In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax, and this model does not go down well with the American electorate, generally speaking.
Im a dual US and Swiss Citizen. My taxes are lower in Switzerland. Of course I still have to pay the difference back to the US, but that's not the point. Switzerland has such a great infrastructure because they have been making steady, incremental investments over a long time. They accept that a project can have a very long payback period. Also, they invest to keep their infrastructure very well maintained, which keeps utility high and makes major overhauls less frequent, thus extending the duration that they benefit from their original big investment.
So I think you don't need high taxes, but rather a long term outlook and the will to execute it, across multiple election cycles. Boston's Big Dig is the most recent example of such a project from the US that I can think of.
Switzerland also spends 0.7% of it's annual GDP on defense spending, vs. 3-5% for the US. If we redirected that towards infrastructure we'd rival the best public transit systems in the world.
Thats just pointless argument to make, it serves as nothing other then your personal critic of defense spending.
The US already has a significant amount of spending on infrastructure. Instead of finger point at some other expense, you should ask why the current money is not giving you good results. Schooling has the same issue in the US.
And If that defense spending is used to fund R&D projects that ultimately benefit society, would you still feel the same way? (ARPAPNet for one example?)
Although the internet was many years ahead of the BBS scene and Fidonet in the sophistication of its technology and its online culture, the BBS scene and Fidonet would have by now become a global network integrated into commerce, government and other aspects of daily life if the internet had not gotten there first. Or the technology behind France's Minitel would have been adopted globally and gotten there. Or something like that.
So you're suggesting we keep drowning the department in cash, hoping that one of the projects they build has a happy side effect of not murdering or spying on people.
Take the same money and spend it on R&D projects whose purpose is to benefit society from the get-go.
But it's not; it's used instead to send our aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc. into dangerous places and stir up geopolitical trouble. How much research could you fund with the price of a single multi-million-dollar gas station in Afghanistan?
Defense is a pretty inefficient way to fund R&D. I don't know the numbers but the percentage of the defense budget that actually goes into R&D is probably pretty low.
just one example out of many - F22/F35 program costs (is it still 1.5 trillion USD?), which cover just one tiny (albeit important) piece of US military offensive power (calling it defense is just a bad joke).
plenty of nasty diseases could be put out of existence with just a fraction of that, for example
I'm pretty sure though that Switzerland spends - relatively speaking - much more on public transportation than the US (if I looked it up correctly it's about 8.7% for CH and 1.2% for the US on the federal budget). After all the terrain is more demanding (alps, etc.) and the density of the network is much higher.
I think what people are missing here is what's left on the table, at the end of a day, for your normal, low to mid level employee, after having paid taxes, insurances and transport to and from work. Swiss pay on average around 300 USD per month for full health coverage and have an average salary of somewhere around 5800 USD, at the low end it starts around 3800 USD. Pension system is in the single digit percentages, as is the few other social insurances we have. Cars are expensive to run, around USD 10k a year. A yearly all-included general public transport subscription (public and private operators of bus, train, ships, mountain cable cars, street cars in all of Switzerland) costs around USD 3000 per year. If you live close to a city it's only around USD 700 a year. So all in all even an average worker can still feed a family of 3-4 people on a single job from 8 to 5 if he takes the public transport and lives somewhere a bit less expensive.
Indeed! I was making no comment on the quality of life in Switzerland which is clearly excellent. They have one of the highest GPDs per capita in the world (especially if you exclude a couple of the oil producers that exceed it).
I was merely commenting on the fact that Switzerland does, in fact, have taxes that are higher than what we have in the US.
Yes, my comment also wasn't meant as a disprove of something you wrote, I just wanted to add the big picture.
Edit: I guess the point I'm trying to make: Switzerland is not all that different from the US (on a small scale), it just combines a moderate amount of corporate liberties with enough personal liberties to strike a good balance. In many ways it's like the Libertarian's small government, locally organized model, it just adds enough social and health insurance safety nets and a good public infrastructure on top. Think every county having their own tax law, school system, road network etc.
He's comparing as a percentage of GDP. I don't know about you but I don't get taxed on my personal GDP, because I reckon I'd be taxed on about 5 times my actual salary since I think that's the amount of profit my company is making per employee.
Be careful with these comparisons. I can't comment on Switzerland, but when I moved from Canada to the U.S., the percentage of my paycheque that was withheld was almost exactly the same. The reason was that while the taxes are higher in Canada, they include healthcare. In the U.S. medical insurance is a separate line item. It may be technically true that the U.S. has lower taxes, but it is very difficult to make comparisons that take into account all external benefits and costs. It would not surprise me if Switzerland had less money available for transportation even though taxes are technically higher.
Health insurance in Suisse, based on permanent employment: employer is obliged to pay you accident insurance, which covers... accidents, full time. Employee is obliged to find health insurance (basically you get ill), otherwise state will find you one randomly. this is paid by employee from net income.
There are various models (GP, doctor on call, semi-private, private etc.), with different franchise, effectively you pay somewhere between 250-500 CHF monthly.
Franchise is amount 300-2500 CHF per year that you still pay from your pocket for treatment of illnesses, then insurance kicks in with 100% coverage. Of course the lower the threshold (ie 300), the more you pay per month. Dentists and eye care are almost never covered, only with most expensive ones. FYI CHF=~ USD.
Apart from that dental and eye care, probably the best model I've ever seen. Medical care is top notch, hospitals definitely don't lack proper (often expensive) equipment, rather the issue is there is not enough doctors/nurses.
this is natural in a country where overall salaries are higher (somehow cashiers in stores also have higher salaries, rent is higher etc.). dining out is especially expensive, but as with all, we can choose how to spend our paychecks
The big dig was a feeding trough for any construction contractor with any connections to pad their pockets on the taxpayers dime.
When people in other cities complain that raised highways are ugly the civil engineers point to Boston and say "well there's your alternative, take your pick"
I'm not disagreeing with your opinion on long term projects but don't hold up the Big Dig as an example of the way things should be.
Years later, sure the tunnels are cool but they're expensive and can't be upgraded reasonably (a problem with tunnels in general). The Big plans need to be future proofed, something you can still get utility from even if the big picture changes. Highways in tunnels under cities don't fit that (railways are somewhat of a different story IMO). An expressway that bypasses the city, maybe but a normal highway with exits, no way (IMO). The I/O locations (exits) and volumes of a highway change too frequently to invest to heavily in any particular stretch of highway.
I think the culture change that needs to take place isn't the long term outlook but more responsibility with other people's money. You can't have a long term approach to infrastructure while people are trying to squeeze every dollar out of every project. As it stands, the time it takes for something to pay for itself (monetarily, via utility or otherwise) is impractical because the time something like $project stops being "in the red" is long past the time it's a clapped out POS that needs an overhaul.
I think it's worth looking at the beginning of the 20th century when large civil engineering projects were more common for insight into the social/political side of things.
The choice "raised or underground highways, take your pick" is a false dichotomy. The correct choice for urban health is to not build the highway in the first place, or to remove intra-city highways. The trouble is that once they are built the demand for their use becomes self-perpetuating.
Compare San Francisco and Oakland - SF stopped the building of cross-town freeways in the famous "freeway revolt." Oakland was bi-sected by freeways which destroyed neighborhoods, many of which have still not recovered. The worst is the CA-24/I-980 connector.
Yeah without US support of NATO there wouldn't be a Switzerland just nuked out mountains flying post WW 3 soviet flag. Or maybe they would fare better considering their sham pro-hitler neutral actions that saw millions of jews perish during holocaust.
Frankly I don't see why HN commenter are so pro tiny European countries which are almost always have sustained due to US military support and are choke full of nativist/racists (Check out white sheep kicking black sheep poster). Be thankful for generous US citizens spending to keep world safe otherwise Europe and Asia would wake up to the next World war within months.
other visitors consider your hateful, ignorant and uninformed post not worthy a comment, but I'll bite - you are wrong, sir, and probably know it.
Plus that funky part about generous US - the world these days would be a much better place if US would just mind their matters for a while. Switzerland couldn't care less about US either, americans are not preferred expats here now (good luck opening a bank account here due to US government foreign policies for expats).
As for tolerance, Switzerland has by far the highest amount of foreigners from whole Europe, and yet it's much safer than any other european country, all religions mixed (ie very strong buddhist community) etc. World could learn a thing or two from this place ;)
Yes Switzerland has by far highest number of foreigners because of its essentialy Xenophobic immigration system rather than anything else. Using that as an example to show how welcoming it is completely deluded. USA offers birthright citizenship and in near future will offer a path to millions of undocumented immigrants. While USA had its own problem it's light years ahead when it comes to countries like Switzerland, where kids whose parents have lived decades in the country and were born their have no path to citizenship.
As far as swiss banks are concerned the world is actually worse off because of corrupt wealth hidden in their accounts. If anything Americans should be happy that one cannot simply open a swiss bank account.
At least on the federal level, about a quarter is spent on Social Security (income transfer), another quarter is spent on healthcare (mostly Medicare, with some Medicaid) and another fifth goes to defense / warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget.
U.S. tax mostly goes to transfer payments and defense / warfare. Whether that is a good thing is debatable; personally, I'd like to see more innovation and less warfare/welfare (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...), but by pretty much any reasonable standard the U.S. already pays lots of tax.
As a middle-class American who lived and worked for a decade in Switzerland (and I made more money there), I can confirm that I always paid less as a percentage in Switzerland.
That doesn't say that the top 10 accounts for 45% but that it should account for 45%. That's a big difference.
The problem is that the US tax system is so complex that once you reach a certain level of wealth, it pays for you to have someone find those loopholes. Warren Buffet famously decried that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, for example:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...
Swiss roads have no potholes, there are no homeless, they have universal healthcare and a free university system. I've lived there and I paid less in taxes, and one big difference is that the wealthy pony up their fair share.
- there are some homeless, but usually import from rest of europe that comes in spring and leaves in autumn, some beggars here and there.
- universal PAID healthcare (except dental and eye care, that is extremely expensive and out of your pocket)
- free university - only state ones, private are costly.
- roads are better than elsewhere and drivers are actually nice :)
wealthy pay, superwealthy just a bit due to special tax deals (which still benefits the country compared to them leaving for say Monaco or gazillion of other tax havens all around the globe).
Agreed, being able to levy fees on probably the largest bank accounts in the world, and not having to pay upkeep on a nuclear arsenal probably helps too.
Americans do pay a lot of taxes...comparable with a lot of European countries (outside of France and Scandinavia). You can't just compare a top marginal tax rate and conclude that one country taxes more than the other...it is the combination of all taxes that determines government revenues.
Our taxes are poorly structured, and the spending of the revenue is poorly prioritized and poorly accounted for. That is the real problem.
Pardon me. I'm going to be just a little more dogmatically right-wing economics than I usually care to be in these pages, but:
> In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax
That's ideological bullshit that is directly at odds with reality. There's another perfectly good and effective way to get shiny new trains and infrastructure projects, and America is doing it with their freight railroads. It's called private investment, we've been doing a lot of it, very successfully, and railroads have been thriving. (The Economist, in a 2010 article which is linked nearby in this thread, opined that "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best" and that "They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world.")
What America's railroads don't have is effective private passenger rail. Private investment won't deliver it because it doesn't make economic sense right now. Some of that is for geographical reasons (population density), some of that is regulatory risk (echoes of the regulatory hangover which helped drive the final nail in the coffin when railroads were already facing difficult competition from the growth of air travel and cars, including implicit highway subsidies) and fear of competing with quasi-governmental subsidized entities like Amtrak, some of that is actual market failure and what the economists call path dependency. Government investment in passenger rail in this nation (including high-speed rail) is something that could be meaningfully countenanced in this nation, though, obviously... if people thought they could trust the government to do make it worthwhile. (We'll see how efforts like the California high-speed-rail project will serve to convince people - boondoggle or good idea?)
The US freight rail system may be maintained with private funds, but it was initially constructed with massive public subsidies. These took the form of land grants, not just for the right-of-way, but for surrounding land. This land was then sold to fund the railway development.
This is true and accurate. However, substantial ongoing investment in the US rail system in the past 5 decades or so has been mostly private or private-public-partnership.
Does it need to be public? Japan has a huge train infrastructure all privately owned AFAIK. Singapore's I'm not sure if it's public or private but it apparently makes a profit.
That's not what I said. I said the EU has sales tax. On everything, even work hours, if you're a freelancer and sell your time. They call it VAT. They could even call it a whistle for all I care, but it still is a tax on sales.
What about if you buy the soup and only put $1 more on it's price and sell it? What value did you add? Your profit, the one where you are already taxed? You still have to add VAT... Call it VAT or sales tax, it's a tax on the poor and should be killed with fire.
Also to be fair Switzerland is a very compact country although quite mountainous. The length of the train rides, even with very fast trains would have an hard time competing against airplanes in the US.
In Switzerland a 3h hour direct, comfortable, Zurich-Geneva train ride isn't much worse than a Zurich-Geneva flight (30 min flight + security and transfer to the city is about 2 hours)
Fun fact: 8M Swiss do 1.8x the passenger kilometers of all of the US combined [1]. I'm pretty sure you have enough densely populated areas in the US that are larger than Switzerland, especially in the East coast.
There is a bit of mentality too - for Swiss, railroads are part of culture, train stations are always at the heart of a city, and even small places are connected. Train infrastructure is dense.
but it is bloody expensive, plain ticket for 20 km ride costs as much as 5 hour ride on fast train back home. everybody here buys early "ticket" that halves the prices of all tickets for 180 usd
