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by gruez 1662 days ago
>My back of the envelope calculation puts the strain of our national bums at 1 dollar a month for every taxpayer.

How did you get those numbers? I took $1/month, multiplied that by 144.3M tax payers, dividing that by the federal poverty line of $12.88k/year (presumably the minimum amount needed for living), and only got enough funds to pay for 134k people. Wikipedia says there were approximately "1.5 million sheltered homeless" in 2014, so that's an order of magnitude more. Add to that, the effects of this program disincentivizing work, and I expect that the final cost to be two orders of magnitude more expensive than you proposed.

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Notice how I mentioned EU membership? It's a non-USA calculation. As I said, I don't know what the rest of the world is doing. I get your $12.88k/year at a fraction of $1/mo for the taxpayers over here and I'm living like a king. No idea why providing basic necessities is supposedly so expensive in the US.

While such leisure disincentivizes bullshit work (which is a good thing), it allows me to do actual, meaningful work. I.e. pursue my lifelong dreams pertaining to computers and art.