I spent half my life in America, half in four other countries.

America is quite different from most developed countries.

For example I have known at least two people and likely four who simply died on the street for lack of money. (There are two missing who were homeless last time I heard of them, late in 2019.)

In my thirty years there, I saw officers openly take bribes. I saw them beat Black people into unconsciousness simply for not showing enough respect. For years I lived next door to a cocaine club that ran from midnight to dawn. Even though the police were there several times a week to break up fights, each time I went to complain I was told the place had been closed for years.

After Hurricane Sandy, my local subway line was underwater for a couple of days. It took them seven years to start fixing the structural damage that this caused.

I now live in Amsterdam. This is a city built on mud and history. They tried to build a new subway line from South to North - a long tunnel with eight new stops -- and run into terrible issues. At one point, a whole district sank a quarter inch in a month and they stopped construction for two years to see if it would continue.

It finally got completed, years later, over budget. Of course, it works really well, but it's been considered a bit of a disaster. Nearly all the cost was the tunnelling, of course.

In New York City at around the same it cost more money to build a single PATH train stop (PATH is one of the two independent "subway" systems that the NYC area has) - a stop which already had its own tunnel.

This includes a 180 meter passageway that cost $225 million dollars to build, the most expensive passageway in the world. $335 million was wasted because the rival subway system, the MTA, did not want to slightly inconvenience a small number Staten Island passengers (the smallest of the five boroughs which pays almost no taxes but has a massive input into everything because of broken voting systems and political corruption).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_station_(PATH)#West_Concourse

It's all graft. The money is simply stolen from the taxpayers.

There are many discussions of why US construction is so expensive in the literature.

They all seem to share two properties - the idea that this might be graft or corruption is simply never mentioned at all, and none of these articles actually presents any reason why it might be so.

The US spent $20 trillion dollars on warfare in my lifetime. That's an inconceivably huge amount of money.

You live in Estonia (and speak a Finno-Ugric language, how cool!)

I'm sure you know this, but the GDP is all economic activity that occurs in a country - every vegetable grown, every teacher paid, every newspaper purchased, everything.

Estonia had the highest GDP in its history last year - congratulations!

Now imagine you took all that GDP - every single thing Estonians do for money - and then spent that on warfare.

Now do that for seven hundred years.

All the money that Estonia made in its best year yet, times seven hundred years. That's how much money the US has spent on warfare in my lifetime.

The US "Defense" Department is literally the largest project humans have ever undertaken.

And they've lost every damn war.

For that money, we could easily have saved humanity from the climate catastrophe. Instead, we burn.

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Let me add that your unsourced story about burnt out cars in Stockholm is completely false.

Stockholm and Sweden are incredibly safe places.

The United States has five times the murder rate, and comparably higher rates of every single crime. There are cities in the United States that have twenty times the murder rate of Stockholm!

(I would also add that Estonia has over twice the crime rate that Sweden has in pretty well every category.)

Like all countries in the world, there has been violent crime in Sweden, and clashes between different groups there, but year after year after year after year, if you are a law-abiding citizen in Sweden, you and your property are in one of the very safest countries in the whole world.

So knock off these base lies. You undermine the value of your whole article by printing such a ridiculous falsehood, one that everyone associates with the worst MAGA alt-right idiots.