In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax, and this model does not go down well with the American electorate, generally speaking.
So I think you don't need high taxes, but rather a long term outlook and the will to execute it, across multiple election cycles. Boston's Big Dig is the most recent example of such a project from the US that I can think of.
Switzerland: 29.4 (or about 9% higher)
I obviously cannot comment on your particular tax situation but it is not representative of the country as a whole.
Person 1-10 make $10. Person 11 makes $100
Case 1, a flat tax of 30%
Person 1-10 pay $3, person 11 pays $30, for a total tax of $60 on $200 total income, that is 30%.
Case 2, a progressive tax of 1% on income up to $10, and a tax of 80% above that.
Person 1-10 pay $1, Person 11 pays 1% on $10 and pays 80% on $90 which is $72, a total tax of $82 on $200 income, a 41% tax!!!
The big difference is that, in Switzerland, the rich pay taxes.
I was merely commenting on the fact that Switzerland does, in fact, have taxes that are higher than what we have in the US.
Edit: I guess the point I'm trying to make: Switzerland is not all that different from the US (on a small scale), it just combines a moderate amount of corporate liberties with enough personal liberties to strike a good balance. In many ways it's like the Libertarian's small government, locally organized model, it just adds enough social and health insurance safety nets and a good public infrastructure on top. Think every county having their own tax law, school system, road network etc.
US broke 40% spending to GDP recently. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_brief.php?brief...
Switzerland spends ~31-34% GDP. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/government-spend...
PS: O wait, debt and interest payments don't count... Sorry.
There are various models (GP, doctor on call, semi-private, private etc.), with different franchise, effectively you pay somewhere between 250-500 CHF monthly. Franchise is amount 300-2500 CHF per year that you still pay from your pocket for treatment of illnesses, then insurance kicks in with 100% coverage. Of course the lower the threshold (ie 300), the more you pay per month. Dentists and eye care are almost never covered, only with most expensive ones. FYI CHF=~ USD.
Apart from that dental and eye care, probably the best model I've ever seen. Medical care is top notch, hospitals definitely don't lack proper (often expensive) equipment, rather the issue is there is not enough doctors/nurses.
When people in other cities complain that raised highways are ugly the civil engineers point to Boston and say "well there's your alternative, take your pick"
I'm not disagreeing with your opinion on long term projects but don't hold up the Big Dig as an example of the way things should be.
Years later, sure the tunnels are cool but they're expensive and can't be upgraded reasonably (a problem with tunnels in general). The Big plans need to be future proofed, something you can still get utility from even if the big picture changes. Highways in tunnels under cities don't fit that (railways are somewhat of a different story IMO). An expressway that bypasses the city, maybe but a normal highway with exits, no way (IMO). The I/O locations (exits) and volumes of a highway change too frequently to invest to heavily in any particular stretch of highway.
I think the culture change that needs to take place isn't the long term outlook but more responsibility with other people's money. You can't have a long term approach to infrastructure while people are trying to squeeze every dollar out of every project. As it stands, the time it takes for something to pay for itself (monetarily, via utility or otherwise) is impractical because the time something like $project stops being "in the red" is long past the time it's a clapped out POS that needs an overhaul.
I think it's worth looking at the beginning of the 20th century when large civil engineering projects were more common for insight into the social/political side of things.
Compare San Francisco and Oakland - SF stopped the building of cross-town freeways in the famous "freeway revolt." Oakland was bi-sected by freeways which destroyed neighborhoods, many of which have still not recovered. The worst is the CA-24/I-980 connector.
The US already has a significant amount of spending on infrastructure. Instead of finger point at some other expense, you should ask why the current money is not giving you good results. Schooling has the same issue in the US.
Defense spending is our third largest expense, behind Social Security and Medicare. It's not a pointless argument to make.
We should be taking a machete to the military industrial complex welfare state in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...
But it's too binary to argue that the production of high-tech defense systems (like planes and carriers) doesn't involve a large amount of R&D.
Take the same money and spend it on R&D projects whose purpose is to benefit society from the get-go.
plenty of nasty diseases could be put out of existence with just a fraction of that, for example
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings...
Frankly I don't see why HN commenter are so pro tiny European countries which are almost always have sustained due to US military support and are choke full of nativist/racists (Check out white sheep kicking black sheep poster). Be thankful for generous US citizens spending to keep world safe otherwise Europe and Asia would wake up to the next World war within months.
Plus that funky part about generous US - the world these days would be a much better place if US would just mind their matters for a while. Switzerland couldn't care less about US either, americans are not preferred expats here now (good luck opening a bank account here due to US government foreign policies for expats).
As for tolerance, Switzerland has by far the highest amount of foreigners from whole Europe, and yet it's much safer than any other european country, all religions mixed (ie very strong buddhist community) etc. World could learn a thing or two from this place ;)
As far as swiss banks are concerned the world is actually worse off because of corrupt wealth hidden in their accounts. If anything Americans should be happy that one cannot simply open a swiss bank account.
Actually, the U.S. government already spends about 41% of GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce..., and that's roughly comparable with some European countries. So taxes are already extremely high.
At least on the federal level, about a quarter is spent on Social Security (income transfer), another quarter is spent on healthcare (mostly Medicare, with some Medicaid) and another fifth goes to defense / warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget.
U.S. tax mostly goes to transfer payments and defense / warfare. Whether that is a good thing is debatable; personally, I'd like to see more innovation and less warfare/welfare (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...), but by pretty much any reasonable standard the U.S. already pays lots of tax.
As a middle-class American who lived and worked for a decade in Switzerland (and I made more money there), I can confirm that I always paid less as a percentage in Switzerland.
The problem is that the US tax system is so complex that once you reach a certain level of wealth, it pays for you to have someone find those loopholes. Warren Buffet famously decried that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, for example: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...
Swiss roads have no potholes, there are no homeless, they have universal healthcare and a free university system. I've lived there and I paid less in taxes, and one big difference is that the wealthy pony up their fair share.
wealthy pay, superwealthy just a bit due to special tax deals (which still benefits the country compared to them leaving for say Monaco or gazillion of other tax havens all around the globe).
Our taxes are poorly structured, and the spending of the revenue is poorly prioritized and poorly accounted for. That is the real problem.
> In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax
That's ideological bullshit that is directly at odds with reality. There's another perfectly good and effective way to get shiny new trains and infrastructure projects, and America is doing it with their freight railroads. It's called private investment, we've been doing a lot of it, very successfully, and railroads have been thriving. (The Economist, in a 2010 article which is linked nearby in this thread, opined that "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best" and that "They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world.")
What America's railroads don't have is effective private passenger rail. Private investment won't deliver it because it doesn't make economic sense right now. Some of that is for geographical reasons (population density), some of that is regulatory risk (echoes of the regulatory hangover which helped drive the final nail in the coffin when railroads were already facing difficult competition from the growth of air travel and cars, including implicit highway subsidies) and fear of competing with quasi-governmental subsidized entities like Amtrak, some of that is actual market failure and what the economists call path dependency. Government investment in passenger rail in this nation (including high-speed rail) is something that could be meaningfully countenanced in this nation, though, obviously... if people thought they could trust the government to do make it worthwhile. (We'll see how efforts like the California high-speed-rail project will serve to convince people - boondoggle or good idea?)
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentations...
If you buy cabbages from a farmer and make cabbage soup, you are taxed on the value addition that soup making results in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_count...
but it is bloody expensive, plain ticket for 20 km ride costs as much as 5 hour ride on fast train back home. everybody here buys early "ticket" that halves the prices of all tickets for 180 usd