The European social welfare system is collapsing as we speak, and Europeans don't have the same size lower class we do... we have one of the larger lower classes in the modern world. For alot of reasons, not the least of which being the history of slavery.. you don't have that in Europe.
I've always supported increasing taxes on the upper class, and I still do, but your notion of taxing the corporations and the top 1% - it's a crowd pleasing notion and not a real solution, it causes production to become stagnant and leads to long term debt for the country. The corporations, the super rich - we do not own them, they are international. Do you know what happens when you try to take their money? They leave, and they go produce in other countries. This is why our production is stagnant. When production is stagnant you cannot grow your economy... you cannot climb out of debt. You have to print money to stimulate the economy... It leads to a debt spiral (which is what has happened). You are shipping our production overseas, you have been for years.
You can increase taxes on the upper class - I'm fine with that. Increase taxes on lets say the top 30% to the top 1%. Even with a substantial increase to that segment of the population, you do not cover the costs we have -and you don't begin to cover the costs of expanding the programs in the ways you're talking about.
And you still didn't say a word about how globalizing our production enslaves workers overseas.
No, ... I'm talking in terms real value on an international market. We don't produce what we consume, not even close. Don't you not know what hyperinflation is? It's happened in many sovereign nations. You can print toilet paper money but at a certain point it's better to use the printed money as kindling.. Hyperinflation has happened in Germany, Bosnia, Turkey, Russia, the Phillipines... all of those are sovereign nations. And the currency also loses value gradually ... The US economy is extremely entangled with the economies of developing nations, with places like China... We rely on their cheap labor. Over the last 15 years we've managed to print money and have them continue to provide for us, and the trade flow has been fairly stable, because the developing nations rely on our consumption of their products - because they do not consume what they produce, they don't have the infrastructure. But that is changing - China is developing, Chinas economy has quadrupled in output in the last 15 years. 15 years from now we will not be able to force China to work for us. When China can consume its own products it is no longer reliant on the U.S. for its consumption to maintain its economy. Our currency over time will have less buying power, it will downgrade in value, infact when our debt hits 24 trillion the dollar is projected to significantly downgrade in value. This is happening around the world, developing nations have been lifted out of poverty at a rate never before seen over the last decade. They are beginning to consume their own products. We are beginning to compete against them directly. So no, we cannot just continue to print our own money because the value of it degrades in relation to other emerging currencies and our buying power on the international market plummets.