There are a few industries where the purpose of the painfully inflated costs seems to be internally (to the managers of the US economy) justified by nothing mor

There are a few industries where the purpose of the painfully inflated costs seems to be internally (to the managers of the US economy) justified by nothing more than "creating money", i.e., paying lots of people the wages they need to move money back and forth in the economy for the purposes of increasing GDP. Those people have jobs which allow them to participate in consumption, which makes US industry look good because they have revenue they can report as earnings. It's real money because of the sovereign fiat nature of the US dollar, but it's not necessarily value. This is ultimately artificial inflation and the subject of Graeber's critique of the modern economic system in his essay Bullshit Jobs.