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I'm confused at how you go directly from "subsidizing" to money flow. By taking a low-paying job that makes middle-class life possible for you, aren't they fore

I'm confused at how you go directly from "subsidizing" to money flow. By taking a low-paying job that makes middle-class life possible for you, aren't they foregoing income (and thus isn't this costing them)? Heck, push it to the limit—if a farmer's wages were $0, who's benefiting at the expense of whom here? Who's subsidizing who? If you never see the cash, vs. having it deposited and then withdrawn from your account, does that suddenly change the direction of the subsidy? Does the intrinsic/moral direction of a subsidy necessarily need to match the technical/legal definition? I'm no expert in this, but as a layman, the question of who's subsidizing who is really only meaningful if you look at it from a human/moral standpoint rather than a purely legal/technical one. Otherwise you're using it to solve math problems, not human problems. And the latter seems like a really tough nut to crack to me. I don't know how to do it personally, so I don't know who's right. But I don't get how people talk about it as if it's some patently obvious thing you can figure out by looking at tax dollars or cash flow in the economy. It seems to me you'd need to assign some intrinsic moral value to all jobs so you can compare them against what they "should" cost or what they're "worth", and that is pretty darn difficult by itself, let alone the subsequent political controversy that would surely follow if such a thing was done.

URSpider94 5y ago
Here's the point, and I'll lay my cards on the table as being more progressive in the political spectrum. Progressives, by and large, don't actually care that our tax money goes to help a lot of other people. We actually like it, in fact. I do think that I should help subsidize the costs of providing things like postal service and broadband internet to people who live in the middle of nowhere. The paradox is that conservatives and libertarians are the ones who get all worked up about their tax money being spent to help others when, in reality, they are more likely to be net beneficiaries.
- dataflow 5y ago
  Oh, I see. Thanks for clarifying, I see what you mean.

URSpider94 5y ago

Here's the point, and I'll lay my cards on the table as being more progressive in the political spectrum. Progressives, by and large, don't actually care that our tax money goes to help a lot of other people. We actually like it, in fact. I do think that I should help subsidize the costs of providing things like postal service and broadband internet to people who live in the middle of nowhere. The paradox is that conservatives and libertarians are the ones who get all worked up about their tax money being spent to help others when, in reality, they are more likely to be net beneficiaries.

dataflow 5y ago
Oh, I see. Thanks for clarifying, I see what you mean.