In the future, it will be obvious to communities that the solution for building commons infrastructure isn’t to crush the people with tax, print money and inflate the economy and rob the poor, or let corporations monopolize services for a mafia-high fee.
The false concept of everything must be "paid for", either with taxation or borrowing, at the federal level is responsible for the almost complete lack of public purpose spending here. This serves quite nicely for neoliberals who want everything dictated by "the market", but it is deteriorating our ability to remain productive in a global economy.
This concept was an easy sell to taxpayers who must "find" money before they can spend or invest. This is especially true when one understands the motives and lack of econ literacy in our corporate media that hammers us endlessly with warnings about the national debt and "printing money" to compensate for shortfalls in revenue. Just the misnomer of labeling a mostly irrelevant tracking entry as "debt" drives most peoples' mistaken concept of federal finance.
While we sorely need increased regulation of our financial sector, and most other business sectors, the US Congress can, without major modification of existing law, "afford" anything that it can resource in the private sector, even without raising revenue (an oxymoron in economic reality at the federal level). Americans, or at least our elected representatives, need to divorce spending and revenue completely in their thought process.
The way we would "fund" expanded free education, universal healthcare, infrastructure improvement, retirement and disability benefits that provide dignity, or any other public purpose spending, is simply to evaluate the availability of required resources and labor and spend accordingly.
Anything that can be resourced in the private sector is "affordable" and their purchase needs no "funding" beyond that. The games currently played by politicians surrounding spending are designed to dissuade the people from demanding more from their government, especially those games that pretend to "pay for" spending. The current monetary system, with only minor tweaking of accounting rules, needs no major revamping to provide Americans with any benefits they can find the political will for.
