• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Let’s make a deal. We cancel SNAP and implement a Negative Income Tax as conservative economist Milton Friedman recommended. That brings everyone up to the poverty line, and everyone on SNAP today won’t need it anymore.

    Benefits for you:

    • close a bunch of SNAP jobs
    • retail stores don’t need to remember what’s snap approved and what’s not

    Benefits for everyone else:

    • no more poverty
    • no application process for benefits, just file a fax return
    • cash instead of food-specific benefits, so people with food can use the cash for something else they need (clothes, utilities, etc)
    • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, poverty’s expensive for everybody.

      Much as I’m loathed to ever agree with an economist (conservative or otherwise), the general thrust there’s sound.

      Let the currency (and energy) flow. For the good of all, the prosperity of all. Even the rich are better off.

      • SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        The rich are better off is a weird saying. Who is better off a billionaire with $1 billion or a billionaire with 10 billion? They are the same, nobody can spend a billion in their lifetime. These people build $500 million mega yatchs because they have nothing better to do with their money.

        • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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          7 months ago

          Better off with everybody in at least sufficiency, if not abundance, even a rather egalitarian abundance with everybody afforded the best, because then they no longer have to live in fear, looking over their shoulder, dealing with the stress of having to maintain a constant deception over the impoverished masses, no longer having to maintain an army to protect them against the masses rising up. Ask them, “Do you have spaceships yet? And the reassurance everybody else does too, so they’re not wanting yours?” and then maybe the “better off” becomes apparent, beyond the mono-linear mundane wealth accumulation tower.