Your government spends billions of dollars on wildly unsuccessful defense projects while at the same time arguing the there's no way to deal with poverty, access to education, homelessness, etc. By cutting back on defence spending, the US could still remain the most powerful military nation in the world and guarantee that every citizen gets a quality education and spends their lives healthy and well maintained. Instead, you insist on going trillions of dollars in debt and then complaining that the poor aren't paying their fair share while the people with so much wealth that it's literally impossible to comprehend use every loophole in the book to avoid paying anything at all. Warren Buffet himself has commented on how he pays less tax than his secretary does.
Meanwhile, your entire government is bought and run by corporations and lobby groups; because money runs the campaigns and the person with the most money wins, elected officials spend a huge portion of their time "in office" not serving their country, their electorate, or even their benefactors, in favour of travelling around, having meetings and dinners and fundraisers, so that they can ensure they get elected again. If you court the right interests then not only will they help pay for you to get re-elected over and over, when you're done with public life they'll offer you a consultancy position where you can make further millions for years convincing your old friends who are still in office to vote the way you want them to because you're old friends.
The entire US system, is, to much of the rest of the world, a farce made manifest. Many of us fail to understand how your populace even got into such ridiculous circumstances, let alone continues to tolerate them year after year.
To claim that someone overseas should pay thousands of euros to tell the US government that they owe no tax while millionaires are using fully legal loopholes that their rich congressional friends refuse to close to shirk millions of dollars of taxes is patently ridiculous.
Fix your system to stop exploiting the poor and giving rights, privileges, and power to the rich elite and you can claim that your system is the envy of the world.
And as for 'how it got that way'? Years and years of economic growth on the backs of slaves imported from Africa certainly helped. Being able to bootstrap your economy by cutting out the business owner's largest expense is certainly an effective way of getting ahead.
