Only US healthcare is an outlier in costs among OECD countries. Housing, food, etc., costs are similar.
Do you mean pre-college? In which case the US spends more per pupil than OECD average by quite a bit.
If you mean college, then most OECD countries have nowhere the number of people in college as the US. And there are ample cheap local colleges in the US - people choose more costly ones because they can.
>healthcare
Yep, I stated that one. We're about twice the per capita cost as OECD countries. That cost is spread through the system, including doctor and nurse salaries being quite a bit higher. This is likely due to Baumol's Cost Disease, since almost all higher skilled jobs in the US pay about twice OECD countries. So to drive our cost to OECD levels, you'd need to mandate locally low salaries for doctors and nurses, which would result in lower quality care.
I'm not sure what a solution is here, but it's highly nontrivial.
>transportation
Gas far cheaper in the US than OECD average, and likely cheaper than most if not all OECD countries. Or did you mean in city busses? In which case ours are similar. Or did you mean metro tickets? Again, same cost. Or are you talking about intra-city routes, in which case again we're similar costs.
Please clarify with data.
>not to mention bad public services...
All depends on where you live. To compare the US (by area and population) to somewhere else, you'd need to include the entire EU, or all of OECD, in which case you're adding places with terrible services.
If you want to pick small, nice countries, then pick small, nice states, and again, very similar.
The bureaucracy of billing in the US is something magical that somehow manages to be worse in outcome and number of people involved than French bureaucracy (and the bar is high in terms of badness)
A 1 bedroom in my immediate are rents for @1800/month. Go 5 miles down the road and the same space rents for $1000-1200/month. Differences? "Desirability" "newness" "better schools (which makes no sense if you don't have kids" "atmosphere (I read everyone looks like me)"
You can go into some older areas of the city and find rents below $800/month.
Perhaps because “you” value morals other than “make the most money I possibly can”? Or you want to provide housing that’s affordable by those who do the blue collar, nearly-minimum-wage work that powers our modern cities?
Profit isn’t everything. I’ll even go so far as to say that the current expectation to get “maximum profits at any cost” is a (“The”?) driving factor in the problems we lament in our society.
Let's consider why older housing is so much cheaper for a second.. Property tax isn't recalculated until you update the building or rebuild on the property. So it's a huge disincentive to ever change any buildings, split lots, etc.
$800/m is still precarious for roughly twice minimum wage. Food is also more expensive and harder to get to in less upscale areas of most cities.
Suffice it to say, these situations are far more common in cities than the ones you've described.