When I was a young kid growing up in Montreal, our annual family trips to my grandparents Florida condo in the 1970s and 80s offered glimpses of a better life. Not just Bubbie and Zadies miniature, sun-bronzed world of Del Boca Vista, but the whole sprawling infrastructural colossus of Cold War America itself, with its famed interstate highway system and suburban sprawl. Many Canadians then saw themselves as Americas poor cousins, and our inferiority complex asserted itself the moment we got off the plane.
Decades later, the United States presents visitors from the north with a different impression. There hasnt been a new major airport constructed in the United States since 1995. And the existing stock of terminals is badly in need of upgrades. Much of the surrounding road and rail infrastructure is in even worse shape (the trip from LaGuardia Airport to midtown Manhattan being particularly appalling). Washington, D.C.s semi-functional subway system feels like a Worlds Fair exhibit that someone forgot to close down. Detroits 90-year-old Ambassador Bridgewhich carries close to $200 billion worth of goods across the Canada-U.S. border annuallyhas been operating beyond its engineering capacity for years. In 2015, the Canadian government announced it would be paying virtually the entire bill for a new bridge (including, amazingly, the U.S. customs plaza on the Detroit side), after Michigans government pled poverty. We are unable to build bridges, we're unable to build airports, our inner city school kids are not graduating, is how JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon summarized the state of things during an earnings conference call last week. Its almost embarrassing being an American citizen.
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The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, ranks its members by overall tax burdenthat is, total tax revenues at every level of government, added together and then expressed as a percentage of GDPand in latest year for which data is available, 2014, the United States came in fourth to last. Its tax burden was 25.9 percentsubstantially less than the OECD average, 34.2 percent. If the United States followed that mean OECD rate, there would be about an extra $1.5 trillion annually for governments to spend on better schools, safer roads, better-trained police, and more accessible health care.
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By contrast, when Kansas Governor Sam Brownback abruptly slashed the states top income tax rate by 26 percent in 2012, state revenues went into a freefall. Yet the notions that government is always a plague upon the economy and that lower tax rates will lead directly to growth and prosperitywhich have together accreted into a core plank of U.S. conservative ideology since the Reagan yearsstill remain popular. And Donald Trump seems intent on steering the country onto the same downward trajectory as Kansas: His Taxpayer First budget plan, released in May, proposed enormous tax cuts that, his administration claimed, would pay for themselves through the economic boom theyd bring about. (In an analysis released last week, the Congressional Budget Office took a much dimmer view.)
otherwise the only extra payment i ever made was for a single bedroom while i was in the hosipital (something like 60€ for a week).