Grass is always greener on the other side. Trust me there is plenty of waste of tax money in the nordics too. Recent example. Every month the govt pays 4 million dollars for a healthcare journaling system that is not used (because it does not work). And that is just the on going cost (even more was spent building it).

Or a school admin system built for 100 million dollars and crap. They even spent a lot of money trying to prevent a open source client that solved a lot of the issues they had.

Maybe in absolute money it is less than the US. But remember US also have a lot more people.