I wouldn't deny there is always going to be some truth in this. At the end of the day money does fix most problems and any problem that is a high enough priority will likely have more resources allocated to it.
However, it seems the vast majority of people struggle with solutions more complex than "spend more money". Even the media will discuss problems in the simple terms of how much money one group of politicians want to spend another.
I find myself often having to explain there are limited resources and for the government spend more money per capita on anything they either need to increase the tax burden, borrow more and offset the problem to future generations, or find some way to increase productivity. The only one of these that is a solution long-term is raising productivity since it's not possible to sustainably keep spending more in real terms via tax increases and borrowing alone.
A few examples of conversations I've had recently:
Kids falling behind in school? Spend more money. Bad health care? Spend more money. Energy bills too high? Spend more money.
What upsets me is that it's difficult for me to even argue that higher taxes, more borrowing and more government spending can't be the solution to all of our problems. I often get accused of not caring about the issues or not understanding people's suffering, but this is exactly why I get so worked up about this and why I want us to find sustainable solutions.
One major problem we have here in the UK is that people will not accept any other solution to our healthcare problems other than spend more money on the NHS. It's really difficult to explain to people that when real GDP per capita has not meaningfully increased in the last 15 years and when we have an aging population and a growing population we literally cannot afford the same quality of healthcare unless it comes at a significant expense to spending elsewhere. This isn't my opinion, this is just the economic reality of the longer-term realities of the situation we're in. The amount of government spends per capita far more a product of the country's GDP per capita than of relative tax rates and government deficits.
Do you agree this is a problem, and if so is there anything we can do to make political discourse more pragmatic about the complexity of the problems we face? I get the sense people were more pragmatic about the limits of government spending in the past, and that this idea that the government should be able to fix all of our problems is a recent trend. It also seems to be playing into dissatisfaction people have with politics more generally and I don't think this is healthy for democracy.
If privatization hasn't been the answer, it kinda makes sense why people would push for more public resources. You still make a good argument, but you should frame the fiscal impact of these suggestions as opportunity cost rather than inherently sinful.
One way we’ve been “spending money” is cutting taxes on the rich in many countries, particularly the US and UK. Another problem the UK has is that since Thatcher there has been a lot of corner cutting such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
and
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/05/raac-and-rui...
I think it does not help that the political systems in the US and UK are so uncompetitive in their own different ways. (The tories have such a lock on the UK no matter how badly they screw up I wonder if it is a nominally 1 party state like Singapore, in the US it seems many people will vote for the same party no matter what happens.). One consequence of that is that universal values that almost everyone can agree on, such as “anti-corruption” and “getting what we pay for in our taxes” fall by the wayside as you don’t have the feeling you can vote against corrupt policians that are on “your side”.
Cost escalation of health care is its own special phenomenon, one which has at least been moderated a bit by recent changes in the US
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01478
I suspect many people would take issue with this claim in its strongest form, which seems to be at the heart of your argument. It's true on anyone's account that the overall prosperity of a country (or lack thereof) places constraints on what it can spend; and the UK's prosperity does seem to be on a downward trend following Brexit. Even so, following 13 years of Conservative/coalition government, it's not really credible to suggest that public spending is currently maxed out. There is considerable wiggle room. More money could be spent on the NHS if there were the political will to do so. Germany, for example, spends a higher percentage of its GDP on healthcare than the UK.
Probably somewhere.
There's more of a tax less, restrain spending problem in political discourse in the US.
> One major problem we have here in the UK is that people will not accept any other solution to our healthcare problems other than spend more money on the NHS.
Clearly not really a problem with policy as much as it may or may not be with the discourse; UK share of GDP spent on the NHS was essentially flat for the decade pre-COVID, starting and ending at 10%, and varying between 9.6%-10% in between.
> The amount of government spends per capita far more a product of the country's GDP per capita than of relative tax rates and government deficits.
That thesis is essentially that government spending is a conatant share of GDP. Pre-COVID, whose effects on spending haven't completely passed, UK government spending as a share of GDP had declined for the preceding decade.
Not only is government spending not a constant function of GDP, there's little evidence that spending more than can be afforded, on the premise that affordability is a constant function of GDP, in the UK, but the opposite seems to be the general case.