Whenever this topic comes up, I recommend reading the one world schoolhouse. It tells the story behind khanacademy.org and in the process it talks about how poor of a job the current education system does teaching math. It highlights the problems created by it.
It really pissed me off reading it because I fell into every one of the traps created by the system just as you have too. I felt robbed by my own education.
The good news is that it's not too late for you to correct your problems and make math easy again. You just have to start over at the beginning.
Back to your argument on education, here is a book that will provide a lot more depth on those issues.
The One World Schoolhouse. It was written by the guy behind Khan Academy. It made me feel very dissapointed with the education that I received. If you want more insight into what is wrong and how we got there, I highly recommend this book. He also talks about the history of Khan Academy in the process.
Follow your passion. This is a field that is full of people that just figured it out.
Computer science is a big field. Math does not overlap with much of it. You can fail out of college math and still be amazing at programming. We like to think they are closely linked. Being good with logic is the important requirement.
There are some very common patterns in programming that have very little to do with math. Get input from user, save data, query data, present data to user, send/receive data to some other system. I won't say that math will not help you, but it is not required to do any of that.
Your failure at math may not be your entirely your fault. To fix your math problem, you need to start over. Fix your issues with early math (That you may not realize that you have) and the later stuff gets easier. https://www.khanacademy.org/ This book by the same person explains what I am talking about: [One World Schoolhouse] http://www.amazon.com/One-World-Schoolhouse-Education-Reimagined/dp/1455508373/ref=la_B00DIE8GXS_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457283970&sr=1-1
> Finland spends less and whomps our asses.
That's is very misleading.
We have a much larger and more diverse population than Finland (or South Korea, et al). This means more variance in standards, funding, and outcomes.
The amount we spend per capita on students isn't a fair measure because we live in different societies. Count all the money Finland spends on Universal health care and other government services used by teachers, students, and their families and you'll see that the cost per capita in the US isn't really that much of an outlier.
It's unclear what you mean by consistently lagging. I assume you mean that our scores on standardized math and science tests tend to fall behind other countries? That's what people normally mean (given that in measures of literacy, University participation, and the economic outcome we do just fine). It's unclear that particular gap in testing is as concerning as it might first appear given that lack of emphasis we place on it compared to other countries (as we debatablely shouldn't). Sal Khan of Khan Academy fame has a nice takedown of this trope in The One World Schoolhouse.
Finland has 17 years of schooling from Primary to Tertiary while the US only has 16 years.
In the US we attempt universal education while many other countries with scores track students rigidly and early (looking at you Germany). This isn't a bad thing but it does mean the comparison becomes difficult to make.
There's plenty of room for improvement in the US education system but let's not pretend we should be copying a Finnish model.