Earlier quoted context omitted.
When everything is going to shit, people are in the hospital and you barely have enough food stamps to feed your kids ... You can go to a movie. Are you going to really fault someone for that, or taking their partner to a restaurant, using what little they have, to just try and forget how bad things are for a few hours?! It's not like they can just stop being poor.
I don't begrudge anybody their small pleasures in life. I also think they can do what they want with their money. But, when the topic of wealth redistribution comes up I do start to have a lot more questions about what people want to do with the money. After all, it's not their money. They didn't earn it. Somebody else did. I think it's pretty fair to at least have the conversation. I absolutely hate the "helpless po…
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/08/23/214210692/the-...
There's actually a mounting volume of convincing evidence that cash grants to poor people are much more effective than random charity programs of equivalent value. Because poor people often know what they need more than some paper pusher in a faraway city.