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Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.

I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.

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But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)

In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.

I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.

> But the Protestant work ethic is good!

I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.

> I was raised with a strong work ethic

Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.

The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.

I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:

https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

> But the Protestant work ethic is good!

No, it’s not. The Protestant work ethic is what causes people to come into work when they’re sick, spreading illness to others.

Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.

Not 90%[0].

Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Not if you're in the US. Social security is ~22% https://govbase.com/blog/where-your-tax-dollars-go

More than 50% of us federal spending is in social security, Medicare and Medicaid and it’s debt service.

You’d have to be counting pretty far afield things to get up to 90% but it’s easy to get to “a majority”.

You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program.

The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.

Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop.

As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.

A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.

Defense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt.

About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.

And CHIP, and SNAP. Whatever. You can certainly say social safety net spending isn't exactly 90%. But it's, you know, most of it.

Chip and snap combined is less than 2% of the budget and shrinking fast.

You can tell it’s nowhere near 90% because even if you counted every single non-DoD dollar as social safety net it would only be 84% of the budget.

84% is near 90%!

Social safety net programs* (obviously).

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