Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

That would simply make food and housing more expensive, as it would devalue money, as it increases circulation, because it wouldn't produce more housing and food - just increase demand - unless they "donated" (tax) that 2.5% to increase production, and not to subsidize poverty.

If you could subsidize your way out of poverty, Venezuela wouldn't be poor. They tried printing money and handing it out. It doesn't work. If you don't have enough housing and you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, you still don't have enough housing.

Anyone who thinks "as long as we have higher than 0% vacancy rates, and homeless-ness, we have enough housing," is a moron who has never been on the market to try and rent an apartment or buy a house.

We don't live in a perfect world. You need more than the perfect amount of housing.

The vast majority of home owners in this country are massively against increasing the supply of housing, so good luck 1) convincing them to pay more tax, and 2) spending those tax dollars on the exact opposite of what they want to spend them on.

Homeowners are almost 75% of voters most years. And in most counties (housing is largely a local issue, not a national one) can be >90% of voters.

Homeowner here, and I do agree, it would be a great investment.

But there are lots of great investments that will never happen, because many people would shoot their own head off before they did something that benefited everyone, but didn't benefit them the most.

There's literally a million things we could do to make healthcare more affordable. But we also won't do any of those because of entrenched interests in healthcare, admin, and insurance - and, perhaps especially, people's entrenched interests to continue living unhealthy lifestyles and exporting the cost onto others as negative externalities.

It does. I'm not competing with billionaires for my bananas. A billionaire doesn't eat 10^6 times more bananas than me.

> Also, the question is why would anyone want to work, if you would be given money for free even if you don't work anywhere (I mean, you're below the poverty line)?

Because people want more comforts than just being barely above the poverty line, of course there will be freeloaders just as in anything (there are even freeloaders at many companies right now, shocker!) but it doesn't mean everyone that gets some cash to be above poverty would just stop working.

It opens their lives to pursue other stuff they wouldn't be able to while fighting to barely survive, they could go to school, take better care of their kids with the free time available, they could look for jobs that are not a dead end because they wouldn't be hostages of working for shitty pay to barely survive.

This argument comes purely from a puritan/protestant belief, the data usually shows that people who get money to cover their basic needs will have better outcomes, commit less crimes, seek education, etc.

Isn't the cost of a minority of freeloaders good enough to provide better outcomes for the whole society? Or do you prefer to keep punishing the poor just in case some of them decide to be freeloaders? Rather inhumane to think that way.

I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise:

look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%.

And it really is as simple as that. As society we have tremendously increased productivity, and most of it is taken/given to the owner of the capital, not the provider of labour.

These are two symptoms of the same problem, I don’t see any issue with the statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone who’s poor or hungry is obese.

If you think about it, it makes sense that food insecurity and obesity go together. If I didn’t know when I’d have food, I’d try to overeat when I could, like many wild animals do before winter. And most of our cheap food is low quality and very high in fat and carbs (esp. sugars).

The problem that’s bigger than both obesity and hunger is poverty, and poverty causes both of those things.

See this paper for a longer explanation: “Food insecurity as a risk factor for obesity: A review” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9549066/