[soulofmischief]

The US citizen sees a fraction of their tax dollar ever actually reach the ground. The rest gets caught up in people's pockets on the way down. We would need to adjust for this but it's unclear how to create a heuristic.

[_jal]

Do you have evidence that there's more friction/graft in the US than, say, Finland?

[pavlov]

There's the established Corruption Perceptions Index published annually by Transparency International:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Finland is ranked #3 while US is #22.

[yokaze]

The keyword here is "perception". I am not convinced that the perception is deserved.

[soulofmischief]

I don't, because I don't know how to calculate it. Like I said, we need a heuristic but I don't know how to go about it. But it's an important qualifier when we're trying to isolate this problem to just the economics of solving homelessness.