Europe

Sounds like less of a tax problem and more of a things are to expensive problem.

I believe it's both problems... because 40% of your income in taxes it a lot, if that value was around 20% people would be able to live much better.

Or government needs to regulate more problem and you have corrupt politicians.

Yes, a lot of corrupt politicians.

All these companies are profitable right? Then they can pay more.

Most of them (at least on energy, transportation, basic utilities, etc.) where public companies that got privatized because they went into debt and the govt couldn't manage the abyss anymore. Those companies may show some profits and usually pay a bit over the average eg. so you may get to the 30k range if you've a masters engineering degree or something higher education but not much else.

Even at that level it's kind of hard, if you pay an employee 2.5k/month gross he will get a net of 1.9k/month. if you scale to 3k/month gross = 2.1k/month net. As you can see it's hard to increase wages because you get run over by taxes. Bigger companies usually get around this by renting cars for employees and giving our a few other benefits that while may be helpful completely hinder the ability for families to grow and save some money.

When you're required to pay an extra 500€/month so the employee gets just an extra 200€ you've to go get that money from somewhere and somewhere is the market... so prices raise and people can't afford the stuff they need etc. etc.

Meanwhile the majority of the population works for small companies that are barely surviving drowning in debt and trying to comply with all the stupid legal requirements in place. People here make way less and work more overtime.