[aguaviva]

Perhaps it may be more instructive to look at not just the past 2 years, in which there's been a global mini-recession (due largely to the Ukraine war) - and more broadly, how Germany has been doing compared to other countries over longer time periods?

According to these two graphs, German GDP fluctuations are pretty evenly matched with those of the US (and in some years, such ast 2016-2017 they did significantly better than the US):

https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth-annual

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

Germany has been hit worst in the past 2 years, but there's an extremely obvious reason for that -- again, largely due to the war. Not because of the country's social system or how it manages healthcare or fuel prices.

They're awful.

True, but (1) only in the last 10 years, and (2) Germany's "awful" is still an order of magnitude better than the land-based public transit system most anywhere in the US.

Go back 20 years - Germany's train system positively rocked, while the US was still going around invading random countries for no particular reason other than to distract its population from its decaying infrastructure, rising inequality and its own slow drift toward fascism.