If you ever go outside of the US it is shocking how much other countries do with so little. Countires with a tenth of our population and an even smaller fraction of our GDP have cheap, efficient, high quality health care systems and clean, convenient public transportation. They have well equipped classrooms with teachers who don't have to work two jobs to get by. They have highly skilled police forces whose training is measured in years, not weeks. These countries are not perfect, but they seem to govern far nore effectively than the richest country on that planet. I'm not even talking about an idealized Europe; some southeast asian countries are like this too.

So yeah, where is the money going? When you combine state, local, and federal, the US spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on education (more than our military!) but where does it go? We regularly churn out illiterate graduates and teachers have to commute from another state away in order to find somewhere affordable to live. We spend more money per capita on healthcare than anyone else in the world for worse coverage and worse outcomes.

I hypothesize that the dollar's status as the world reserve currency is actually a bad thing. It makes it cheap for us to borrow money and as a result encourages all kinds of social pathologies associated with ZIRP