Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.
The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it.
I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all.
It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.
The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.
On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.
Much can be said about the problem of government waste, and it certainly is a problem, but there's an underlying assumption in this kind of talk, which I'd like to attack. That assumption is: "people are poor because the government taxes them too much, and wastes their money". Republicans in the US run and win on this platform again and again.
The problem is that it's simply not true. Government wealth has been falling for decades[0] -- nations are increasingly rich, but governments are increasingly poor. I don't even need to include a source that shows effective tax rates have been falling for the same period (no surprise -- that's _why_ governments are so relatively poor). As nations have continued to get richer, most of that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of private individuals.
Governments are not sequestering your wealth -- rich people are.
Any time people bring up concerns about fraud and waste in social problems only, I dismiss them out of hand as using that fear to justify their selfishness.
If one isn't calling out waste and abuse in their favorite programs too, then their concern is insincere and should be treated as such. Pro tip: audit the DOD.
There are zero studies which show this.
Free money as in quantitative easing that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy?
Completely unsubstantiated FUD. The underlying problem is the structure of the economic system they reside in.
Value for whom?
Most of what you said is greatly exaggerated or simply not true. It's like you cherry picked Fox News talking points.
It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.
Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life?
Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
I guess if I am a factory owner I could produce a Yacht, but as a humble employee I'd be unlikely to experience or enjoy the produced Yacht's of the factory, and it also seems like the factory owner would sell most of their produced Yacht's for money, not "farms, factories, skills"
I think GP means we could destroy the taxed money, which would benefit everyone by either deflating their savings (the same money is worth more), or allowing more money to be printed for social programs without causing rampant inflation. This is getting pretty close to MMT.
