Canada spends about the same as the US for government but has universal healthcare, mostly balanced budgets and less than half the debt per person

Canada got a hold of its government spending problems during the 1990s.

The charts below show that Canada has federal government spending at about 14% of GDP and the US is at 24% of GDP.
Canada’s debt to GDP ratio is about 33% vs 75% for the USA.
Canada has a government deficit this year of about $6 billion vs $600 billion for the US and had deficits of $25-40 billion during the crisis while the US had over $1 trillion deficits each year. Even if multiplying by nine times for population adjustment Canada is still way lower in terms of spending and deficits.
Canada has universal healthcare at the provincial level.

The US has plenty of financial strength to turn things around.
The military spending could go from 5% down to 2% of GDP with no chance of not having enough military to handle any terrorist threat or any issues with countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran or North Korea. China, Russia and the US will not have a shooting war. If there was the US still would have way more military and can get some help from NATO. In that kind of war the US could mobilize and scale up as needed. Also, the military spending that the US has now is on equipment for something like World War 2 or Vietnam. Any future war between big powers would be more cyber war and other new kinds of conflict.

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