my connection with the tea party

[FireIceTalon]

The tax structure in a place like Denmark is indeed less progressive than here. But that is compensated by the fact far more citizens have equal access to many services, including this most important sector of healthcare. That is after all, the whole point of having a social democracy. Here, those who can pay get treated. Those who cannot, either go without or do so but face or at least run the risk of financial ruin and/or hardship. Not so in Denmark. And thats because, once again, profits are out of the picture, as they should be in the healthcare sector

At the risk of distilling down your post to the grist. We cannot afford more services, like universal health care unless we restructure our tax code where the middle and lower classes would pay much more. The rich would end up paying about the same. For example, if you taxed the top 1% of wage earners at 100% of income over $1 million, you'd only raise an additional $78 billion. Barely enough to pay for a few months of the current military expenses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, let alone add the trillions needed to expand social services.

Indeed this is true. But even still, at the end of the day it just reinforces my original point that social democracy nation-states are a better system to live under than capitalistic warfare-states. This all boils down to perspective: if you are a lawyer, a banker or an engineer, corporate CEO or lobbyist, the latter is probably preferable. For most everyone else though, I think it's a safe bet the former is more desirable. Had we not had a numbskull president in office from 2000-2008, its likely we could have spent all that wasted money on developing a universal healthcare and/or improving our education system and fixing infrastructure problems instead of reckless military empire and conquest (when we had a huge surplus in the economy), though of course Hillary failed in getting that passed in the previous administration (and she even sold out later on by staying silent on the issue and then receiving checks from various pharmaceutical companies) due to the stupidity and false consciousness of a huge portion of the American populace, of which half can't even point to Great Britain on a map let alone realize that a universal healthcare system would be in their best interest. But I digress. We will have to agree to disagree it seems, but interesting debate nonetheless. Peace^^