[wfhordie]

Ah, I love this game. It's the same one that the super-rich use to convince people barely scraping by -- or anyone who hasn't read Barbara Ehrenreich -- that you should zoom out far enough so that your situation is compared to literal kids with literal flies on their eyeballs. Your life ain't that bad, why you complainin'?

The fact is, this country could fund universal childcare, universal healthcare and universal education from K-16 and not 'wreck the economy.' All it would take is doing what every other industrialized first-world country has done... and done better, with less resources.

And don't worry, the people who you think are actually living in abject poverty aren't reading on HN on a Monday afternoon, so my discredit of their situation will go largely ignored.

[CodeSgt]

I was just correcting your misusage of the term. Everything else you've said has come from you projecting your beliefs onto the discussion.

I also think your perception of social aid in some other countries is wildly distorted. These benefits often come with the side effects of significantly higher taxes and subpar offerings. There's a reason why the US harbors the majority of the worlds prestigious universities and has the best patient outcomes of any medical system in the world.

Of course I agree that things could be improved, they always could. But it's not as trivial as you'd like it to be.

[refurb]

Are you saying other countries don’t have “very poor”?

You’d be wrong then. Countries with universal healthcare and other social programs still have the very poor.