https://youtu.be/Qi0HGYftyLQ
We could have had high speed rail, free universal Healthcare, no homeless people, and still had money left over.
If that is what the video suggested as possible, then he ain't worth jack...I only watched a little bit, and got bored with the obviousness of the points. First, with the US flushing about $2.2 trillion into the Afghanistan occupation, that would round out to about $100 billion a year. Rough estimates for Iraq is another $2 trillion over roughly a decade. So between the 2, it would still only be about $300 billion a year. Yeah, that is a shit load of money, but it wouldn't come close to covering your laundry list, let alone have anything left over.
My napkin plan would be something like $25 billion for your homeless issue; $25 billion for real aid to the third world; and $200 billion for real infrastructure. I'd boast NASA funding by about $10 billion a year. Then I'd boast funding to support things like high speed internet expansion, 5G, and STEM education with the remaining $40 billion a year.
On UHC: Medicare's budget alone last year was $776 billion. Expanding that to the whole country would cost more than that. However, most of the cost of UHC could be covered by the combined budget of Medicare and Medicaid, and then general taxes coming from all the money that would have gone towards health insurance premiums. Those 3 components should roughly cover UHC. In reality it should even cost much less than that, as the US spends far more per capita than the EU on health care in total.
Ending homelessness is a nice idea, but I'd go for minimizing it as it will always be around at some level. Say adding $25 billion a year towards the issues around homelessness would do quite a bit when considering the other changes.
Pumping $200 billion a year into infrastructure over the last 20 years would have done a hell of a lot more than the waste in the ME. High speed rail in some parts of the US would be nice, but that all by itself would be a huge budgetary consideration, so I left it off my napkin plan.
And much of the above spending would have done far more for the US economy/GDP than the warmongering we have done. The VA budget by now would be even smaller than it was back in 2001, as the only veterans still alive in large numbers would be from the Vietnam war. War veterans end up homeless at a much higher rate than others, so that would also reduce the homeless issue. Medical expenses is the single largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the US, and I have to assume it would also be a driver for homelessness. And Clownstick spent 4 years trying to tear down everything he and his shitting minions he brought in could do to un-help those in need, at least until courts blocked him. So we wouldn't have had that adding to the homeless problem if we hadn't had SCROTUS. There are other things that King FiS would do to the budget, but this more than covers your 'what if' question...
