> Sadly in the U.S., public spending often requires some
> appearance of dedicating revenues from some particular source.
That is for sure the reality; but it's not a good reason to support such a move, unless you're campaigning to pay for more transit by cutting the outsourcing of, say, paramilitary security detail for the State Department.
> With real social democracy, most people would have to
> pay more taxes than they do now.
I think that's pretty cynical. I don't think that an easily-imagined alternative would necessarily require an increase in the average taxpayer's burden. It's so slanted against the average taxpayer today that even minor progressive adjustments could make a big difference in the total amount of funding available. I think the crime here is that the progressiveness of the Income Tax has been undermined not directly but rather by all the other regressive tax burdens (like flat Medicare taxes and highly regressive FICA taxes, not to mention sales taxes and use taxes) and that the majority of "loopholes" and tax complexity are at the periphery of the ultra-profitable corporations.
If we fixed those, net tax burden for the middle (and certainly for the bottom) would likely go down. You can't have a "social democracy" without fair taxation.
/jordan