[feoren]

Almost all of these calculations work out extremely in favor of just giving the poor money. It's expensive to be poor, and not just for them. They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems. Literally just giving all the homeless cheap housing for free is by far the better option if you actually pay attention to the numbers. The same is abundantly clear for free education. But we can't, because we like the suffering. That's it: Americans like it when other people are suffering. We like it so much that we're willing to suffer ourselves just so that those other people can suffer even more.

To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?

[spyckie2]

It's not that the US likes suffering. No, the US likes their 7% ROI.

There's a reason why the average S&P500 is still 7% year over year. Why does Coca Cola have a 3% dividend yield? Why does Google still have a 50% yoy ad revenue growth?

Why does health insurance get priced at 10% annual income, no matter how high your income seems to be? Why does mortgage / rent inevitably go up to 28% of income, no matter how high an income you seem to get?

It's because to make the numbers go up for corporations at the ROI they promised to their stakeholders, they have to make it from somewhere, and that somewhere is the consumers.

As long as we hold sacred the 7% ROI dream, that 7% ROI on assets is going to continue to leech all the excess prosperity and wealth our predecessors have enjoyed. You cannot have an infinite wealth printing machine - news flash - that money comes from society. The house that once costed 200k, and now costs 1.6 million? That 1.4 million went into funding the 7% ROI money printer. The 126k/yr Masters degree? It's also funding the 7% ROI money printer.

That's where all the money is going.

[unholythree]

Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation. We narrowly achieved our soft landing, but that should have taught us that while sometime helicopter money works, it isn’t free.

[smegger001]

Maybe if more of that PPE money had actually been paid to those that need it rather than the employers that pocketed millions instead it would have gone better.

[gowld]

Inflation wasn't caused by the giving, it was caused by the printing. The cure for that is to destroy money (taxation). If you tax the people you just gave to, that's just doing nothing with extra steps. So if you want to help someone by giving them money, you need to take that money from someone else.

Giving without taking is (Keynesian) only useful when it "greases the gears of the economy" enabling productive people to trade with consumer, in which case the inflation is cancelled out by the increased real productivity.

[naasking]

> Except inflation, in the US we gave everyone money a couple of years ago (probably had to) and it caused (probably unavoidable) spectacular inflation

No it didn't.

[matrix87]

> They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems.

Not really sure causality is being poor -> being more expensive

Could go the other way, behaviors that make people more expensive -> being poor

Different hot take: if we took schooling more seriously this would be less of an issue. Which is on the one hand a government problem, on the other hand a cultural problem (compared to, say, Japan)

Just throwing money at a problem without attaching strings or directing how it's used is administrative complacency

[NotMichaelBay]

Here's a grim example where being poor leads to being more expensive. An $80 tooth extraction would have avoided $250,000 in hospital care costs.

https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/165

[matrix87]

Maybe for healthcare, in a preventative sense like eating a healthy diet.

But for stuff that requires actual care like your counterexample, yeah it's 100% a government problem

Maybe for crime, diet, civic engagement, it's more of an education problem