That's not really fair. American cities have "high taxes" in the sense that they are higher than in non-cities, but that's really not that much money. New York

That's not really fair. American cities have "high taxes" in the sense that they are higher than in non-cities, but that's really not that much money. New York City raises something like $55 billion / year, but that's only around 4% of its GMP. New Yorkers are still taxed overall rather low for very big city in a very rich country. As for public services sucking...it's easy to point to obvious failings but hard to compare public service suckiness overall. Americans are generally unhappy with their public services but so are most Europeans.