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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13339 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Any kind of subsidy or redistribution will have some kind of waste built in from people exploiting it. I just can't get too worked up about EBT: sure, it isn't 100% efficient, but a substantial portion of it does reach people who need it.

Another California program: property tax deferral for the needy. If you own your house but have an income below ~60k, you can defer property taxes indefinitely, as a loan at a simple (not compound!) rate of 5%. One one-time coworker has engineered his income and assets (multi million dollar Roths FTW) so he no longer has to pay property tax through this program; this ends up amounting to something like 20k in benefits per year (that's after subtracting the accrued debt). That's a lot more scamming of the system than someone buying shitty mushroom snacks on EBT.

My main objection to the people in your example is the obesity and the festering sores. But, that's what poverty looks like in the US today. If you want to avoid it, shop at better grocery stores than the bargain market.

Your California property tax evasion doesn't reach into my pocket to take money that then puts it in someone else's hands. It's just money staying where it found a place to rest, instead of being confiscated by the government. Unless, of course, you think all money rightly belongs to the government, making a tax cut is the same thing as a spending raise, and justifying the equivalence that's so clearly different.

There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well. I don't think that would make it any less objectionable to the people who object to it.

To your more abstract point, the government is an institution like any other, and it will extract value from the economy to sustain its own existence. As part of my negotiating with its power, I want it to do what it does in as fair and transparent a way as possible, in a way that minimally distorts the economy or incentivizes putting effort and planning into schemes to take advantage of it.

There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well.

I don't think you can. If people are taking more out of the system than they're putting into it, ie have direct benefits greater than their taxes, then they cannot receive those benefits via tax cuts, because there's not enough to tax. Once your taxes reach zero (or if you have no income and they started at zero) the only way to get more is to actually be given money. Which means it has to be taken from someone else.

The FairTax prebate (flat “precalculated rebate”) of >$250/mo could be direct-deposited in a real bank account or dropped onto an EBT-like card.

I think he means something like the Earned Income Credit (welfare spending designed to look like a tax refund). It's just an accounting change to do something similar with food payments.

My main objection to the people in your example is the obesity and the festering sores. But, that's what poverty looks like in the US today. If you want to avoid it, shop at better grocery stores than the bargain market.

I recall a few weeks ago, the Trump administration announced some sort of drug price discount website, which included some GLP-1 drugs, and people were joking that Trump just solved the American obesity epidemic. Likely untrue, since, AFAIK, the prescription gate for these drugs still exist. But if he were to run roughshod over the Constitution and just declare such drugs as over-the-counter and fully subsidized (and/or nullifying all associated patents) and enforced it with the US military, over the objections of the other branches of government, then I'd seriously have to consider if the fascism and authoritarianism (the actual ones that exist in this hypothetical) was a worthy price to pay.

Of course, these aren't magic drugs, and I know that plenty of people have negative side-effects, including one of my friends who became super-gassy. So the improvement in attractiveness in senses of sight and touch (perhaps even sound - fat rolls rubbing or slapping against each other isn't that attractive) could be offset by the worsening in attractiveness in smell.

I mean, couldn't Trump get RFK to remove the prescription gate?

We could just dump it in the water supply. No need for the authoritarianism; there's the precedent of fluoridation for polluting our precious bodily fluids. Just have to make sure sodas also have it in them.

Sounds like a good way to poison the 58% of Americans who aren't obese.

Or just make them into more disciplined, less addictive, and more smelly versions of themselves.

Or make them malnourished when naturally skinny people eat even less than they were previously inclined to because they're being force-fed appetite suppressants.

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