[munk-a]

That's quite possible. Americans also lose a lot of money unnecessarily to utilities (the cellphone bills are ridiculous) and keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses like a starbucks a day. I think it's pretty hard to distinguish those costs as we can see similar or higher standards of living elsewhere - but I do think the out of pocket expenses hurt a lot (and they hurt even more when you stop drawing an income - retiring in the states is a huge gamble).

[inter_netuser]

Starbucks and fastfood, etc, I don't see it as keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses.

I feel in the US there is a lot of subconscious decision making that's essentially about buying more time with money, but in an actual monetary transaction as opposed to some implicit trade off. They seem to be chronically starved for time.