Free Higher Education - This is payed for via a 0.5% wall street tax. Bonds would be taxed at 0.1% and derivitives at 0.005%. What this means is that each time a stock is traded on wall street there would be a 0.5% tax on it. So for every $100 of stocks traded there would be a 50 cent tax applied. For comparison, this is a fraction of the percent of state sales taxes which can range anywhere from 2% to 9% of sales cost. The wall street tax would raise around $83 billion annually which would pay for free higher education for all. Most industrialized countries in the world already have this tax. The wall street tax also has the benefit of discouraging high frequency trading that creates volatility on the stock market.
Universal single payer health care - This plan would be payed for by a list of changes. First there would be a new payroll tax of 8.4% (6.2% by employer, 2.2% by employee). You can compare this to the Social Security payroll tax which is 12.4% (6.2% by employer, 6.2% by employee) or the Medicare payroll tax which is 2.9% (1.45% by employer, 1.45% by employee). An additional 8.4% might sound like a lot at first, but you have to consider this would be offset by neither the employer nor employee having to pay for medical insurance anymore. This would raise $840 billion per year.
There would also be a change in the top marginal tax brackets to pay for this. This will have no effect on anyone making less than $250k per year. Money made over $250k will gradually shift to higher tax brackets. $250k bracket goes from 33% to 37%. All the way up to >$10M bracket goes from 39.6% to 52%. While raising the top marginal tax rate to 52% on the highest earners may sound high, you have to compare this to the past where the top marginal rate under FDR was 92%! (and the wealthy did just fine then). This would raise $110 billion per year.
The next thing used to pay for it is taxing capital gains at the same rate as income. Capital gains is how the wealthy makes a lot of their money. It is currently taxed much lower than regular income, which means the wealthy pays much less on their income than we do. Taxing capital gains at the same rate as income would raise $92 billion per year.
There are a few other adjustments that add up to about $50 billion per year that don't affect anyone but the rich (hard deductions limit on income over $250k, 0.3% estate tax on inheritance over $3.5 million).
All in all, the single payer system would cost us at least $310 billion less per year than the current health care system we have in place. And that's just right now. Every year the cost of health care is dramatically rising. Single payer would level it off (in 5 years, we could be saving $500 billion a year or more).
In exchange for saving money we get universal health care (meaning no more worrying about health costs or going bankrupt). universal medicine coverage, vision coverage, hearing coverage, oral coverage, eliminate deductibles and dramatically reduce co-pays. Every single citizen in the US would be 100% covered for all health conditions from the day we're born to the day we die.
Don't say it can't be done. We're the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't offer universal health coverage. And we currently pay more for not offering universal health coverage than every industrialized nation.
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