Well, the taxes we have here in Denmark are quite high. We either have the fourth highest rate of tax compared to GDP or the highest, depending on which source you go by. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio
The thing is just that taxes means that the money gets spent directly on improving the lives of the people who live here, instead of people having to buy stuff like health care through companies that skim off the top, and who uses the money you pay them to employ people who try to find ways to not help you.
Taxes helps ensure that everything runs efficiently. A healthier population who are more productive, infrastructure that prevents disruptions to business and daily lives alike, and ensuring that people don’t have to resort to crime if they lose their job or get ill. Crime is another source of inefficiency that gets significantly reduced.
Everything helps ensure that the average person is in a much better state of mind, and mood is contagious - even those who pay the most benefit off of it, and pretty much everyone here agrees that it’s money well spent.
In Danish politics, even the right wing would be considered leftists in the US - we have a lot of political parties (16 in parliament, with 4 of them being from the Faeroe Islands or Greenland).
Same here.
I learned to read at 3, and taught myself English before starting in school by reading all the text I came across on my Amiga, recognizing words that were similar to the Danish ones and slowly picking up more and more.
I also got a My Little Professor at 3, a reverse calculator that gave problems to solve. My mom taught me addition, subtraction and multiplication, and my mothers “subtraction is the opposite of addition” was enough for me to figure division out. I did the hardest problems in all four categories in my head, with numbers with up to 4 digits, before starting in school too.
I never did homework in school, only things that had to be turned in. I always had my hand up in class, because my innate curiosity and mental capacity meant that I could figure things out as the questions were written on the blackboard. The lax attitude stuck.
My biggest problem growing up was bullying. I didn’t share interests with hardly any of my classmates, since I was at least 3 years ahead of them in my mental development. My best friend was 10 years old when I was 7, and he and I played Magic together because his classmates couldn’t figure it out. My glasses, small stature, and the fact that I changed schools twice didn’t help.