Is academia underpaid in the US?

For most skilled jobs, the US have higher salaries than pretty much everywhere else in the world across the board. Sometimes the gap is massive at least for gross amounts, especially in tech.

But academia seems to be a major exception. PhD stipends are ridiculous and barely allow students to scrape by. Postdoc salaries vary a lot but most of the positions I've come across were in the range of $45k-$60k. I guess you can live relatively comfortably in most of the US with that, but it's peanuts compared to what you'd get in the industry, and about the same as what you'd get in a country like Germany - not to mention Switzerland where postdocs usually start from $80k and can go up to $100k in the best institutions.

You never get rich anywhere in academia - but in other countries academia seems to be less underpaid compared to non-academia.

Given the amount of debt so many grad students in the US get themselves into, it really doesn't seem worth it. Granted, US academia can be the gateway for top paying non-academic jobs, and you can make good money in tenure track positions, but those are hard to come by.

Is there something I'm missing here?