One of the things Americans fail to understand, because nobody tells them and politicians don't want them to know, is that the government can spend $10k on someone or something now (e.g., UBI, healthcare) and save itself hundreds of thousands in the future -- or even "profit" in the sense of higher productivity and tax revenues.
Instead, we live in a country that insists on spending $150 million on cops to prevent $104,000 in lost subway fares.
@gwynnion ‘but what if people could already afford heating/$thing and don't need that extra money!’
Ah but you see, that's what tax is for!
@Kalshann Capitalist social democracies can actually be pretty nice places to live in once people accept that fact!
And it's what Democrats say they want! But they never support it in fact because they would rather punish people for being poor for reasons largely beyond their control.
@gwynnion Ah, the general point one can agree with, but the final example (a "cost of quality" issue) could bear some discussion.
You won't get zero losses (to fraud, other crime, quality control failures, whatever) without spending an infinite amount on prevention. If you spend *nothing* on prevention your costs (of crime, recalls, whatever) will be rather higher than you might like, quite apart from the message you're spreading that the bad guys can do WTF they like and get away with it.
Getting the right balance is not easy. Spending *twice* as much on prevention as you're going to save on bad outcomes might actually be reasonable - you don't want to be *too* soft on the bad guys, for all sorts of reasons. [My own involvement has included discussions in council committees as to what point to give up spending money on chasing council tax debts and write them off.]
But yes, a factor of a thousand is probably going too far. They could perhaps drop that $150m to something like $1m and see what happens. Assuming, of course, that they don't already know the answer from historical data.
The thing that irks me is that the average liberal will agree that these social programs are underfunded, but will continue to vote for policies that put more money in the hands of more cops, then not understand how the two are related.
This is why we have single-provider healthcare in Canada. With it, we cover 100% of permanent residents of our country, at 1/3 less expenditure than the Americans pay to cover 2/3 of theirs.
Don't listen to Canadians telling you we have 20th century healthcare because we're compassionate and have a social conscience. Any objective analysis will confirm that's crap. The argument back in the 60s was an economic one. And we're a stingy people.
Meanwhile, the Yank reputation for business acumen generally doesn't survive a second look.
@gwynnion It's the same with illegal drugs. Imagine them making some of these drugs (like marijuana) legal for use like alcohol is, and then using the tax money to actually help the healthcare system or heck, using it to help people with other types of drug addictions!
That would actually help not only with citizens being overall better off, but it can generate tax revenue, increase research into new treatments, and it can make the need for these illegal drug busts less and less necessary!
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