Europe pulled a good one on us […]

No, we did that to ourselves, by always cutting taxes instead of raising them to pay for things that are public goods, like single-payer health care, public transportation, public education, and so on. Our taxes are too low, and as a result we pay far, far more for the same things as private services rather than public. You can complain that the gov’t is inefficient, but there’s no profit; profit takes a far bigger bite than waste, inefficiency, and fraud does.