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The US should have done this. We could have done it. We don’t know the total economic damage yet, but I would wager it is already many times what it would have
by apozem 6y ago
The US should have done this. We could have done it. We don’t know the total economic damage yet, but I would wager it is already many times what it would have cost to do what New Zealand did.
The problem is a huge chunk of the country flies into a rage at the thought of their tax dollars going to people who “don’t work.”
Combine this with decades of Republican rhetoric about “welfare queens,” [1] separating the undeserving poor (read: black and Hispanic people) from the deserving poor... it convinces white voters to hurt themselves just so those people don’t get something that they don’t deserve.
Racism warps American politics again and again and again. I used to live in Atlanta, a city with some of the worst traffic in the country. It lacks adequate public transit because white homeowners didn’t want black people coming to their suburbs [2]. So now everyone suffers.
Our political system is diseased.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traffic-atlanta-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traf...
- asciident 6y agoI think it'd be the opposite reaction if the US adopted the NZ strategy. People would be outraged that the money is going to companies, especially large corporations where most people work. Someone would come up with the statistic that 80% of the money went to the richest 100 companies in the US or something.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoThat would be true if corporations were just given money. But as I understand it, that's not what NZ did. The US actually did a fairly smart thing with the initial aid package - corporations got loans that were forgiven if used to pay wages. The problem was that we (the government) didn't do anything to establish whether a company actually needed help with this. I wonder why that happened ....
- tstrimple 6y agoIt will forever be a mystery as to why there was so much corruption surrounding the Covid business loans and payments. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-06-16/hiltzik-collapse-of-coronavirus-bailout-oversight https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-06-16/hiltzik-co...
- asciident 6y agoThere was also a ton of fraud (some estimates were 1/3 of the money went to scammers and foreign people). They didn't have a good way to check if a business was an actual business or not. This resulted in entire neighborhoods of people getting 10K each by sharing the scam [2]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-24/small-business-administration-sba-loan-fraud-payouts-show-magnitude-of-issue https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-24/small-bus... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-business-administration-10-000-grant-fraud-went-viral-hurting-program https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-bus...
- imtringued 6y agoWhat's the demographic of the scammers? Are they immoral rich people who don't need the money and just love the idea of scamming the government? Are they poor people desperate enough to steal from the government? If the latter then the stimulus was actually quite well spent.
- asciident 6y agoA lot of the money went to gangs in foreign countries. There were some stories of immoral rich people like the rapper who got over a million dollars and boasted about it, but I imagine most were dishonest poor people. The problem is this rewards a small pool of scammers, and the honest poor are left even further behind. But it sounds like you want to believe it was money well spent, so I don't imagine this would convince you otherwise.
- refurb 6y agoLeft wing rant aside, California, which is not exactly known for it’s right wing leanings has done absolutely horrible with Covid. Not only has it failed to contain the virus it’s almost last in rolling out the vaccine (well behind those racist Red states you call out like TX).
- shakezula 6y agoI wonder how much of that is due to the lack of leadership from our President
- howlgarnish 6y agoNot very much? California has plenty of vaccines now, they just can't work out the last mile to distribute them. If only there was a valley in there somewhere that had people who had thought about things like this before...
- apozem 6y agoI like this reply because not only does it strawman my opinion of “red” states, it boils down to, “I’m going to brush aside your substantive points because did you know some states are run badly by LIBERALS???”
- refurb 6y agoWell, since your entire rant was "we could be like New Zealand if it weren't for racist Republicans", I wouldn't call it a straw man by giving an example of "a racist Republican state" doing a better job than a state that's been run by liberals for decades. Kind of proves your point wrong, no?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- odessacubbage 6y agounfortunately the de facto embrace of reaganomics and welfare queen rhetoric is completely bicameral. the orthodox position is that aid flowing to people who 'don't deserve it' is a far more unthinkable sin than aid getting to almost no one at the bottom after being delayed indefinitely by a broken social support system that is deliberately designed to demoralize and humiliate people who need help.