Perhaps, really- stop comparing apples to oranges. % of GDP is not % of taxes.
I know it’s kinda hard to find what % of budget is spend on healthcare, but I did find a few budgets and yes, they do spend more on healthcare. Not enuf to make up the whole difference, sure. Most of that is safety net.
A social safety net doesn’t cover only the poor, it’s not catastrophic insurance.
Parts of the Spanish safety net which cover me at zero POD cost include healthcare (preventative, professional and curative), professional training, courses with a cost of admin fees and (if applicable) books from public universities, unemployment services, off the top of my head. If I were third-party employed and became unemployed I’d also get unemployment pay (I can’t get it because I’m self-employed). For my mother, it has included or will eventually include things such as home assistance, reduced cost of assisted living facility… Back when I was in college, it provided me with a beca de desplazados: a grant from my regional government, automatically given to any regional student who was in college more than 100km from home.
I’m in the top 1% of earners, she’s got the highest pension the country pays (she has more disposable income than either of my brothers).
And I have no idea how do you decide that “free public college is cheap”. At POD sure. But one of the reasons every goddamn university on Earth has a law school is that teaching law school is cheap. Astrophysics, Biochemistry or Mechanical Engineering, nowhere near as cheap.
It would cost around $50 billion for the USA. Not cheap. In the la\ong run perhaps a great investment, but not cheap.
As a % of GDP, free public college is cheap. Its about 1/3 of 1% of GDP. It doesn’t explain the massive differences in public sector spending.
A lot of the things you describe are health care related. Which most wealthy nations other than the US offer to everyone.
We have unemployment insurance in the US. Ireland likely does too, same as Denmark and France.
Either way, you’re in Spain correct? Spain spends about 30% of GDP on the public sector. Far lower than places like Denmark or France. So all the stuff you describe comes at about the same public sector spending as the US spends.
https://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/satellitesites/newsroom/49106386Tax%20small.JPG
There are a lot of posts in this thread like this, but I think that Wesley Clark has it right.
If the US (as a whole) collects 27% of GDP in taxes and spends 8% of GDP on public health programs and France collects 46% of GDP in taxes in spends 8% of GDP on public health programs, then we are comparing apples to apples. All numbers are in terms of %GDP.
And the result is that the US spends 19% of GDP on non-health government expenditures and France spends 38% of GDP on non-health government expenditures, and the question is: Where does it go?
This wikipedia page has a table that lists government employees. It’s fairly out of date, but it gives at least an idea of where most French civil servants work. Looks like about half are employed in education. It’s hard to find statistics for the US, but I expect that’s the place to look. I bet a decent chunk of the difference is explained by that. Note that most of it is not in higher education, so it’s (mostly) not free college, it’s very labor-intensive primary education.
I appreciate that, but I don’t think its education either, here is why.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
The US spends $12,800 per primary and secondary school student. France spends $10,000. Granted France has an economy that is only about 2/3 the size of the US (in per capita terms), but the US has free K-12 education and heavily subsidized tertiary education. Even when you adjust for the lower per capita spending (a nation with 60k per capita has more money to spend on education than a nation with a 40k per capita income), spending on education is comparable.
Also a nation like South Korea which has a smaller share of GDP devoted to the public sector than France spends more on education than France.
That’s per student enrolled in public education. About 10% of US students go to private schools. Maybe the rate is lower for France.
If we assume it’s 0 for France, then the France is spending 10,000/12,800/0.9/(2/3) ~= 1.3 times as much GDP on education as the US (before factoring in higher ed). US GDP spend on (primary) public education is around 4%, so that puts Frances at 5.2%, etc. I expect that there are a lot of things like this. A % of GDP here and a % there and pretty soon you’re looking at real money.
I think if you spend some time with the link I posted and maybe google translate, it’ll help. But here is a ore detailed breakdown of that:
Social support:
Pensions: 232
Sick pay: 42
Other social purposes: 140
Health services: 32
Cash to parents: 20
Employment: 11
Transfers to lower administrative levels (Municipalities and… kinda state-like lower administrative levels): 171
Regional health care: 159
Transport and communications: 72
Defense: 60
Higher education: 40
Foreign Aid: 36
Farm subsidies: 15
Child benefits and cash to parents: 16
Interest on public debt: 10
Other: 268. Which is a fairly large fraction.
But at a guess, it is the pensions, the 2 years of unemployment benefits at 66% of you salary, the year of paid maternity leave, the free housing and minimum income for the rock-bottom people, the cash payments to people with kids, as well as things that add up, such as free higher education. And especially, the low amount paid on interest on the national debt which we have decided to have for some reason.
I did, but the problem is that funding comes from city, county, state and federal level in the US. I assume its similiar in other places. As a result getting the correct info is hard.
For example in the US, K-12 education tends to be funded on the city and county level. College and university is funded on the state level. Very little of education is funded on the federal level. If all you look at is federal spending, you’d think the US spends almost nothing on education. But thats because most education is local and state for that.
Military is almost exclusively funded on the federal level by comparison. State funding has a role too, but its mostly federal.
Medicare is funded on the federal level, but medicaid is funded via a mix of state and federal funding.
Norway has a GDP of about 3.6 trillion NOK. The national insurance is 478 billion NOK, about 13% of GDP, the old age pensions are about 6%. In the US the social security program is about 5%. So the money spent on old age pensions is not much different, but higher in Norway (as one would expect). But only 1% of GDP.
And the US does have various forms of welfare for the sick, disabled and poor. But they’re funded on multiple levels and hard to really all figure out.
Basically, its hard to figure out. But nations like Spain and Canada, which spend about 30% of GDP in the public sector have pretty advanced social welfare policies, the same as you’d expect in nations spending closer to 45% like Denmark and France.
Like I mentioned, the US also has welfare for the poor.
This graph is from a right wing libertarian site, but if its accurate it implies a low income family can get tens of thousands of dollars in assistance each year from various local, state and federal programs.
https://www.learnliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/welfare-e1471458574375.png
So although I’m sure other nations have better welfare programs than the US, it isn’t like the US has no welfare. Also nations like Canada spend around 30% of GDP in the public sector, vs 40%+ in Italy. I doubt Italy’s welfare is massively better than the welfare in places like Canada.
I guess they just waste it all then. Probably on illegals, art programs, or drugs.
Dangerous minorities too.
For those of us who aren’t American, what do some of those terms mean, such as RTC?
You used a welfare family, but some countries have lots of “employable” adults with no children on welfare. Other than food stamps and medicaid, what would such a person get in the States?
I gave a figure for about $700 before (for a single, employable adult), but a single employment parent with two children (no disabilities) on welfare would get $1002 per month from Ontario Works, plus $1020.08 per month in child tax (one child under six, and one over six), plus $94.75 in Trillium (a monthly provincial benefit, assuming $700 per month in rent, which is ridiculously low) and $221.50 per quarter in GST (a federal benefit) for $2022 per month or $24,264 per year in cash benefits.
Which reminds me of a discussion I had with an Italian last year. She didn’t seem to know what welfare meant, so at first I thought it was a language issue. Nope. They do not have welfare like they do in Canada. Apparently in Italy it refers to a type of pension (which, I presume, was paid from the former worker’s paycheque).
It could just be a scale issue. In Canada, Quebec likes to do things differently. They don’t participate in the Canada Pension Plan, they participate in the Quebec Pension Plan instead (which seems less efficient due to having a smaller population).
RTC = Refundable Tax Credits. **PastTense **mentioned how maybe part of the US’s lack of welfare compared to other western nations is that we use tax credits instead of welfare funded by taxes.
In the US we also have programs for housing and rent assistance, programs to buy food, child care subsidies, etc. But they tend to disappear as you earn more money, causing whats known as the welfare cliff.
It would be better if everyone had public health insurance and publicly funded/subsidized child care though. I believe that is how most wealthy nations do it. In the US, we just give those things to some of the poor.
In the US I believe a single adult would get food stamps, welfare, and I believe housing assistance. If you’re disabled you can get SSDI, which is a disability pension. There are also programs to help with utilities (heating oil, cell phones, etc) for people who can’t afford them.
Either way for the purposes of this thread I’m not anti-welfare, I’d personally prefer expanding public spending (especially to the middle class and making some programs universal like health insurance and child care subsidies). But I don’t personally think welfare alone explains the public sector gap in nations like Ireland & the US vs Denmark and France.
Welfare ended under Clinton.
More or less we now have food stamps, TANF and AFDC.
And no, I am not going to dive into that link. You shoudl know better.
Here’s a mostly unbiased cite or two:
If AFDC is “Aid for Families with Dependent Children”, that is gone.
FWIW, I live in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has one of the highest tax burdens that I know of right now (highest tax bracket of 51.75%).
However, it is also true that a very sizeable chunk of that tax money is spent in order to keep the sea at bay. I have the feeling that that kind of country-wide existential menace is a very important factor when it comes to the high tax rate here.
On the other hand, of course, the situation of the Netherlands is rather special. I do not think that there is any other highly-developed country that has that kind of constant threat against its very existence.
Yeah but according to this, the Netherlands only spends $3 billion a year on water protection.
3 billion is barely 1/3 of 1% of their 900+ billion GDP. Something else is behind the spending.
And as far as the social safety net, nations like Spain and Canada spend far less of GDP via the public sector than France and Denmark, but Spain and Canada have good welfare programs too.