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christopher
@christopher
I am so deeply frustrated that the categorically needy β€” 17,000,000 Americans β€” lost a chance at healthcare and economic stability. We gave kids meals, impoverished a chance to live, and young mothers hope. What is the point of government if not to help those that can’t help themselves?
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@m-j-r.eth
some might say the government is insurance and property rights, so one has to weigh its ability to underwrite promises. so who's culpable when austerity becomes absolute? arguably "nothing happens", and this bill tests that while also being hostile to safety nets. on our generations-long trajectory, there will come a point where entitlements go insolvent, and not one by one, but through wholesale democratic failure. we really should help ourselves stabilize, so we can survive to help others. if this mandate can't be upheld, then I don't see how anyone can be permanently helped, even if they can't help themselves.
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Boiler(Chris)
@boiler
When do you point the finger at tax cuts to the rich leading towards entitlement insolvency? Let’s ask why the rich would want entitlements to be insolvent? Maybe so that they can privatize everything, such as the Army brought to you by Coinbase and Palantir?
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@m-j-r.eth
so taxes are always intended to trade a certain amount of economic activity and growth for the entirety of the government's responsibility. there's only so much anyone can collect before the cost outweighs the social mandate. personally, I think taxes are insufficient for the government's current mandate, yet I'm not going to imagine that the class anticipating this burden is any less... invested than the colonists who tarred and feathered British tax collectors. that's what it boils down to: a third rail. moral rhetoric isn't going to be sufficient for those who see the government as overspending itself to death. the critical problem is that the government can inflate money, and socialized cost just feeds into inelastic supply (housing/healthcare), so entitlements really end up being privatized, anyway (as jobs). the actual political journey is not as simple as "those people are immoral, let's seize their property", unless you're fine with capital flight overnight. you have to also deal with supply-side policy and corruption to build justification for progressive taxation. you have to remove the debt while keeping/growing the credit. this is not as easy as many socialist politicians sell it. and the numbers don't lie: https://www.wcax.com/2025/05/19/experts-are-sounding-alarm-health-care-costs/
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PurpπŸ‡΅πŸ‡Έ
@purp
Lol funny how the question isn't can we afford 175 billion dollars for ice Or 961 billion dollar defense budget Or 9 trillion dollars spent on post 9/11 wars( which borrowed from social security and didn't pay back But rural hospitals and safely nets a bridge to far, got it
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@m-j-r.eth
no, that's not what I'm saying. I watched the cost of the military industrial complex throughout the GWOT. this is common knowledge, same as excesses to nationalist immigration policy. do I need to make some pacific, amnestic shibboleth in every conversation involving taxes and expenses? no, my silence is not tacit endorsement. in any case, how does one reign in any excessive fiscal policy if they're always bundled with pork? then we should all support line item veto. but even that creates problems of its own. if the current bill is so unjust, then consider the midterm and 2028. build up the political capital you need, but haven't currently realized. check the populist excesses on both sides. personally, I think the defense budget has to be proportional to global climate, but it has to be significantly, transparently more humanitarian in current AI-dominated theaters. I don't see this as fungible to an unrelated sector that's got its own issues. running a country is not as simple as naming what any person can demand from it. it is fundamentally an equilibrium among adversaries. any sincere reform to socialist ends must respect this, or join the other experiments in history.
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