You could consume the total wealth of the entire Forbes 400 and fund healthcare in the US for eight months. It will cost $45 trillion over the next ten years to fund US healthcare, conservatively - equal to nearly half of all household wealth.
Healthcare costs in the US are inflated due to corporate welfare and funny money coming from insurance companies. Similar to the situation with student loans where school prices have risen to match the amount of loan money student are able to borrow.
Also crappy pork-barrel public works projects: roads to nowhere,insane public spending on rural areas, random bets on large public works projects that don't pan out or do anything useful.
Really, it's not that we can't afford to invest in public healthcare. It's that we would have to cut our our politically connected parasites' purse strings, and nobody wants that.
Well, talk about a strawman. In the countries we're talking about, you have actual progressive taxation, and every dollar you take home above approx. $100k gets taxed almost 50%. That's not taxing 400 people, it's taxing the 25 million top earners in the US.
In Australia the marginal tax rate on $100K is more like 35%. You have to be making several hundred thousand a year to approach the maximum 45% marginal rate. Not sure how it works in Norway...
In Norway, the ~45% maximum marginal rate kicks in at $120k. In Denmark, the ~50% rate cuts in at $75k, while in Sweden (which is the most extreme I know of) the ~60% rate cuts in at $80k.
In all these countries, 10-15% of the population pays the top tax rate.
Right. Yeah, with ours you do hit the top bracket (45%) at $180K but the actual percentage of tax across all income (the marginal rate) means that you're still only paying just over 30% at that point ($18,200 free, 19% of $18,200 to $37K, 32.5% of $37K to $87K, and 37% of $87K up to $180K = $54,232, which is about 30.1%). Even by the point you're making a million dollars a year you're still only paying 42% marginal rate, even though you're well into the 45% tax bracket.
I'm generally not super opposed to having a rate as high as 60%, but the point that kicks in with Sweeden's system does seem very low...
Well the next idea I'd have, after fixing up education and healthcare, would be to fix up unemployment. Esp. people in risky financial situations simply can't afford to look for a job in America.
On the other hand, should I choose to quit my job and look for a new one, the risk is relatively low that I end up on the street or run out of money, even if I didn't build up a buffer of money in my bank account.
People should, IMO, be free to look for a new job if they loose their current one or quit without having to worry about becoming homeless.
Next idea is to have the government exert more control on the health care providers; their rates are many times higher than that of e.g. Canada, for example. Why is that? Because they get away with it. That's the other problem to tackle.
There's plenty of money to make it happen, it just has to be taken from the 60% of the total budget currently being spent on the military - military which doesn't help the country itself at the moment.
What's your next idea?