It's Long Past Time We Had Universal Healthcare In The US

Extend medicare/medicaid. increase taxes. Corporate participation in private policies should go towards increased medicare taxes when the employees opt into medicare.

Medicare for all? I could get behind that. Increased taxes? No. We pay enough already with fed, state, local, sales, etc. Let's restructure all of our "entitlement" spending to make it more streamlined and cover more stuff.

we could tax rich people and corporations for it.

employee and employer contributions will more than cover it. Sucks if you're a private contractor.

You do know if we start from here and attempt ANYthing, it's going to cost even more money. and ANYthing we do eventually WILL cost less. But, your taxes will NEVER go down.

They went down with trump and bush. Deficits are good.

THere's probably a few hundred ways to pay for it without reaching directly into the taxpayer's pocket.

Your social service system is already woefully inadequate, making it even less effective would be the conservative approach though... So let's go with the typical progressive response to maybe start looking at the obvious of taxing the richest while restructuring your "national security" or "defense" industries to eliminate redundancy and waste? Y'all might even improve your standings in relative freedom levels from doing so

We could start by cutting our yearly $800+ billion "defense" budget.

Any model of universal coverage is going to save just about everyone money (the notable exception being insurers) in a short period of time. That's why substantial parts of the business community are for it - although not enough, as yet.

Though quite a few in the upper echelons will always be against it, because they know that UHC would make it easer it leave jobs, and that will drive competition in salaries. Short sighted, but that's corporate America.

And the military-industrial complex understands that lack of UHC is one of the foremost drivers of enlistment. One of the Generals said the quiet part out loud recently, that social benefits lower military participation.

Cut the freaking defense budget and stop playing world police.

I think most calculations show that it would require less money than the current system. There might be some big upfront costs developing and transitioning to such a system, but that would probably balance out against the savings over time.

And then who steps into that role? Guarantee it won’t be someone as nice as us.

Both parties are a joke. The republican party doesn't care about we the people and they aren't fiscally responsible. The Democratic Party doesn't care about UHC or raising the minimum wage. When this talk of a fifteen dollar minimum wage began, I thought it was laughable. I still think minimum wages should be a local issue, but I'm willing to accept a federal increase. Something significant though. Biden had a chance to do this and didn't. He also had a chance to give a public option and didn't. For those playing along at home, I've always been in favor of a public option, my posting history (since that seems to be important) speaks to this. Despite what we are being told, Bidenomics is not working. It's smoke and mirrors and they know it. They're hoping nobody notices, but we are. But they'll blame the Republicans and go, "but Trump" because that's their playbook. Never mind that the DNC purposely rigged the game so that Bernie Sanders wouldn't get the nomination. The Democrats are bought and sold just as much as the Republicans, if not more so.

First, don't know if you've noticed, but the last 30 years or so you guys have been looking like pricks.

Second, nobody asked you to be the world's cop... you haven't got a very good image for policing, either. You're perceived as a hammer in want of nails...

Third, even if it was cut by 20% you'd still be spending more than the next 2 dozen countries do. Most of whom are allies or at least not really all that interested in aggressing against you.

The one thing that Trump did right was getting the Europeans to pay their part with NATO. We need that type of leadership again. And no that doesn't mean I want Trump back in the White House, it means exactly what I said, we need that type of leadership again. Get the Europeans to step up their game and we can still be leaders without being world police. We need to be the Captain Picards of the world, not the Gul Dukats.

The beat cop almost always looks like a prick. But I suppose we should just let the bad actors run amok. Let Saddam take the whole Middle East, stuff like that.

No, the role fell to the US because the entire first half of the twentieth century was pretty much all of Europe blasting itself to rubble, what with two world wars an all. The US was the only major industrial power still on its feet after WWII, and the Soviets quickly showed that they were an existential threat. You can whine about it all you like, but we wound up as the world police because no-one else could do it at the time.

The "cop" analogy is a very bad one. The law is not being upheld. That of the Mafia Don is more appropriate.

And yes, that generalises to other world powers, before and since the US was dominant.

Fucking hell, PUTIN did more to get EU states to pay into NATO than Trump did. Trump was hoping they'd balk and he could use it as an excuse to get the US out of it.

again, that's really a problem with policing in (north) america.

Hate to remind you, but WW2 was 80 years ago and the soviets really didn't show themselves as any different type of threat than america's carpet bagging has often proven to be... that you're appearing more like them in some regards doesn't seem like much of a cold war victory either.