We’ve Confused the Receipt With the Result

Spending isn’t the problem in America. Not in healthcare, education, infrastructure, or housing.

There’s a perversion at the heart of American exceptionalism. We’ve rotted our own brains, conning ourselves into believing that cost is the same as value.

It started with consumer goods. We’ve built a culture that respects a Louis Vuitton purse or a luxury car almost exclusively because of its price. We respect the cost over the quality, the longevity, or the efficiency. Often, the build quality is shittier than a cheaper brand, but that doesn’t matter. The entire point is projecting wealth. The value isn’t in the item; the value is that it cost a lot of money.

We don’t worship the product; we worship the price tag. And this sickness has infected every part of our society.

Look at our healthcare system. We have, by far, the most expensive healthcare system on the planet. Any time someone questions its efficacy—pointing to our abysmal life expectancy or maternal mortality rates—the defenders pivot. They’ll find one niche stat about cancer treatments and then implicitly point to the spending as a feature, not a bug. The sheer, outlandish cost is internalized as proof of our exceptionalism.

We deliver shitty coverage, shitty quality, and healthcare deserts, but because the receipt says “$14,000 per person,” we tell ourselves it must be the best.

This is how the con works. We’ve substituted spending for results.

Everything about “how great America is” these days is tied to big, abstract numbers: our GDP per capita, our growth rates, our “outlandish spending.” We don’t measure our success by the results delivered to the hundreds of millions of Americans in the bottom 80%. We just point to the big number on the board and declare victory.

This is why politicians sell us on transformational change by shouting about the price tag.

The Joe Biden era is a masterclass in this. The CHIPS Act, the IRA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the American Rescue Plan—they were all heralded as “transformational” and “generational” achievements simply because of their spending levels.

They held the press conferences. They gave the speeches. They passed bills with huge, impressive-sounding budgets.

But they didn’t do the work to ensure that anything useful got produced with that spending.

Take the CHIPS Act. Intel’s Ohio plant was announced with great fanfare in 2022—production would begin in 2025, they promised. Two years later, the timeline slipped to late 2026. Then it slipped again to potentially 2029 or 2030. Intel’s federal grant was actually reduced because of the delays and failures to deliver. TSMC’s Arizona facility started as a $12 billion project that would produce chips by the end of 2024. Now it’s a $65 billion project with production delayed to 2027-2028. Five major suppliers to these plants decided it was cheaper to just keep shipping materials from Asia than build American factories.

The victory lap wasn’t about any of this. The victory lap was about passing the bill.

Or look at EV chargers. $7.5 billion allocated. Goal: 500,000 chargers by 2030. Two years after the bill passed, federal money had built exactly eight charging stations. Eight. By the end of 2024, they’d managed 44 stations across 12 states. But when questioned, the administration pointed to 200,000 total public charging ports—the vast majority built by the private sector—and claimed credit for their spending.

High-speed rail? We announced billions for rail projects. We did corridor planning. We had press conferences. But we still haven’t built a single mile of true high-speed rail with infrastructure bill money. The two projects under construction—California and Brightline West—predate the bill entirely and won’t be operational until 2030 at the earliest.

When spending becomes the only metric, there is no accountability for delivery. Just pass the big bill. If nothing happens, well, at least we invested in America. The money went somewhere, right? Who’s gonna follow up in three years to count the factories or measure the outcomes?

Politicians learned they can campaign on “I delivered a trillion-dollar investment” without ever having to answer for what that money actually built. By the time the failures are obvious, they’re running for a different office or the news cycle has moved on.

It wasn’t always this way.

When we were doing things that mattered, we were impressed by production, not just spending. The Arsenal of Democracy, the New Deal, the TVA—their greatness was tied to results. We were impressed by building 40,000 miles of Interstate highway, not by spending $100 million.

We used to think American exceptionalism meant we could do more with less, build faster, and innovate better. Now, it just means we spend more than everyone else and call that achievement.

Real exceptionalism would be covering everyone for half the cost with better outcomes. Real exceptionalism would be building that subway for a tenth of what we’re spending.

Real exceptionalism is results. We’ve settled for receipts.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Corbin Trent