[quote] Side note: If the US can afford to spend ~10 times more than the second most expensive military power in the world, there is no reason college and healthcare shouldn't be free. For example, the numbers average around 600 billion for the US. Russia, the most cited second place, has a measly ~70 billion.[/quote] Well you can't have all of them, someone will probably disagree but the old proverb "you can't have your cake and eat it too" is appropriate to attribute to the structure. You can't have a huge military such as ours and have free healthcare and college with the way everything is structured currently. To fund the other things you would have to cut military spending, which would lead to people in the services losing their jobs inevitably. If you wanted free healthcare you would have to get rid of the "private provider system" we have now. A private system healthcare system and social health system cannot coexist because the two would conflict with eachother. With college you can't have free college and have colleges accepting the current amount of people they do now. France for example has free higher education paid for through taxes, as a result they only accept a limited number of people who are capable. The reality of higher education is that not everyone has the capacity to succeed in the setting rich or poor. For people who are capable college should be more reasonably priced.