But it also doesn't include the benefits you gain from those taxes.
There's your net income, and your disposable income at the end, after you paid for insurance, food, medicine, and all the other things you need to survive. Looking at the net income instead of the disposable one makes the US seem, very clearly, much better off.
However, as soon as you start looking into disposable income and a true, "net net" of how much money I can save and spend on god knows what, the US starts falling behind FAST.
As a result, most US Americans tend to cope using that nice big number and conveniently forget the real number at the end.
But do keep in mind this is general and doesn't always hold true. As much as I may dislike the US right now, the US really is more like 50 tiny countries than one big one, so results vary depending on where you look. Especially along the Democrat-Republican divide.
NFTs could have been great, if they had been used FOR the consumer, and not to scam them.
Best thing I can think of is to verify licenses for digital products/games. Buy a game, verify you own it like you would with a CD using an NFT, and then you can sell it again when you're done.
Do this with serious stuff like AAA Games or Professional Software (think like borrowing a copy of Photoshop from an online library for a few days while you work on a project!) instead of monkey pictures and you could have the best of both worlds for buying physical vs buying online.
However, that might make corporations less money and completely upend modern licencing models, so no one was willing to do it.