Enter “Why should I have to pay for someone else’s kid!!!”

Because you live in a society, dipshit. Plus, it’s cheaper to feed him breakfast and cover his daycare than it is to incarcerate him in 20 years.

I mean really socialism is a scale. A true free market would have no regulations, meaning monopolies would form and the biggest company would basically become more powerful than the government (which is kind of what blackrock is, to most countries outside of the USA.) Whereas there's a system which is so regulated that everything is controlled and owned by the government.

The middle ground is whatever denmark is doing. Yes the middle ground, not communism, but the middle, where under a largely similar system to the USA, the capital owners, big companies etc, but still, the basic needs of the people are supplied by a governing body. This means that Democrats and other "left leaning" political governments who don't advocate for universal free healthcare are right wing.

Americans pay high taxes as well: they just don’t get as much for them.

Swede here, I have said it before, and I'll say it again:

The Social Democratic is the best ideology humanity has found.

It combines the safety nets of government run services with the powerful incentive of a free market.

Sure, not all sectors are included in the free market, essential services like public transport, power, water, sewage, hospitals, schools, and similar stuff that you need to live and participate in society should be run by the government, and not just by decree, but actually running them.

Anything more should be on a (regulated) free market.

Progressive tax brackets should be kept st a high level, with a public highscore list with a awards like fancy dinners, medals, and other symbols of status for paying a lot of tax, creating more incentives to pay tax.

That to me sounds like a good society

Their taxes probably go to things like education and social services instead of bullets and bombs to kill brown people in other lands.

Wait till Americans hear that Danes don't need to calculate their taxes and pay a fee to file them.

I pay for insurance and then pay copay.

And then I pay a school tax and pay for school lunch and fees.

And my health insurance doesnt cover teeth so I have that as separate.

And I pay a tax on my food and then if it's a specific type of food, I pay a tax on that.

I also pay taxes and yet my friends pay $2800 to put their kids in a day care.

We aren't socialists; we are just better at accounting

What's the difference?

We aren't socialists

You are socialists, Social Democracy is socialism, it's just a fucking word. America is socialist too, so is every country in the world that has post, police, fire, military - any services everyone needs that everyone pays for through taxation.

The difference in America is that the capital class has realized that the money generated through taxation looks very nice when it is lining their pockets instead - so they spend untold amounts of money on bribing politicians and generating propaganda designed to convince us that certain things, primarily education and healthcare, are not the same kinds of things as post, police, fire and military.

They have been very successful in convincing a majority of Americans that socializing them would lead to the loss of their money, their freedom and even their lives - even as they take the very same money, freedom and lives for themselves. This is because on the whole Americans are, for a variety of reasons also perpetuated by the capital class, deeply stupid.

Best answer ever

Americans are way too dumb to grasp the benefit of paying higher taxes in exchange for having more benefits. To be fair, Americans have some of the worst politicians on the planet, so they can't trust their representatives to use their tax dollars responsibly. But American stupidity is what put those politicians there in the first place. So........

Similar line of thought regarding public vs private service providers. There's nothing preventing public services from being as good as or better than private ones, but private ones will always want to extract more value than they provide as profit (which is the extra money left over after paying for everything, including staff). Plus they pay a whole team of people whose whole job is about maximizing profit, which can come at the expense of the quality of the service.

And with public vs private healthcare, there's a whole health insurance industry extracting wealth from the public for the privilege of limiting their healthcare options (otherwise the healthcare providers would be the ones doing the fleecing by recommending unnecessary procedures, which probably still happens anyways). And on top of that, there's an attitude of "just try it, even if it would be illegal, consequences are always avoided by backing down before it gets to court".

Exactly.

This is what I've been saying for years.

If you have to pay it merely because you're alive, it's a "tax".

Have to pay healthcare insurance because otherwise you will die or lose everything you managed to get from decades of working if you get sick or have an accident: Tax!

Have no other option than to pay for a car and for gas because you have to drive everywhere since the entire infrastructures is designed for that to be the only option you have: Tax!

Need to have Internet access at home because a lot of things must be done via the Internet nowadays and/or you work from home and there only one or two expensive Internet providers: Tax!

Need a mobile phone for everything and there's only a handful of mobile telephony available, all expensive: Tax!

Need a place to live and because of all the realestate "investors" house prices are insane and totally beyond your reach, and rents are high because of being highly correlated with house prices: Tax!

Must pay for an expensive kindergarten for your young kids because both members of a couple must work to keep up with all the other taxes I described above: Tax!

And, guess what, the Taxes paid to the state (be it Local, State-level or Central Government) at least have a chance to partly get back to you as benefits, whilst the Taxes paid to the Private Sector go entirelly to shareholder pockets and fuck you plebe.

In the Neoliberal era even in Europe the whole Economy is riddled with these Taxes payed directly to the Private sector because politicians in the past were payed to make laws to distort certain markets or to remove the state from regulating markets prone to monopolies or cartels (or, even more subtly, to make sure the fines for breaking competition rules are a microscopic fraction of the gains from doing it) hence large sections of the Economy and Society are little more than rent-seeking, but the US is way more extreme than Europe in this because it's even more Neoliberal and its system even in the beginning of this era was way less tempered by a tradition of society-oriented politics than most of Europe.

A LOT of effort has been spent into brainwashing Americans to think that Taxes paid into the common pot which pays for benefits for everybody (even though, in all fairness, a large fraction of that pot just to subsidies for politically connected companies) are a great burden for them even whilst they don't count in the same way all that money they're forced to put in the hands of certain private entities, even though in both cases the system is structured to make sure they have no real choice but to pay and, you know, money is money so even in the purest most selfish logic it's no less a burden if you're forced to pay X amount to the Private sector for unearned profits from merelly having a monopoly or being part of a cartel as it would be to pay X amount to a Public sector that did absolutelly nothing for you (and even in the US the Public sector does do something for everybody, at the very least basic schools and roads).

This shit has been exported to Europe but people here aren't yet anywhere as brainwashed.

If we could only train everyone to loudly hiss whenever they hear GDP or Tax Rate used as a metric to gauge a country's value, a lot of people would be a lot better off.