People want to find these grand narratives. But if you actually look into the data, the real cost are actually mostly related to health care, car ownership and housing police (or city/town planning).

If the US fixed its city planning, stopped pushing every family to have many cars and managed its health care system with even minimal efficiency the data would look much different.

Offshoring is a bad argument, because that has happened in many places to a large extent and the results are not that American.