These are all major, but not the biggest, cities in their respective country. I'm not saying they are representative (for what, anyway). You'll find major cities that are much more expensive (eg Munich) or cheaper.
As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
OK, let's do some of them, say Poznan (because I'm most familiar with it). It's hard to find median household income figures in Poznan, but you can find that average individual income in it is 22000 EUR/year, and average household income typically is something like 150% of average individual income, so let's take average household income in Poznan to be 33k EUR/year, or 16.5 EUR/hour. This gives us 120 hours/square meter, which is comparable to Seattle.
However, this becomes much worse if you look at after-tax situation. In Poland, at this pay range, your effective tax rate is 27%, whereas in Seattle it's 16%, and you have to then apply 23% VAT to your purchases, compared to 10% sales tax in Seattle.
> As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
What specifically does it disagree about? It is well known that the effective tax rate on lower half of the population is much lower in US than in almost all of Europe, as my example comparison between US and Poland or France shows. In Europe, the middle class pays the bulk of the tax burden, whereas in US, taxation is much more progressive, and it is the wealthy who pay most of the tax.
Marseille: 4300 EUR
Birmingham: 3000 GBP
Bremen: 3000 EUR
Liege: 3000 EUR
Antwerp: 2500 EUR
València: 2200 EUR
Poznan: 2000 EUR
These are all major, but not the biggest, cities in their respective country. I'm not saying they are representative (for what, anyway). You'll find major cities that are much more expensive (eg Munich) or cheaper.
As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/france/individual/taxes-on-pers...
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/taxes-on-per...