Our taxes fund more public health dollars per capita than almost anywhere else in the world. Medicare and Medicaid spending is higher than DOD budget, and that’s before you include medical research funded by NIH and DOD or VA spending.
The issue is that our prices are out of control because of regulatory capture and downstream inability of the government to negotiate lower prices.
What we need are price controls.
That’s what happens if you don’t have public health care.
A small insurer or even an uninsured person cannot bargain with large pharma companies. If they try to, the pharma company will just not sell the product, because it’s more expensive for them to lower the prices for everyone compared to losing one small customer.
But if your whole country’s health system bargains at once, it can get much better deals, because not taking a deal means for the pharma company that they’ll lose access to millions of potential customers.
That’s why for example in Europe Insulin costs about 10% per dose compared to what people in the USA have to pay.
I don’t like paying taxes, but holy hell not having the things they’re supposed to pay for sucks. You ever use a toll road or get caught in an intentional speed trap? Holy hell it sucks. And also we’re only kinda sure our food is safe and our medicine works. But the cops have tanks and the beef and gas are subsidized
I mean toll roads make sense, I’m not sure why we’re expected to pay to use public transport but not roads, when roads are far more expensive to maintain and us driving literally causes them to be damaged.
If roads and parking are free then public transit should be free. Otherwise toll roads are fine by me, although they’re technically a regressive charge in the US and Canada since you’re kind of forced to use a car in most areas… I mean car dependence itself is a giant regressive charge so that’s just one part of it.
But assuming we had actual functional transportation infrastructure, toll roads would actually be preferrable near more densely populated areas since it makes you think twice about using your car instead of taking a train or biking.
It’s just a matter of how much they want to invest in what.
In many cases toll roads mean that the government didn’t want to/wasn’t able to invest in building a road, so they let a private for-profit company do it for “free” (meaning without tax money) and that company then recoups their investment using toll.
Some times toll roads are used to steer traffic. Some cities for example have a city toll that’s meant to discourage commuters from using their car to get into the city and instead get them to use public transport.
The first case means the country doesn’t raise enough tax, wastes too much tax money or has other priorities than road infrastructure.
The second case is totally valid since it uses tax to discourage unwanted behaviour.
Why shouldn’t you pay for using car infrastructure? You’re damaging the environment and damaging the roads, it’s a lot more sensical for the cost to be put on you, the driver, instead of burdening everyone else with higher income/sales taxes.
The way toll roads work in a lot of places is that they are built with public funds, then a private operator gets a lease for a set amount of time and gets the lion’s share of the revenue.
And yes, public transport should be free.
Won’t that encourage overuse of transport, which will actually make it harder to reach emissions targets and similar?
I always find it amusing when Americans can only come up with paying less taxes as the answer, then they don’t understand why they get less services. It’s almost like you should expect more from the tax dollars you already spend. But I guess that’s the point of this post and I’m just beating a dead horse.
That’s my argument. There’s no need to raise taxes. It’s all scare tactics from the GOP. In Texas, a hot topic last election was our increased property taxes. The democratic nominee for governor proposed legalizing weed and using those tax dollars to lower property taxes. He lost the “moderates” when he proposed stricter gun control the last time he ran and they never got over it. Conservatives would rather pay extra money and complain about it than legalize the devil’s lettuce.
Politics is theatre. They use buzz words to win the ignorant votes. I don’t think we’ll ever see a return on our taxes because of how much it would take to completely flip the system. Businesses would go bankrupt if we had access to socialized programs, and that goes against the capitalism that the country stands on.
Removing tax havens within the country would also do a fair bit, and people wouldn’t notice any difference from that, except that there is a lot more money that the country could spend on more useful things.
Too bad spending money is considered “free speech” and all those tax haven dollars are used to buyout the people with the power to fix that problem
Isn’t the military like 3% of the gdp and Healthcare somewhere around 20% in the US?
As well as the expenses of WIC for military families, since they don’t get paid enough.
Everyone hates on The United States military, you know, until they are getting their asses kicked. I think the USA should only lend military support to those countries willing to pay for it.
