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The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
The US skilled working class (anyone above a call center worker, really) have higher QOL than any comparable workers elsewhere in the world except a handful of small rich European states like Norway, Denmark and Switzerland (Americans often still earn more, but one can reasonably argue the latter countries have superior QOL, are higher trust, have a better safety net, more vacation time etc).
What income do you figure being skilled working class begins at? Moving from the US to Europe in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more) was an almost straight QoL increase for me - better transport and other public infrastructure, cleaner and safer streets, better food, higher quality housing, better healthcare, more recreation options. The downsides were that housing is smaller by floor area, grocery stores are not open 24/7, and carsharing services are rare and clunky. I live(d) in countries that are not quite in your list of uncommonly rich, but near the top of "normal" Europe.
(If your experience is mostly with the UK, I guess I could see you seeing the US as being vastly superior in QoL? My memory of the UK after doing undergrad there is as a land of a thousand small gratuitous and avoidable inconveniences, like the split hot/cold taps. Do people still have those?)
The going rate for entry-level skilled work right now is around $18/hr in my cheap-by-tier-one-city-standards metro. That's slightly under $3k/mo, which is not enough to rent your own apartment- although you can probably rent a mother in law suite on someone else's house for that, and you can definitely rent a bedroom either in a house or in a larger apartment.
The difference is, people making that in America are starting at the bottom of their chosen profession. They can make significantly more within a few years. In most of Europe I'm given to understand that this is not the case.
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