@kaia i'm not so sure about that, rent is very hard to think about just because the US is so huge and diverse, and groceries can be very cheap (costco, walmart) (also, at least according to this, it's not that different from 'rich europe' https://commodity.com/blog/food-prices/).

I think that the US and americans in general are meaningfully richer than EU-europeans, but it's hard to bake it all into one number that can be compared. For example, average food expenses are higher in france than in germany, but not necessarily because of higher prices for basic goods, but because the french care more about good food than germans.