> Imagine if this money was put into education or healthcare or transit. We’d actually have a net benefit!
Based on the evidence, it's hard to imagine that lack of money is the problem with those three things.
K-12 education in particular has seen more and more money spent over the decades while the number of students, teachers, and student outcomes have stayed more or less constant (the extra money mostly goes to administrators to administrate the extra money). Higher ed has gotten famously more expensive while delivering a poorer product, with grade inflation and recently a focus on worthless social activism diluting what it means to have a college degree at all.
On healthcare, the US already spends close to one-fifth of its GDP on it. Its per capita spend is over 50% higher than the next-highest country, Switzerland. And what do we have to show for this, other than an obesity rate exceeding one-third the population and diminishing life expectancies? I don't know how more money could possibly help this situation.
Transit only makes sense in a few cities (largely due to idiotic zoning that prevents the kind of densities that would enable transit) and even then, if you look at things like NYC's East Side Access project, it would be hard-pressed for a public works project to spend taxpayer money less efficiently. And to truly improve the transit experience would require a concomitant improvement in the social fabric, which is its own set of problems.