The US should have done this. We could have done it. We don’t know the total economic damage yet, but I would wager it is already many times what it would have cost to do what New Zealand did.

The problem is a huge chunk of the country flies into a rage at the thought of their tax dollars going to people who “don’t work.”

Combine this with decades of Republican rhetoric about “welfare queens,” [1] separating the undeserving poor (read: black and Hispanic people) from the deserving poor... it convinces white voters to hurt themselves just so those people don’t get something that they don’t deserve.

Racism warps American politics again and again and again. I used to live in Atlanta, a city with some of the worst traffic in the country. It lacks adequate public transit because white homeowners didn’t want black people coming to their suburbs [2]. So now everyone suffers.

Our political system is diseased.

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traf...