Would still like to hear you concede that you were wrong in your claims about Danish taxes as you painted your number to be some sort of overall number, which it isn't.
Let's take me for example. How much do I pay in income tax? About 27% overall. This is why you don't just post the percentage of the highest bracket of a progressive tax system and yell "high taxes!". And speaking of "stuff", we'd need to actually include that in these conversations. Since those taxes pay for healthcare and education among others, they aren't paid for separately. That leaves actual disposable income, from what I remember from a few years ago, on similar or better levels in Nordics (as the systems are fairly similar there) compared to middle or lower income families in the US. This does flip when talking about high income families in the US.
They can, though naturally as societies are different, the solution might need tuning. And I remember some discussions on those things here, the price increases certainly didn't seem to be related. They didn't match the increases and prices have increased even without salary hikes and in placed where the new minimum wage law doesn't apply.
Yes, and these need to be taken into consideration. I never understand the population amount arguement though, scale/capability move hand in hand. And of we look state by state basis, the difference is even smaller.
I don't think there's that much radical difference though, at least on this topic. The major difference is how widespread workers unions are. That's really the major difference on this topic.
Rather than deal which each point I would like to simply address them all. Yes you have a graduated system. Here in the US 50% of the population don't pay any taxes. The top income earners pay the majority of them.
I've already pointed out our system is a FAR cry from yours. No it can't take just a few tweeks. You have to change the entire system. And the population point is that 330 million people of wildly differing groups would have to come together to change the constitution and change their governments in each state to match what the Danes do. You would also have to create a far more homogeneous culture and nationalist culture. Massive amounts of laws would have to be changed. All this done by 330 million people who would agree to make it happen.
Those in these small countries with the predominant cultures don't have any idea what it would take. For example Texas culture is far different than California which is quite different than Montana or S Dakota. Wyoming is a fat cry from New York which is quite different than Florida.
It would be like taking all the Danes, the French, the English the Germans, the Swiss the Norwiegans and mashing them all into one country and then using the United States Constitution and type of government and the each countries government and then tell them all you want to do it the Danish way.
All these countries don't do it the Danish way now. Yes most have free healthcare, but they don't run it all the same way. But don't forget I want you to do it using that US government way of doing things.
Perhaps that will help with understanding why the Danish way doesn't work here. It's not that the Danish way is bad. It's just different. In Denmark your college tuition at the highest rate is about 20000. In the US it's its 64000 or maybe higher. I just looked up one. So there would have to be a radical change in the US toward college costs. And even now you country is looking at ways to cut your costs down including cutting degrees and allowed time to get one.
In other countries they have even more strict requirement as to who can attend college and for what degree.
Now I might get on board with the Danish way if College costs were drastically reduced and we didn't just let anyone go to college for any reason and any degree they wanted. That was one of the reasons your government has been looking into this because not all the degrees were earning the money back because people weren't finding jobs that earned enough money to "pay it back" so to speak.
Is the Danish way impossible here? I do t don't, but I'd have to say it's as close as it can get due to the changes it would require. Why for universities each state runs it's own. And kids can go from state to state to go. The Costs are wildly different from state to state and university to university depending on many factors including the cost of living which varies drastically from state to state. For example in Montana the University tuition only is about 8000 a year In California the cost is around 30000 and as high as 95000 a year or more. I think California has about as many people as you do. Now if you could get CA to cut their costs of education by 1/2 and tell them they could all go free you might have something. But good luck with that. As radical as California is, they haven't come close to doing anything like that. And I know good a well that their politicians are all for free college. So why haven't they done it? It's because they know they can't. There is no way they would be able to cut costs by that much.
