> I think it’s fine.
Good. You can do it on your own dime, then.
Good. You can do it on your own dime, then.
My mother was one of these people and that's what she did. She eventually used her depression which was caused by her drug addiction to get on to social security disability. She spent her entire adult life living in group homes where all the other residents were also on social security disability and when I would hang out there you could guarantee there was going to be drugs and beer everywhere as the cable TV played.
The part of West Virginia where her family was and I would spend my summers was filled with people who had a way of life of living on the "draw".
People like yourself who come from culturally functional backgrounds simply have no reference point to understand the other cultural dysfunction that people like my mother and her friends exhibited.
She overdosed on oxycontin in 2015 and from the years 1985 to then she never worked a single job or paid a single bit of taxes and she never wanted to.
I understand that I am simply spouting an anecdote here, but no matter where my mom lives she always had roommates that were just like her. There's an entire subculture of people that do this.
For every one of these people there are many more who aren’t like this and do manage to claw their way out of poverty (or at least give their children a legitimate shot at it) with the help of social programs.
That's an interesting suggestion given how horrific US infrastructure is. If only they actually fixed the roads we drive on with the trillions of dimes they already take from us.
Let's start with the fact that roads and infrastructure haven't been getting fixed properly for the past 20 to 30 years now despite a massive government expansion in spending and overall size since ~1999. Nearing $8 trillion in total government spending and they can't give us nice infrastructure or fix basic things like roads.
California is supposedly awash in a tax revenue surplus of epic scale, and yet their roads and infrastructure are horrific, akin to developing nation conditions across Los Angeles as a matter of routine the past 10-15 years.
edit: the downvotes are amusing, given how absolutely atrocious US infrastructure is, and given there is probably nobody left on this planet that doesn't know how bad it is. Every single person reading this knows how bad it is and how poor of a job the US has done at allocating its tax revenue the past several decades. It has been discussed endlessly here on HN for a decade or more, and now I point out that fact of reality and it's unpopular; un huh, sure.
Sure, Germany and the Netherlands have excellent infra. Do you know what's "third world" infrastructure like? It's not having potable water. It's cities of 50K people with mostly dirt roads. It's highways with potholes literally bigger than mortar craters.
We do have rolling blackout on occasion. We do have non potable water on occasion. We have completely fucked up roads and failing bridges. We don't have underground powerlines in most places.
(hint: military spending to name one thing, would be cut in half; the monsters in DC, the globalists and forever-war advocates that dominate both parties and have us de facto occupying Syria right now, would never allow this)
Now that would be a glorious, worthy experiment. Of course everybody - without exception - knows the outcome ahead of time.
The problem with directly earmarking taxes is that whoever pays more taxes gets more control over government spending. People with more money already have too much control of the government; I would rather not support policies that make it even worse.
In the US the public can't really choose to meaningfully allocate money for public health. It's catastrophically expensive.
This is an idea that's trendy in local government, especially among progressives; "participatory budgeting". I don't think it's going to work much better in municipal government, but you can watch and see whether the participatory budgets outperform the competently-managed ones.
The cliched libertarian trope is that all our money goes into the military; the sharper libertarian critique would be that the United States is a health and benefits management provider with an army attached.
I don't even know what a "globalist" is, by the way. Maybe you could pry that phrase a little further open for us.
They were not asking for firefighters to be privatized.
Instead they were asking for people to be allowed to earmark their tax revenue.
So, someone could move their money from military spending, and put it in firefighting, for example.
Firefighting is the same. If I’ve put in place fire prevention equipment & paid for insurance why should I fund public firefighting?
I think quite a lot of people would choose to divert their military tax dollars to firefighting.
> remove their funds from the public school coffers.
I think that many more people would choose to put their tax dollars into public schools, than they would other things, such as the military.
Personally, I don't consider forcing people to work for others who are able but unwilling to work "looking out for each other". I call that slavery.