I can tell you feel passionately about this, but your feeling that you're being ripped off by your taxes isn't going to translate well to any sort of workable policy.
>>You can't start any economic argument by saying that paying any cost is a must. You will get fleeced.
>Paying taxes isn't getting fleeced.
I think it's fair to accurately address the arguments being put forth, rather than reinterpreting them. Taxes are necessary, and I don’t think any serious person would argue otherwise. The problems come when we get into the details:
Conflating local, state, and federal governments with their respective tax regiments only serves to muddy the waters. Additionally, conflating property, income, and capital gains taxes compounds the problem.
Scaling anything from 60M people to 300M is non-trivial (just ask Twitter, which is pretty simple).
Arguing for a collectivist approach in the US (which was partially founded on individualism), seems to betray the entire reason for our independence from Europe (the old country) in the first place.
Let Europe do Europe, and America do America.
Edit: Just to be clear, individual European countries are 20% of the population of the US at best, so it makes more sense to compare them with US states (e.g. The state of CA is the 6th largest economy in the world). Top-down policies do more harm than good in such a large heterogeneous place as the lower 48.
I've never seen a plausible explanation of why a health care system would work for 60 million (UK) but not for 300 million (US).
Bodies are mostly the same, they break down in mostly the same ways. There isn't a lot of mystery in providing care, either. Nor a lot of mystery in how you'd fund it.
We just aren't doing any of that, cause our politicians are bought so very, very cheaply, and enough people are enriching themselves in small ways through small grifts that changing the system would impact a lot of people who are just well-off enough to be listened to.
>I've never seen a plausible explanation of why a health care system would work for 60 million (UK) but not for 300 million
Scaling advanced systems to large numbers of users is very difficult and is the reason Facebook is worth ~1/2 Trillion dollars.
"James Madison argued, especially in The Federalist No. 10, that what distinguished a direct democracy from a republic was that the former became weaker as it got larger and suffered more violently from the effects of faction, whereas a republic could get stronger as it got larger and combats faction by its very structure."
<our politicians are bought so very, very cheaply, and enough people are enriching themselves
If this were true, we should arbitrage this value-mismatch and create a market for buyers and sellers of this powerful, political influence. "cheaply"? As the saying goes, "Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence."
It is possible that the lawmakers share the same views as the for-profit/non-profit corporate execs, just like I agree with Green Peace(i.e. lobbyists) that we should end the practice of whaling significantly. The sovereign nation of Japan disagrees.
I can tell you feel passionately about this, but your feeling that you're being ripped off by your taxes isn't going to translate well to any sort of workable policy.