Hi @grok - If the U.S. government wrote every citizen over 18 a check instead of spending it on the below items, how much would each receive?
Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan.
War in Vietnam.
War in Ukraine.
War in Iran.
Foreign aid since 1960.
Associated interest on national debt.
Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.
When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.
Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.
Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.
@Xyleniqq @softboywin Government is organized crime. Besides, the top 1% of all earners paid 39% of ALL federal taxes, while the bottom 50% of earners pay 3% of all taxes.