Yeah, syrup is better than jelly
Humanitarian aid: increase it to 0.7-1% of GDP, which would make it about 70-110 billion a year. That is an extra 50-90 billion a year.
Energy research: I have no idea how much is needed to promote not only energy independence but cleaning up the environment (ie helping to pay for clean coal plants and nuclear plants). It could run 50-100 billion a year, I don’t know.
As far as healthcare and education I feel that taxes would go up and private spending would go down, so it’ll even out. No country spends near what we spend as a percentage of GDP for healthcare. We spend 15% (8% publicly, 7% privately) while most other countries spend about 10-11% (9% publicly, 1-2% privately). So universal healthcare will save money, offsetting some of the private expenses.
The idea/feeling that private is always better than public is just an emotional opinion due to cultural upbringing. There are people in communist countries who feel that public is always better than private, but neither opinion is automatically true. I read an article I’m trying to find that showed privately run for profit hospitals are less efficient and cost effective than publicly run non profit hospitals.
the government already pays for 50-60% of healthcare costs, including a good deal of medical and pharmaceutical R&D. The idea that that 50-60% in public funds is flushed down the toilet while the other 40-50% in private funds which is paid for mostly by private insurance companies is a paradigm of efficiency is a joke. That 40-50% is mostly insurance companies that do their best to not provide coverage for the sick and ill in the first place. That is not efficient. If you are trying to charge high premiums and avoid covering people and avoid even offering coverage to those who actually need it that is very very inefficient and inhumane. Offering coverage only to those who don’t need it and not covering those who do need it (which is what the private sector does) is not efficient at all and I don’t see how people can assume that system is more effective than covering everyone.
Of course, at the end of the day, if everyone ate healthy, exercised, reduced their stress and had good personal relationships healthcare costs would drop dramatically irrelevant of who ran the system.
So if a person makes 100k in today’s system they probably pay about 8k for healthcare in taxes and 7k privately (in withheld income, insurance premiums, and copays). In a universal system they’d pay about 10-11k privately and 1-2k privately. Their taxes may jump from 29k to 40k, but they wouldn’t be giving a deficit to their kids, their private spending for education and healthcare would drop about 5-7k a year.