If recipients are going to use EBT like money, and EBT ultimately comes from money, wouldn't it be more efficient to just give them (more) money (again)? If you receive enough money to feed yourself, and fail to do so, that shouldn't be the nanny state's problem.
EBT presumably exists to mitigate some people's inability to manage money at all who would starve themselves and worse their kids, if just given money; and to curtail criticism of giving free money to people by saying "it's the necessities of life".
The money we as taxpayers give to poors to give them money to live and eat should not include money for comfort food like soda and Doritos. Should we give them free plasma tvs, cable subscriptions, and video games too? How about heroin? Surely they their life won't suck!
I mean, that's welfare for the poor that keeps them soporific and not rising up; it's welfare for the landlords as the poor make up a lot of their long-term tenants. The only people who lose out are the Middle Class and those poor people who have ambition and burn themselves out trying to move up in life (doable but hard without role models).
I've been theorizing about this lately. I think you could if you re-centered your entire economic model around inflationary pressure. Basically instead of taxing people the gov just prints whatever money it needs to fund itself year-to-year. The upshot of this is there's effectively no more deficit build up and whatever deficit currently exists will eventually be devalued to the point where paying it off becomes a simple matter. It would also mean that so long as you produce a material good or service your purchasing power could remain stable relative to the constant rise of inflationary pressure since while goods and services would be continually more expensive that also means the same for the goods and services you produce as well.
Sounds a little like Modern Monetary Theory where iirc, you can print as much money as you need because inflation isn't the result of extra money (they say) but of extra money making its way into the hands of the public (the theory goes). So money is available for government and business and traders, but not for people buying consumer goods. Big difference of course being you have no segregation between gov-business and the hoi polloi.
If you're inflating your currency like you say, how does a country get other countries to buy its currency? You've just removed the American dollars status as Global Reserve Currency. The thing which for many years has allowed the USA to effectively export its debt. So in addition to assessing whether your system works, you will need to also think about if you can get there from here. Once you start this, see a mass sell-off of US bonds. Can you handle that?
(Replies are in the spirit of friendly and constructive comments, not mean rebuffs, tbc).
However this would also mean accepting that one day the price values of goods will be measured not in flat dollar amounts but in exponent values. It means that retirement becomes a thing of the past as an economy predicated on continual inflationary pressure doesn't really allow for investment capital or financial savings. This would also require the country to be largely self-employed and in possession of their own productive capital save those who work in the public sector or for large-scale industries that can't be democratized effectively (Think car/tractor/microchip manufacturing/Shipbuilding/Foundries)
You could probably do some sort of periodic rebasement of the currency to avoid having indices on your bank notes and people could buy property and other long-term investments to manage retirement. In fact, there would be immense pressure to do so under such a massive inflationary boom. But given such a policy would eliminate foreign demand for your currency, you're probably right about an increased need for autarky.
The thing I have to ask though, is what makes you think the government isn't already doing this?
(M2 money supply, US dollars).
I guess because it does it under the guise of borrowing rather than printing directly. You're suggesting the number of dollars should never go down, right?
I am a bit off the current loop, do tell: Have you guys heard of the newest netflix slop and how it is being used by the UK government to justify even more draconian policing of whites and boys while also insisting on the 2010s feminism as being a good idea? They took a real case from a 17yo Rwandan psycho and made him a 13yo white boy for the show, and name drop Andrew Tate (still baffling to me how a entire country is a-logging a cow) and incels.
The UK government is straight up using the show as if it was a real case to push policy and action. Are there any retards in the US Political establishment doing the same? It seems like it is right up the alley of the current out of touch DNC to wanna copy Labour in this to pretend the same shit is happening in the USA but with "racism" and shit.
It's called Adolescence, was discussed a little in the British News thread.
Here for example. The show is named "Adolescence" and follows the horrific murder of three very young girls by a 17yo Rwandan immigrant with a history of red flags. The British govt. came down like an anvil on anybody so much as voicing criticism of high immigration following it (often the same judges sending people to prison for a year for their opinions were the same judges who'd let go child porn sharers and consumers with a slap on the wrist as frequently documented by "Pagliacci the Hated" aka
http://x.com/Slatzism /
http://xcancel/Slatzism (well worth a follow if you do Twitter at all). Anyway, in the show this suddenly becomes the tale of a young White boy who browses social media and comes under the influence of Andrew Tate (by name in the show, explicitly him) and hates girls because he is an "incel". Kier Starmer the Bong Prime Minister lauded it in parliament and there's talk about showing it in schools.
