The US is really really big. People way underestimate how huge it is in terms of land area. You could fit Europe inside the US. So the reason Germany or France underspend the US has more to do with the area they have to cover and the number of people they have in their borders.
The argument is density. Things tend to be cheaper per capita, when density is high.
I don't buy it thought. I think the reason why the spend is less in Europe is due to higher salary equality - good people take job in government because the salary is only 50% higher in private sector (for tech, even less for other areas).
There are only a couple of US states less dense than e.g. Norway, and even in those states the vast majority of the population live in small, higher density areas.
The areas where the vast majority of Americans actually live are fairly high density.
Some cost might come down to density, but not much.
I'm guessing the poster was thinking of "Europe" as more like "the EU" or "Europe minus Russia"; 1.1 million of Russia's 6.6 million square miles are part of Europe's 3.93; take it away, and "Europe" drops to more like 2.8 million square miles, a smidge less than the contiguous US.
Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation? Alaska still isn’t quite enough to push the US up, but it’s good for another 20%-ish increase in land area over the contiguous number.
>Why would you ignore the largest state in that land area calculation?
As a non-contiguous later addition, with a small population, where statistically nobody lives there per sq mile, and is not pertinent to the discussion of population density as related to infrastructure problems?
Except in what's holding US bureucratic efficiency down (what we were discussing), and requires spending inflated federal budgets for little returns, Alaska is a big factor relative to its size...
