Actually, the U.S. government already spends about 41% of GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce..., and that's roughly comparable with some European countries. So taxes are already extremely high.
At least on the federal level, about a quarter is spent on Social Security (income transfer), another quarter is spent on healthcare (mostly Medicare, with some Medicaid) and another fifth goes to defense / warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget.
U.S. tax mostly goes to transfer payments and defense / warfare. Whether that is a good thing is debatable; personally, I'd like to see more innovation and less warfare/welfare (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...), but by pretty much any reasonable standard the U.S. already pays lots of tax.
These are political problems and they have political solutions. It's not "sad" that Silicon Valley can't get faster Internet access; it's the nature of the way California's politics as a whole have developed. The number of veto players (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...) and NIMBYs ensure the problems California is currently experiencing.
It depends. A lot of people are already losing their lives through inaction.
This is slightly tangential, Alex Tabarrok's book Launching the Innovation Renaissance is good on the subject of FDA inertia and spending too much time trying to prove efficacy and too little emphasis on experimentation and rapid iteration: http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Marke... .
It's hard to get any drug to market, and the FDA's intransigence is tragic. Alex Tabarrok has a good book on this called Launching The Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast (https://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Brin...).