It is probably easier to provide, say, free health care (or health care that doesn't also bloat the profits of insurance companies) to a population of, say, 80 million (and Scandinavian countries have much lesser populations than that) than to 330 million. Aye, there is more revenue in the latter, but there is also a higher absolute number of persons requiring health care. Is there enough health care to go around? If we consider health care, for the present, as a consumer good, then shouldn't classic economics apply? If demand exceeds supply, somebody loses. Much the same can be said about, say, free college tuition. Aye, it is possible, when there is no social imperative to provide a college education for all. But in the U.S., we like to push the "everybody should go to college" shtick. Again, in terms of supply and demand, is there enough education to go around? Sure, there are a lot of qualified people who aren't teaching (I'm one of them), or who are only working as adjuncts (which is not quite hell, but it's in the same zip code). Teachers do need to be paid, after all, they can't live on air (however much we're trying that experiment). But who would suggest that, yes, college should be free, but it should also only be for a smaller percentage of undergraduates?
None of this is to say that it is impossible to have such things, only that it must be recognized that to do so, there is going to have to be a fairly exhaustive re-distribution of income. To say otherwise is to perpetuate a con. Unfortunately, re-distributing income is not too well received in the U.S., which is probably one reason why even Mr Sanders advocates tax rates that are not even comparable to 1980, to say nothing of 1960.
-- Mal
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