That depends on your level of income. Generally speaking, the people who pay the most in taxes as a percentage of income in America are small business owners. The ones who are at the bottom of the top tax bracket get hit pretty hard compared to most Americans.
Yes, a lot of Americans get more back from refunds than they pay in, but that's a separate issue. Two things would substantially fix our public debt situation. First, government should stop spending more than it collects, and second, deductions should be a lot more limited than they currently are. Of course, given the prominence of the bread and circus vote, neither approach will likely happen.
I'm ok with socialized healthcare if we use the French model. A lot of other systems aren't so good (like the Canadian one or the British one).
I'm impressed. I thought you were beyond sensible talk. I don't know much about people who get more back than they pay in. But the whole point I was making about that is that taxes aren't really taxes if you get most of it back when you file a tax return. Only what you might not get back is the real tax. The rest can be looked at as a short term loan to the government. Also, in some other countries, people don't have to file tax returns at all. It is all done automatically. I think that companies who do tax returns are making too much money. So we have to do it the hard way.
As for what we spend, what needs to be done is to mostly do away with capitalism as we know it. In my town there are plans to privatize a couple of the bridges and make them toll bridges. But do you know what the main concern of any private business is? Profit. Maybe they plan to replace the city workers with illegal invader scab scum mexicans. But when there is no need to make a profit, obviously the government can do things cheaper. Also, do you know what the number one priority for any civilization is? Which has been shown over and over throughout human history? Employment for their people. That was the real reason behind the pyramids, the great wall, stonehenge and a zillion other great public works projects. Though unfortunately civilizations most often choose another path. War.
Here in the U.S., sending our jobs to basically slave labor third world countries is just the opposite of what we should be doing. At the very least, the things we use we should make ourselves. Take our trade deficit with China alone. Each year it costs the U.S. anywhere from around 300 billion to over 700 billion. And I tend to agree with the higher number. And seeing what it costs in social problem and people in prison due to unemployment or underemployment, it is probably way higher than 700 billion a year.
Also, before the coronavirus hit, we were around 19 trillion in debt. Each year we had to pay 420 billion dollars just on the interest of our debt. On top of that, we had around 61 trillion dollars worth of unfunded obligations. I wouldn't like to try and split the hair between a debt and an obligation. What this meant was that each man, woman child and fetus in the U.S. is around $250,000 in debt!
As for universal health care, we don't have to go by the French model or any other. We can choose which ideas in each work the best and use them in our plan. To hell with our healthcare system. All those parasites who sell medical coverage insurance policies can go to hell. Also, there was one drug maker that made a drug that had been around for a long time. They decided to raise the price of it by 100,000%!
Seeing how taxes and what is basically socialism came up, I will include a couple of charts about taxes. I will also include something that FDR spoke about.
https://youtu.be./3EZ5bx9AyI4