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Notes -
That's certainly the traditional critique, but I'm not sure it holds up. And by not sure I mean I'm sure it doesn't. The US' finances are unusually messy for a wealthy developed country. The US has a debt-to-GDP ratio of approximately 120%. Pretty bad, though our northern adversary and former overlord both hover around 100%, so maybe it's just an Anglosphere thing. Or maybe not, since Australia's is ~50%.
Conversely, the 'give-away' heavy democracies of Europe (e.g. the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Belgium) broadly have better public finances than the US in terms of both debt and deficit (some actually run a modest surplus from time to time). This despite generally weaker economies and lower per capita income. American conservatives like to attribute this to (lack of) military spending, but they're mostly wrong. The primary driver of the difference is taxation - the US spends like a high-tax country, but has relatively low taxes. This is not a general failing of democracy, it is an peculiarity of American politics.
I don't have any theories as to the deep rooted cause of this, but in a proximate sense, I think this is fairly straightforwardly explained by the fact that the US doesn't actually have any fiscal conservatives. The Democrats are, broadly, fiscally liberal. They want to raise taxes and redistribute the money or spend it on public services (but will happily settle for the latter without the former). The Republicans, however, are not fiscally conservative. They are merely anti-taxation. They might like to cut welfare spending and public services, but when push comes to shove they always prioritize cutting taxes over balancing the budget or paying down the deficit.
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