Part of the argument I made to Can Man in the link above, while referring to the Bush tax cuts, is that when that money is given to individuals in a way that isn't strategic (...which would be, say, targeted to small businesses, which is a good idea, or to a specific kind of population, like vets), it strengthens the economy for a little while, but then you're left with the same structural problems you had before, which get increasingly worse.

Unless you invest in infrastructure, education, health, and so on, your society starts falling apart at the seams in ways that affect everyone.

So people will buy an extra bluray player and an iPad mini and some fancy sneakers with the money (all manufactured abroad, so you aren't even stimulating GDP in most cases) and then the money has been frittered away....but then they feel the pain of all these other societal issues that start to feel insurmountable - violence, lots of homeless folks, rising opioid addiction, crumbling schools with teachers that make peanuts with class sizes that are too full, dying sectors like coal without a counterweight in strong training/growth in new kinds of energy, balooning student debt, and on and on.

So, I mean, congrats on the extra few hundred dollars you got or what have you, but most folks don't grasp the way growing income inequality (with the greatest giveways at the top) erodes their freedoms and lives as a whole. Hell, they don't even get how bad it is. CBS recently did a great illustration of it with pie and it's worth a watch:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-inequality-in-america-how-98-trillion-of-household-wealth-is-distributed/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2020 05:37AM by JMac.