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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

Actually the solution to poverty is quite simple! You directly give everyone the base resources necessary to lead a dignified life. Some people instead prefer to create narrowly-targeted means-tested programs incentivizing hypothesized third-order economic effects to improve some abstract wellness metric twenty years in the future. The reason why they do this is because it’s cheaper, of course, but someone trying to change the course of a stream with the perfectly-placed stone will always believe the task is impossibly complicated.

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> Actually the solution to poverty is quite simple! You directly give everyone the base resources necessary to lead a dignified life.

I guess even the most complex, difficult things can be accomplished, if only we just do them. Becoming a millionaire is simple, just have someone give you a million dollars. Being a CEO is quite simple, just get hired as one and make smart decisions that are good for the company.

I mean there’s a lot more involved, not just in robbing the non-poor to give freebies to the poor, but also all of the societal and economical and all sorts of other consequences they could have that, non-real-world studies that prove nothing aside (countless times we are told something will be so, but then it’s not - we do, however, have centuries of failed socialist and communist history giving us red flags), are quite likely to happen.

There were 37.2 million people living below the poverty line in the USA in 2020[1]. The 2021 budget for the US military was 705.4 billion dollars[2]. Let's be anomalously generous to the military industrial complex and only cut that in half, to $352.7 billion dollars - about matching the combined military spending of both China and Russia (combined population 1.5 billion people). We can direct the other $352.7 billion dollars toward those people in poverty, giving them around $10k/person/year every year.

I challenge you to come up with a reason not to do this that is not psychopathic.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...

[2] https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/FY2021-Defense-Budget/

Agreed. I now have clear path in front of me to be neurosurgeon, mathematicians, astronaut and so on.

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