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Comment by _DeadFred_ | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing is coal mining is 40,000 jobs. I have never seen such a tiny industry given such preferential/oversized treatment.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001

Lyft is 10% of the size of big coal and Amazon is over 20x larger.

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Meanwhile the areas where the coal jobs used to exist (or still do) just had their food stamps removed or reduced. It's such a charade.

There’s such an amount of implied or perceived shame attached to using these government safety nets in America. I’d be surprised if anyone who was benefiting from them worked in coal.

And that is by design. There is a reason why people get food stamps and not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

I suppose you’re right. Now that you mention it, are food stamps similarly inflationary to having 1000 dollars deposited into their bank account?

I doubt they make any inflation in the sense "more dollars chasing fewer goods"

SNAP etc makes the base-load revenue of many rural grocery stores.

The food is going to be produced, and scale is better.

I work with disabled SNAP recipients and it's never been easy.

$1000 is um, high...

> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.

The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.

While they say it’s about the jobs, it is so very clearly about who is making how much money by propping up coal ( and other industries)

The UK fishing industry was cited a lot as a reason for Brexit, despite being just over 10k jobs ( https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-an... ) and less economically significant than Warhammer.

(see the "everything is gender now" thesis: fishing and coal mining are "manly" industries, which is why they get this preferential treatment from the right-wing)

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