Disclaimer: I could be wrong on a lot of things but these are my thoughts on why America is like this. This is in no way particular order of the most important factors.
- People still cling to the American Dream
Basically, in the early to middle 1900s, anyone that wanted a minimum wage job could just go in there and ask for it, and you'd get it. It didn't matter what your education was, your background, if you wanted to work, you could work. Heck, you could get a factory job even if you were illiterate and make enough for yourself. Then, minimum wage sustained a family of 5 in a house and could take vacations. College was affordable, housing prices were reasonable, stuff like that. That is the American dream. You can be anyone from anywhere, and if you put in hard and honest work, you could make your path in America, marry someone and have kids without worrying about feeding them. The problem is, that doesn't work anymore. Companies require you to have a lot of experience with that topic, even for some entry-level jobs. But the fact that people still believe in it prevents more helpful measures like lowering the cost of college or healthcare or raising minimum wage, etc. etc.
- Cost of living problems
Wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living in the US. Fairly straightforwardly, the government needs money, so they print some money, injects it into the economy, helps it go, and so on and so forth. The problem is, companies point at that like “oooh scary inflation” and they jack the prices up way more under the guise of keeping profits steady with inflation. This leads us to the next point, Corporate Greed.
- Businesses will squeeze money out of people no matter what
Long story short, companies don't care out the standard of living of the average person. Supply in demand but they restrict supply to drive up the price and sell it to the highest bidder. This applies to people willing to take increased prices at the supermarket to housing. Every price you see is the maximum people are willing to pay, and then the rest of us are forced to pay that same amount. You may think “Oh that's just supply and demand, of course they want to turn a profit) but also it means they can have bad products for the same price because people are willing to pay it and people can't get a good product for a reasonable price. We either get bad quality or crazy prices. Along with this, business will go as low as people will take in prices. This is especially bad in America because people will just kind of take this because they don't have an alternative.
- People can't afford to strike
Simple as that. People would love to strike for better wages, affordable healthcare, a reasonable cost of living, stuff like that. The problem is, a large group, if not the majority of people that have cause to strike won't be able to afford just staying alive because the corporations will likely get propped up by the government and the government and highly militarized police force can put the strike down by force if they choose to. Along with this, there's another problem that's inherent with individualism.
- There just isn't coordination between the people willing to strike
There is a chance, a hope, if you will, that if we all work together and fight for our rights then we can win. The problem is, we can't coordinate supply lines. We can't afford to keep millions fed and clothed and give them the things needed to survive waiting out the corporations. We might be able to give money and food to those in need, but American freedom really just means individualism. Individualism isn't exactly a recipe for coordination across large areas, like what would be needed for a large scale strike. It's simply not feasible at the moment or anything soon for us to rise up and take to the streets. Sure, you're making a bold statement against the corporations that will lose billions, but you have people to take care of, if not you, then other would-be strikers. There simply isn't the community built to take care of everyone in America like there was in Europe.
- America is the World Police
This means that a large amount of taxpayer money is dedicated to stopping the likes of China and Russia from freely expanding. Before the Ukraine war, much of the European countries of NATO didn't meet their defense budget requirements, meaning the US had to defend the countries by itself. If we defund the military in any major way, that leaves us vulnerable against foreign aggression and encroachment on spheres of influence. Europe got built practically from the ground up by the Marshall Plan after WW2 and even after that, Europe didn't have to worry as much about defense because of American guarantees whilst America had to hold both the Pacific, Europe, do interventions across the world, supporting governments and all that Cold War stuff. This all kind of gave the Europeans a better starting point, so to say, socioeconomically and let them focus on programs like healthcare. But the point is, America kind of had to hold the Western world together. Granted, Europe is doing a better job now with their defense, but the position of world guarantor still was the role America had to fill. This makes America have to spend a massive part of the government budget on defense. They didn't have to just defend themselves. They had to defend everyone.
- Reaganomics
It's a pretty bad system that caused tons of debt, lowered taxes, increased GDP spending, etc. etc. Granted, at the time this was all well and good, it reduced poverty, but the problem was that the rich people just kept getting richer. Now people are trying to apply a 40 year old system to a very different time, with bad effects on inequality and now, standard of living. The money didn't trickle down, the rich just made their share of the money that was meant to trickle down stay in their ever expanding cup.
Anyway, that's my summaries of things on why America is like this. Also conservatives freak out whenever they hear of any idea from the left whenever it sounds like it will benefit people and call them communists or whatever instead of working together to solve major problems. This thing has kind of been all over the place, and you could probably learn more about these topics somewhere. Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something.