Great News for Skeeter and Bobby Ray !

I can do better than that just off top of my head.

Norway

Sweden 

Finland

Denmark

France

England 

Canada 

Netherlands 

Those countries have large social safety nets, with high tax rates, but the economies are capitalists. 

So there remains no succesful socialist economies. 

In any case all those countries GDP is lower than 6 years ago. Germany has negative interest rates  

You are confusing socialism with communism. When Bernie Sanders, AOC, I or any liberal talks about Socialism we are talking about Western European style socialism like it is practiced in those countries I listed. By your definition above no country would be socialist because there is some elements of capitalism. Even China which still defines itself as a Communist nation would be capitalist using your criteria because it has private enterprise. 

Also, as I've already pointed out, we are already a quasi-socialist country, and I'll bet even Trumpers like such things as free primary and secondary education and government paid-for highways and bridges. And quite a few of the older, rotting-away Trumpers are collecting Social Security.

Tom, you're really stretching to prove your "point." "The economies are capitalists"?? News flash: socialism refers to a system of GOVERNMENT. There is no economic system other than state-run communism (which doesn't exist anywhere in the world now, except in North Korea, perhaps) that doesn't have some elements of capitalism in it.

Your point that those countries' GDP is lower then it was (and I don't necessarily believe you) is irrelevant. What matters is per-capita income and production, and the countries Mark listed are ALL in the top twelve worldwide and have been for decades. So they've been pretty successful, even though they have SOOOOOCIALISM. Or maybe BECAUSE they have it.

Unlike Trumpers, I look at evidence and am willing to recognize its reality. The social democracies of Europe are the most successful countries in the world, by any metric. People there are happy and prosperous. And yeah, they have SOOOOOOOCIALIZED medicine--and some of the highest life expectancies in the world (much higher than ours!). So shouldn't we look at that to see what they're doing right? Wouldn't that be the responsible thing to do, as a society?

I know; no, no, we have to concentrate on maximizing shareholder values and making billionaires richer. Who cares how long our citizens live, as long as we accomplish that!

Learn punctuation, Molly. Jeez.

You're not thinking logically. With a "70-80 percent tax" in place, how would the rich get richer? And how many people work 50-60 hours a week? Not many.

One thing conservatives always ignore is that when your health care, education, retirement, etc. etc. etc. are all paid for by your taxes, you don't have to pay for those things out of pocket. So you can easily tolerate a higher tax rate, because when the day is done, you're paying less to support yourself (and the reason for that is economies of scale: look it up if you don't know what that is). The numbers you cite are hypothetical and unrealistic, of course--for instance, in Western Europe, someone earning that amount would be taxed at about 35%, not 70-80%.

Again, Kevin loses the argument and calls on the punctuation police.  Kevin do you ever get tired of just being flat out wrong?

Kevin, can you name one damn thing that the government does more cheaply than the private sector?  And I should turn over my health care to them?  Have you ever gone to the DMV or the post office?

You narcissistic piece of crap......everyone is "unrealistic" or "traitors" or "nazi's" to you.....but you are so far left, that I think you are coming on my far, far, far right at this point.

Now give us another one of your goofball rants......or better yet, call the spelling, grammar or punctuation police, because that is all you got. 

But since I mentioned different police units, see if you can make it through one post with swearing at the 100 million or so people who disagree with you.

A 40% tax rate is not unusual, plus a value added tax in the 20+% range.  Sweden is the league leader with a 70% tax rate.

Since kevin is such a fan of these systems, why doesn't he move to socialist success stories such as Venezuela & Cuba

lvfritz said, Kevin, can you name one damn thing that the government does more cheaply than the private sector?  And I should turn over my health care to them?  Have you ever gone to the DMV or the post office?

Government Insurance:

The trustees’ summary listed total Medicare expenditures of $678.7 billion for 2016, of which $9.2 billion was characterized as "administrative expenses." That works out to 1.4 percent

Private Insurance:

Budget Office broke those costs down, they put administrative costs in the nongroup market at 20 percent, small-group market at 16 percent and the large-group market at 11 percent.

Source For Numbers

I can recall reading quite a few articles on what a disaster it was for communities that privatized essential services like water and sewer.  It seems there is no incentive for the private sector contractors to do maintenance or provide clean water.  They just run the utilities on a shoestring as long as they can to extract the maximum profit and when the infrastructure breaks down they abandon ship leaving the community to rebuild their infrastructure that was effectively looted by corporate profit takers. 

I can look at the mess of privatized toll roads here in my state as well.  The maintenance is poor and the tolls have gone up so much that passenger traffic uses the old highways and the toll roads are left to commercial traffic which leaves the government paying the added expense of increased wear and tear on the old state highways and regular citizens not getting the benefit of the infrastructure their tax dollars already paid for. 

Then there is the disaster of how private contractors have run state lotteries.  The numbers show the states ran their own lotteries more efficiently and profitably. 

We also tried to outsource/privatize most of our Divison of Family and Children here in Indiana to IBM and it was a miserable failure.

Fritz, your arguments are stupid and flaccid, and you've forfeited the right to have me respond to you.

The only thing conservatives have as an argument is stupid shit like Tom's "why doesn't he move to..." He needs to repeat fourth grade once again to develop his reading skills. I never said there were no such things as failed socialist countries. There are also many failed capitalist countries. So bloody what?

To give Fritz's stupid question an answer he doesn't deserve, government-run health care (SOOOOOOOOOOCIALIZED MEDICINE!!!!) costs about half as much as the system we currently have in the US. I'm referring to Canada and Western Europe, whose societies and wealth levels are roughly comparable to ours.

Why is the government option inherently cheaper? Because we wouldn't have to pump billions of dollars of profits into the medical and pharma companies. Also, one out of every five dollars spent in US healthcare is administration and billing. Wouldn't it be cheaper if there was just one entity to bill?

Fritz will now post some stupid bleat that the above is all FAKE NOOZE.

Mark - medicare costs tend to be a lot higher which account for the lower admin rate. For example, a $100,000 cost takes the same effort as a $300 doctor billl.

There is also a $40 trilion unfunded medicare deficit