That's the point though. The rich already have all the benefits, plus more, but we also make the poor spend a lot of time, money, effort, and stress on "proving" they are poor to get the baseline benefits just so the rich "can't" use them (even though the truly rich have access to better and more services). If the rich already have plenty of access to stuff why are we forcing the poor to go through all these extra "proof" steps? Of course, rich people will cheat and take the 'free stuff" too (because they can, because many of them penny pinch too). So why not just make it for everyone and avoid all the tests and stress and administrative overhead of "prove you are poor to get this service"?
(A very similar thing applies to things like public school "free lunch" programs. The poor have to do a bunch of paperwork to qualify every year and lots of real poor people fall through the cracks of the system because they miss the paperwork or get some small detail wrong. The rich are generally going to pack better, healthier lunches anyway, so in some cases the time and cost of that paperwork would be better spent on "free lunch for all" programs, even if that means a few rich kids get free lunch sometimes.)
Unfortunately, the desire to soak the rich is a thing.
(A sentence that is not seen very often.)
Of course, the problem isn't really the rich. There aren't enough of them to strain the assistance budget even if they do all take the free lunch. The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them, and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.
> The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them, and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.
But it does though, because those are the people the existing system is screwing the most.
If you're all the way at the bottom, whatever the government provides is what you get because you have nothing else.
If you're all the way at the top, you have the resources to buy whatever the best of the best is.
But if you're in the middle, you can't afford to pay the taxes to fund public schools you don't use and pay for private schools, so you get stuck with public schools. And then we end up with this catastrophic districting system where you buy into a better public school system by spending more money on housing -- and making sure that there is more political support for keeping housing unaffordable because it's the way the middle class gets their kids into a better school district.
If you just give everyone the same amount of money, someone at the 40th percentile income doesn't have to massively overpay for a house, they can just add 20% more of their own money to send their kids to a better school. And someone at the 25th percentile income who is willing to sacrifice more for their kids can do the same thing, instead of having no path to do it at all because it would require them to get mortgage approval for a single family house in a suburban school district which is forbidden at their income level.
Given that children are our future, making sure all of them get a good healthy nutritious lunch behoovs us all. Even the not destitute, and not wealthy ones. If we have to have fewer stealth bombers and aircraft carriers to pay for that, then so be it. But of course trading one for another in order to be able to afford it makes sense if you think of the whole of the US economy as a one househole, with no control over monetary policy like the interest rate. Except it isn't. Look at how willingly spending is increased on military projects, and not the projects themselves. If we wanted to have the money to pay for it, we could.
It's just this idea that someone undeserving might get something for free. This makes sense for adults, but children, for whom we have laws preventing them from having jobs, can't have jobs.
Don't buy into the idea we don't have the money to pay for it, we do. Monetary policy allows us to create money out of thin air. If we treated this like the emergency it is, we could afford it. We don't do it for other reasons, but it's not a money thing.
> Of course, the problem isn't really the rich. There aren't enough of them to strain the assistance budget even if they do all take the free lunch. The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them
Welcome to the squeezed middle. Don't make enough to be truly comfortable but too much to be eligible for government assistance.
> and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.
Though if we had a functional legislature we could make this money exist simply by bumping the tax rate in the relevant income bands so that the extra expenditure is covered by the higher taxes.
(A very similar thing applies to things like public school "free lunch" programs. The poor have to do a bunch of paperwork to qualify every year and lots of real poor people fall through the cracks of the system because they miss the paperwork or get some small detail wrong. The rich are generally going to pack better, healthier lunches anyway, so in some cases the time and cost of that paperwork would be better spent on "free lunch for all" programs, even if that means a few rich kids get free lunch sometimes.)