We want great schools, nice roads, affordable health care, a kick-ass military, and…wait for it…low taxes.
We can have all of that as long as we can resource them in the private sector. We simply have to elect people who understand the role of government (at least at the federal level) as the "ISSUER" of the money we use in our commerce.
This means approaching federal spending from the perspective of the monopoly "source" of our money and not from the perspective of a "user" of that money which must "get" it from some source (taxes or bonds) before spending on the public purpose. Taxes and bonds don't serve the same purpose at the federal level that they do below that. In fact, it is more accurate to say that federal spending "funds" both than it is to state the opposite.
One simply cannot collect or borrow what doesn't yet exist and it is foolish to demand that the one entity that has infinite money available to it be so constrained. Taxation as "revenue" became obsolete in '34 when FDR ended the convertibility of the currency to gold, and the final blow to "balanced budgets" was dealt by Nixon in '71 when he ended it for international trade and the US dollar became fiat with floating pricing for commodities, goods, and services.
Anyone who understands simple dual-entry spreadsheet accounting and can apply that understanding to our federal government would be a better choice for leadership than any orthodox economist or others who believe that nothing changed when we went fully to a fiat currency. The quest for "efficiency" in our federal government and the demand that it function "within its means" is very good for those who benefit from a smaller government that is unable to regulate and fund our commerce or tax away excess dollars that are unearned and pervert the purpose of government.
The truth is that our currency-issuing federal government can "afford" anything it can resource from the private sector up to the point of full deployment of resources and labor without incurring inflation. This makes "ANY" misery or hardship that can be mitigated with federal money creation/spending entirely a "POLITICAL CHOICE", not sound economics. The fear of such misery or the lack thereof defines our economic strata, so don't look for a collective epiphany in our government any time soon.
