40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

That's an ad-hominem attack that has nothing to do with the substance of this discussion. How about sticking to the actual numbers?

> 1) With respect to healthcare, investopedia has different numbers than the ones she cites

Let's assume the investopedia numbers are right (though it's not clear why their uncited administrative costs number is more authoritative than an OECD report on administrative costs). They claim 5% of GDP in administrative costs (25% of 20%). The drug numbers they mention as being "saveable" are $11.6 billion per year; that's .0006% of GDP. No other numbers are cited for drugs there. For defensive medicine, .03% of GDP. For the other items, no numbers are given.

So we could potentially spend about 5% of GDP less on healthcare; the other bits all look like rounding error on that. I used $19.39 trillion for the current annual US GDP, fwiw.

And just to be clear, the actual US federal government spending on healthcare is about $1 trillion a year, or maybe 5-6% of GDP, as far as I can tell. The remaining 14-15% of GDP is spent outside the federal budget already. If we're trying to put it in the federal budget that means raising taxes by 9% of GDP or so.

> Eliminate Imperialism - Save > $1T dollars by not fighting wars based on lies.

This would definitely be nice, but that doesn't seem to be what most people propose. Again, the context is people proposing "just tax the 1%".

> Tax the (Natural Person) Rich

Right, this is the thing under discussion: taxing "the 1%". The total income of the top 1% is something around 20% of total personal income according to https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-percent-receive-record-high-s... and total personal income is around $16.5 trillion according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/216756/us-personal-incom...

So if we taxed away every single penny "the 1%" earn, that gives us 16% of GDP. That's assuming that there are no disincentive effects, emigration, etc, etc. Probably a bad assumption.

> Eliminate the Rentier Class

I'm not sure what your actual proposal is here, but at this point I suspect we're way outside the realm of the politically feasible or desirable. That said, can you quantify this, please?

> Tax the Tax Evaders

I would be very much behind this idea. Again, this is not the same as "just tax the 1%".

Anyway, last I checked US government spending (including all levels of government) was about 37% of GDP. If we add the very optimistic 16% we can get by taxing "the 1%" we get to 53%. That's still less than France or Finland or Denmark spend. Yes, we could nationalize healthcare if we did that, fairly easily. We couldn't do all the other things people want to do by "taxing the 1%".

I agree that if we radically restructured everything about how the government is funded and what we spend money on then there are a lot more options. But, again, what people tend to propose is "just tax the 1% and use that money for X, Y, and Z". And there's not enough money in that bucket to do all those things.

One reason I stopped believing is because of all the hypocrisy I'd hear. Go to church on Sunday, leaders of the church officially deny supporting a political agenda, then they go about instituting anti-gay propaganda and fighting against legalizing marriage, or legalizing medical marijuana. Heck the LDS church is trying to ban the ability to record someone (like a Bishop) without them knowing, because they're afraid of the backlash they themselves might have (and so far are having with recent events).

Yet, I still admire Jesus and what he taught... the sad thing is.. there's no Jesus in most of America or they'd be fighting to cure the sick and the poor, they'd want universal healthcare and guaranteed basic income. Even Jesus forgave the Harlot and welcomed her at his table, so why not forgive the drug addict and give them a home regardless?

I say make GBI require you spend it on rent/mortgage -- to receive it you can't be homeless - you must have a physical address and only one check per address + x amount per person living in house, --maybe 2k per house/apartment, 500 per adult/child extra living therein.

This even helps the economy as poor people are most likely to spend the money locally instead of squirrel it away in a trust fund or investment.

If I had GBI, I'd quit my day job and finally launch a side-business or go freelance full-time, but I work 60 hours a week on salary for 80k as a developer because I have to pay the bills and my wife stays home with the kids. I could really use that money personally to just float by when freelance dries up, or my side project fails, and I start building the next one.

> the fact is that a living human is killed in an abortion.

This is absolutely the talking point of somebody pushing an agenda and represnting it here as a simple “fact” is specious at best.

I didnt say the individuals are the source of the issue. I'm saying as a society we screwed up by more or less creating this issue. Things like a lack of financial (and other) education, or failing to teach adequate data science in high school etc.