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Comment by AnarchismIsCool | Hacker News Reader

Fuck that, kids should have basic necessities (food, clothing, education etc), at a minimum, covered through public funding. If the government has one fucking purpose, that's it right there. If people can't even have a fucking childhood what are we doing.

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While I agree with you, most red states can't even afford that kind of thing and are already paying out a ton in overburdened welfare programs (except maybe Georgia and a few others that are aggressively anti-welfare). In the absence of those funds and that regulation, at least allow older teenagers to compete against grown adults in the labor market if they need the money.

Yeah, the funding streams are bonkers at the moment. We need to be able to get the funding to kids, the money exists, we've just made the logistics insane.

11.6 million kids in poverty in the us. The naive approach: just give each kid 1k/mo would cost 12B/mo or 144B/yr, so 3.2% of the 2023 4.5T annual budget. That's entirely doable given the political will.

Maybe red states could afford nice things if they'd stop screwing up their economies?

They absolutely CAN afford those kinds of things if they'd stop giving away sweetheart tax deals to major corporations and actually accept federal funds when they're offered.

How will Brett Favre's girl can play volleyball, or how can his pharma company can make money without capturing welfare dotations ?

> most red states can't even afford that kind of thing

What made them so poor? Was it bad governance?

If they can't afford it, why do they keep turning down federal money that will let them do exactly that?

We absolute should provide that, and government absolutely shouldn't be involved in that. Whatever society can do itself, government should never be involved in.

....uh...I'm an anarchist but...the world isn't perfect. We can do a lot to reduce power structures but we still need to designate someone to take money from billionaires and move it to poor people, otherwise the billionaires will just spend the money on private security to fend off the starving hordes.

Bruv. Government is a construct of society.

Just as many other things, like organised crime. Government is still society's main enemy and never should be trusted with anything that a monopoly on violence is not necessary for.

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