and what they aren't, the culture within which they live and how it agrees with their own personality and ideas, etc. But in terms of being able to afford physical goods and services to improve ones life, the data clearly shows Americans have it better than Germans.
The reason I have chosen to focus on the ability to purchase goods and services in forming my counter argument to the OP of this thread is because it was the only aspect of the "standard of living" of a person implied. When you juxtapose the ability to buy healthcare with having a high standard of living, and then claim another group of people are struggling, you are leading the reader to infer that that group of people must not be able to afford healthcare and must not therefore have a high standard of living because of this lack of ability to afford physical goods and services.
"Maybe because median is not average."
Context. The "average" person is better represented by the median of a data set, not the mean of it.
"Actually, it's impressive how much free stuff and security Germans get for only 6k less PPP."
The data can be further refined by subtracting from the U.S.'s figure the costs that the German's have already subtracted through taxes, but I highly doubt it would cause a reversal given healthcare is most likely the greatest benefit the German's receive and it only cost American's $1,300 per HOUSEHOLD to obtain it and this data is per capita (meaning the exact subtraction would be a fraction of that).
"Manwe, Germany PPP is 48,260
While US PPP is 56,430
At least according to google."
Those are GDP figures, not personal disposable income, sorry for the confusion.
"@Manwe_Sulimo: source for stats? I'm not exactly sure what "median PPP per capita" means since that could be calculated many different ways. Of course "median" and "average" are different statistically, so maybe not comparable terms here."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
"Regardless, PPP only measures income, and does nothing to consider health care costs. If you consider Americans pay over $9K a year on average for health care and Germans pay a little over $5K a year, that wipes out most of that difference. See: http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0006_health-care-oecd."
The BLS reported that U.S. citizens spent per capita $2,977 on health insurance in 2015,and that is much more in line with the $1,300 reported for 2004 cited in the article. The $9k figure in the source you cited most likely covers far more expenses than just health insurance and probably includes the costs of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. With costs such as those, taxes have already been deducted from the equivalized median disposable income (PPP) and would not be deducted a second time.
"Americans get $14.90/hour and Germans $14.83/hour, basically the same rate."
It's not the same rate because the prices of goods and services in the countries differ, thus the need for the PPP. You also have the problem that a huge percentage of jobs are purely salaried, and have no hourly wage. Additionally, I suspect those are averages and highly distorted by large incomes, making their relevance to the "average" person indiscernible.
"Apparently Germans just value leisure time more than Americans."
This is a very good observation. Differences in the amount of time worked would cause differences in the incomes of the two groups of people. It is another aspect in determining the "standard of living" people have, but does not change the fact that Americans can afford more physical goods and services with their incomes.
"If you look at the big mac index, the average big mac is 3.97 USD in Germany and 5.01 USD in the USA. Burgernomics is of course not a reliable way to calculate PPP."
It has been reliably used in an informal way for decades. Regardless, it was not the method for adjusting prices used in this study. The conversion rates were taken from the OECD database.
Conditions for going CD
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