Hacker News Reader

+1 Million on this!

Our efforts to avoid accidentally helping a rich person via means testing cause for more damage to our ability to help poor and middle class people.

Just give everybody the same amount of cash and leave it at that! There are few enough rich people (almost by definition) that it won't save much to exclude them.

View on HN

I feel like the public, even in may 2022, just can’t grasp the basic concept of inflation. A better way than dropping cash out of helicopters, or mailing checks, is to give people tax money back in the form of a standard deduction. It’s almost like people have thought about this stuff already.

Any way that you give people more money without also increasing the supply of stuff to buy will generate inflation for those things that those people want to buy. If you target the money to certain people, then the things those people buy will inflate. If you target the money to certain stuff (like education), then that is what will inflate. I don't think changing the mechanism to a standard deduction changes this - except maybe to focus the inflation on taxpayers and what they buy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com