This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".
What I don't get is how people in the US pay 25% income tax and don't get outraged for getting almost nothing back. Heck, we just put our daughter in public school, and even though it's a public school we have to pay $360 a month for full Kindergarten, otherwise she can only attend 2 hours a day. Besides that, the school has to promote fundraisers to cover their costs, because apparently the only thing the state pays for is teachers' salaries. At least 911 is free.
To me it feels like all taxes I pay in the US are mostly just for funding wars :( Even in a shitty country like Brazil you get free education (up to grad school - and state universities are the best in the country), free healthcare and a state pension when you retire. Sure, it all sucks one way or another [1], not because there's not enough money but because politicians down there are extremely corrupt - fix the corruption and you get a tremendous quality of life with a 27,5% income tax.
[1] Public healthcare varies from place to place - where I lived (Porto Alegre, RS) it was ok, but in poorer places they don't have a lot of necessary equipment and are understaffed. Although state universities have a lot of research funding and the best professors, the facilities are quite poor. And the state pension is very low, but that could be fixed by fixing the high level of corruption we have first.
[Edit: In Scandinavia] If you pay taxes for health care etc -- then someone else decides the priorities. This is potentially very bad for you. After paying taxes, you won't have enough money/insurance to go do expensive treatments in other places.
(Edit: Let me put it like this. Health care is centrally planned. Consider the size of that system per million people and realize it is very, very hard to make it work.)
My standard example, from me and others I know:
Sweden (and probably Finland) are internationally acknowledged to be bad at catching health problems. Doctors have lots of administration and just don't have enough time to do diagnosis for individual patients.
The worst part is that the doctors will tell you something, anything, to get you out of their hair.
(Anecdotally, Swedish doctors take jobs in Norway partly to get a chance to do their d-mn job.)
Me and others I know have had decades with e.g. losing your favorite sports (easily treated knee problems), tiredness (undiagnosed food allergies with few symptoms, lack of X, etc). And so on.
I have no idea if 0.5% or 10% of the population get their life quality seriously lowered by this. And no one else know either, since that question just isn't examined...
I haven't lived in Scandinavia, but my observations of other parts of the world lead me to suspect that politicians and bureaucrats in that blessed region are simply less corrupt and inept than those in the USA. Given more resources, they deliver more benefits. In the same situation, their American counterparts just inspire more outrage.
No, I don't have a solution for these depressing observations.