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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> Lately the government seems to be wanting to take more from me to give to those types

Relevant to the article, this particular rhetoric too has been a consistent and regular complaint in the conservative discourse over the years.

While it's true that some forms of social safety net assistance like medical care are definitely getting more expensive (because the care itself is getting more expensive as we discover new tests and new treatments, of course), most of the stuff you're complaining about has been getting significantly stingier over the decades.

Is there a particular benefit program that is upsetting you? Are you absolutely sure it's getting more generous?

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Pandemic payouts and college debt forgiveness, lately.

Are those going to people who "don't want to work", though? That was your original frame: assistance for unemployed/underemployed, not just assistance for people other than you.

Most statistics I've seen show that student debt holders are employed at a greater rate than the general population (not surprising, they have bills to pay). And of course pandemic relief was quite famously disproportionately aimed at employERs. All those PPP loans did nothing for the unemployed, as they only went to firms with existing payrolls.

I really think if you look at this in a more detached way, you'd maybe find that the "government helps people don't want to work" frame of these arguments is misplaced (which is the point of the linked article).

It's giving money to healthy, able-bodied adults. We need to do this less, not more.

You're moving the goalposts. Your complaint was about healthy, able-bodied adults who don't want to work.

Btw, not that it matters, but I'm against student loan forgiveness.

Or, it's investing money in people with high expected ROI, such as, able-bodied adults. For it is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them, right? (paraphrasing Tiberius)

>We need to do this less, not more.

Why? So you don't feel like a rube for working? Why don't you stop working, if that's the case, and cash in on this sweet sweet deal you allege these "healthy able-bodied adults" get?

I would try carrying that though to its logical conclusion. Healthy people who don't want to work (aka don't have value, as work == value) shouldn't be given money. Money is needed to survive. Therefore it is okay if the person does not survive? Or rephrased as, if you don't work, you should not live?

I hope that's not really how you feel, but it seems like the clear logical conclusion to that kind of thinking.

Society requires people to contribute. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and we do not have robot slaves that do everything for us as we laze around.

If you want to survive, you need to contribute. Wanting to play video games all day while other people work to fulfill your lazy desires is what a child thinks.

I find college debt forgiveness to be backfilling an unequal burden we put on college students starting about a dozen years ago. During the great recession, many states needed to crank up tuition to cover gaps in their university budgets. Students at the time were given two options: pay even more out the nose for reduced services or drop out. Those who chose to stay had to build up even more debt than they would have piled up in the aughts. We as a country shifted the societal costs of educating our populace further onto the backs of the young. I often compare the state my friends who went to state school are still paying off their debt with the experience my older family had. My parents were both able to graduate from a state school with less than 5 figures of debt. My grandmother was able to pay her way through Berkeley with no debt by working at See's. Sometime around the late 90s we started to break this contact and by the teens, we had completely pulled the rug out from incoming college students. Despite having no college debt myself, I see college-debt forgiveness as a step back towards the society we used to be.

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