US versus Australian mine manager salaries

Let’s talk philosophy for a moment – from not just 60,000 feet, but higher, such as 200,000 feet. The USA is fundamentally very different than AUS or the UK or the rest of EUROPE. For example, those millions and millions of acres of recreation land we have. But even more than that, we have the opportunity to own beautiful pieces of private property in rural areas, sometimes in mountains like the Rockies, or the Ozarks, or the Applachians, etc, and there is a tremendous variety of cost to those properties, some very nice places that cost less than $100k. Most of us live near the mine sites in smaller towns where we have a very different lifestyle than the people of Perth, Sydney, New York, Chicago, SanDiego, or even Phoenix. These smaller towns often have small but still very real universities, plenty of quality resturaunts, sports bars, and pubs, decent hospitals and plenty of dentists, and often have places for outdoor recreation that can be reached in the evening after work, and very easily on the weekends, and still small but much larger towns usually not more than 2 hrs drive time away. The kids have lots of things to do including athletic activities with their schools, swimming pools, and more video game rooms than they need. Gents from outside the USA, even to some extent our neighbors in Canada, don’t quite understand the intrinsic value of all that.

I once worked with a PhD who was ‘educated’ at Oxford University, this was in Detroit, and he was completely unaware that Michigan had wild animals such as coyote. Uh, Michigan is nearly the size of the UK, and there is everything including Elk, Moose, 700 lb Black Bears, an estimated population size of 800,000 white tail deer (about 200 lbs), 150 lb wolves, 200 lb mountain lions, and 12,000 lakes we call inland lakes – as opposed to the Great Lakes on which 10s of 1000s of ocean-going ships travel each year to reach the grain storage facilities in Minnesota and other major cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, etc. I own 30 acres in a beautiful rural area, at the end of the road which means I have privacy, and the cost of this land with a large but simple home is $90,000.

Google up some info on Marquette, Michigan, with iron mines nearby, Silver City, New Mexico, with copper mines nearby, and Show Low, Arizona, where people from Tucson and Phoenix drive just 3 hrs for weekend get-aways and buy retirement homes, again, at widely varying cost. Take a look at Elcho, Nevada and the surrounding attractions. We have some of our largest coal mines just 2 hours drive time from the Black HIlls and the Bighorn Mountains in the west, and many coal miners live right in the beautiful Appalachians in the east. Some of us are less than 2 hrs drive time from Las Vegas many others are less than 2 hrs flight time to ‘Vegas’, yet we live in those aforementioned smaller towns close to the mine sites. This is why you see us with our pickups and big suvs – we use them to pull our boats and jet-skis and snowmobiles and quads around to all these places of outdoor recreation. There is no doubt within the USA a vast difference between the urban dwellers of the bigger cities and those of us who work and live in rural america – we built this nation and they ride our coattails, and we will NOT be turned into another Europe just because the under-educated from Oxford and Harvard universities have no clue what the USA is all about. We are NOT subjects of the global bankers and global merchants of London and New York – we never were and we never will be – learn something?

Cost of living in Australia is very high compared to US. I’m from Canada but living in Perth. Compared to Toronto, cost of living is about 30% more on average. Some cities are considerably more (Sydney and Melbourne for example). If you use Perth WA and Tucson AZ as a comparative, rents are 40% lower, groceries 25% lower and entertainment (restaurant, movies, etc) 55% in a mid sized US city compared to Australia. To buy an average 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom house in a Perth middle class suburb is between AUD$800k and 1.2M + stamp duty ( a tax on the sale of the property whihc can be about 75K for a $1M home). Average mortgage rate here is about 6.5%. The salaries sure look nice but on average the cost of living is way higher. Check out http://www.numbeo.com for a cost of living comparision.