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Comment by TimorousBestie | Hacker News Reader

As always, “reforming entitlements” barely moves the needle on paying down the debt.

Even SNAP only cost 100 billion last year, and its net effect on revenue was probably positive, though these things are hard to measure in isolation: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...

(Because humans are bad at large numbers: 100 billion / 38 trillion is 0.2%, or alternatively 38T represents 380 years of SNAP at 2024 levels.)

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SNAP would be a start. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security would be the place to end. Those are all politically tricky to take a bite out of, of course.

I don’t approve of a policy that entails the premature death or destitution of millions of Americans while also ensuring that a couple thousand obscenely wealthy families remain obscenely wealthy.

Or we could just raise taxes on high income earners (which will barely make a dent in their quality of life). If the alternative is cutting programs that keep people from starving, from losing their homes, and obtaining basic health care... no thanks, I'll pass on that.

A slight rephrasing:

Letting 70M+ Americans, many of which are children, go hungry is good for the country because it saves money. And if they don't die from malnutrition, don't worry, we're going to save even more by cutting their health coverage, and eventually social security, a program that people paid into their entire lives.

Take a step back...do you believe these 70M+ people are just lazy, inept, ...? Do they deserve to suffer, especially the children? What are we buying with their suffering? A reduction in spending? A tax break for the wealthy? Is this the only solution?

What if we were to create a real national healthcare system which cared for everyone at a vastly lower cost? That would also save money AND reduce suffering. Seems like a net win.

But that won't get us all the way there, so what else can we do? Everyone knows the answer, increase taxes on the wealthy. Top marginal tax rate used to be 90% (1950-1964), so perhaps there's some wiggle room between that and today's 37%.

Historical Tax rates: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2012/12/1.png

This country needs a big old heaping of empathy and compassion.

I said this up thread. Trying to get 20% of GDP (or probably even a bit less then that) out of the economy and into the Federal government hasn't worked historically. I would encourage you to look at what people really paid when rates were 90%. They didn't pay 90% of the money that was coming through their door.

I'll agree that eliminating SNAP is an extreme measure that in the overall picture saves little (unlike modest cuts to SS and Medicare) but consider that 20% of Americans are to some measure dependent on SNAP. There's something wrong with that in my view.

> consider that 20% of Americans are to some measure dependent on SNAP. There's something wrong with that in my view.

but what interpretation leads to "therefore SNAP is the problem" ? compared to land management or anti-trust, etc

as a policy alternative, we could say, ban the exports of alfalfa until the SNAP usage is 5%, and split up cisco into 2000 different food distribution companies.

funding for social spending i think is a very strong chesterton's fence, in that the program was introduced to mitigate a problem. getting rid of the mitigation isnt going to get rid of the underlying problem

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