If the system isn’t working taxes should be used to subsidize the people and small businesses. Fix the problem.
What you likely mean here is that "spending" should be used to subsidize the people and small businesses, right? Your assumption that spending is connected to taxation only falls into the trap that the wealthy and their corporations spring whenever investment in the people is suggested or any attempt to legislate it is made.
The US dollar is self-funding when created and not dependent upon the revenue position of the government, past, present, or future. This means that anything that can be resourced from the private sector is "affordable" to Congress. Taxation is a necessary and useful tool in managing the economy and avoiding inequity, but it, like borrowing, cannot be a funding mechanism as Congress must create the currency before it can collect any of it.
Only an econ illiterate would deny that single-payer (not government-managed) healthcare is both less expensive and provides better health outcomes. We have numerous examples of this among "every other nation" considered to be civilized and first world. However, anytime the prospect of adopting such no-brainer legislation arises it is stomped on by those demanding proof of how it will be "paid for" by taxation or fees.
This bit of ignorance relates directly to the much wider ignorance surrounding federal finance, even among our representatives who are supposed to have an understanding as a job requirement. The propaganda campaign waged by the fascist oligarchs supporting the concept of taxation funding spending at the federal level has been so successful since RayGun introduced America to the fictional "welfare queen" that it is now assumed even on the left.
It is unconditional and blatent BS, but it is now a part of our political reality and we will not be able to properly fund an economy that works for the poor and middle class as long as it prevails at the policy level. Even the Democratic Socialist in the Senate, Senator Sanders, fails this and his policies that are considered common in every other civilized first-world nation are constantly defeated by the demand to show how they would be "paid for".
This elicits the opposition to taxation among citizens and requires that the fight for benefits be fought at two levels, justifying the benefit and for funding. If the citizens/voters are mistaken in their myopic view of money creation and federal finance they will assume such a benefit will be zero-sum and will be paid for by taxation of those who "work hard" (as if the poor don't work) to benefit those who don't.
In fact, single-payer healthcare would be a large "deflationary" policy that will put up to a million people out of work and require a massive retraining and job security fund that can only be funded by the currency-creating federal government. Attempting to "pay for" such a program by extracting more currency from the private sector would be an economy killer.
