And most of that money goes to higher food prices, health insurance and cars.

No, it really doesn't.

PPP-adjusted disposable income per capita (meaning, after all the necessary expenses) is by far the highest in the world: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di...

Food spending as a portion of total expenditure is the lowest in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...

Out of pocket health care expenditure as a share of GDP per capita is fairly low in comparison with other wealthy nations. Of European nations, only Monaco, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France are lower (and not by much!).

Transportation spending is indeed higher in the US than most of the developed world, but it doesn't eat away much at the increased disposable income per capita -- proportionate to household income we're talking about a few thousand dollars higher, and most of that is a very recent development as costs went way up over the last few years.

And yet we have the highest disposable income in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

>The (average) income is therefore calculated according to the Atlas method from the quotient of the gross national income and the population of the country.

Ah yeah, surely that doesn't get insanely screwed up by America's near top of the list inequality?

The average salary for 9 homeless people and 1 CEO is $100k! Americans are definitely better off than Europe!

I mean, the same is true of median income as well. People overestimate how much inequality affects the actual end numbers in the US. The median incomes in the poorest US states are still higher than most of the world.

West Virginia has a higher median salary than the United Kingdom.