Consider healthcare: Americans pay more than double per capita than Canadians or Brits, yet 40,000 Americans die annually from lack of healthcare coverage and another 500,000 declare bankruptcy from medical bills every single year.
What most miss in this comparison with countries that offer free healthcare to their citizens is that the US government already pays half of all healthcare billing via Medicare, VA, Medicaid, etc. This means we are already paying for healthcare that we aren't getting due to our for-profit system. This doesn't take into account the losses due to the uninsured delaying treatments or diminished spending power of the insured who pay unnecessary premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.
At the post-secondary level, America spends 93% more money per student than the OECD average. That’s right — it costs $30,000 per American student, versus $16,100 for students across Finland, France, etc.
Are you sure those numbers aren't comparing what other "countries" pay for education, not the students? I won't do a deep dive into federal spending as a "cost" (hint; it isn't), but the difference this makes in even archaic orthodox econ is huge. Those countries are spending newly created money into the private sector while American universities are siphoning away the spending power of the students, sometimes over their entire working lives.
On average, college graduates earn $1 million more in earnings over their lifetime. At the current 22% personal income tax bracket, that’s an extra $220,000 in public funding.
OK, I have to dive into federal finance, but not too deeply. Public funding can't be achieved by removing money from the private sector, and the currency-issuing government has no use for "funding" since it can create an infinite amount of its unit of account as needed. If you mean "redirected" instead of "funding" you would be a bit closer to correct.
In spite of this basic truth that every federal government representative knows, their immediate "go to" for any proposed program or expenditure is always an elaborate and misleading list of taxes, mostly on corporations and the wealthy. This all but guarantees the failure of any such proposal as the wealthy and their corporations pay those representatives very well "not" to increase their taxes. Why take on such formidable opposition when it isn't necessary? The federal government can afford anything that can be resourced in the private and foreign sector that is priced in US dollars, even without a dime of added taxation.
