Provide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.
Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
But you actually said every major country is in debt, so do all the major countries owe money to um...minor countries?
Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but the government? In which case it must owe money to entities like people and corporations. The government has powers to take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is issued by the government in the first place, you could consider a token of government debt is actually a token meant to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the government you receive interest, or in other words a discount off your future tax.
All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no reason for it to not be able to pay for things.
In fact you might argue that government debt takes money out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means the government can spend more without causing inflation. If a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it then you create gdp growth. Magic.
Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:
https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...
Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.
Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician. $10k.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/BUDG...
I don't think that's a hard claim to make in other terms than % of gdp—I can't imagine many americans want to devote that much of our gdp to it when other countries manage a high degree of care with much more efficiency. But we seem to have largely talked ourselves out of democratic control of such matters, somehow, for some reason, repeatedly over the last 70 years or so.
It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set.
Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you.
By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest.
I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
The things you mentioned are always a problem because even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.