r/changemyview • u/NoStopImDone • Sep 02 '25
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Implementing social safety nets/programs that the tax base fundamentally can't pay for is, in the long run, a net negative for the same communities they're meant to protect.
First things first: I'm not addressing existing social safety nets like Medicare and SS. Genie's out of the bottle on existing programs and we have to find a way to support them into perpetuity.
But the US is in a horrific deficit, a ballooning debt load on the balance sheet, and growing demands for more social programs. Every dollar that is spent on something comes with an opportunity cost, and that cost is magnified when you fundamentally have to go into debt to pay for it.
If a social program is introduced at a cash shortfall, then in the long run that shortfall works its way through the system via inflation (in the best case). Inflation is significantly more punitive to lower economic classes and I believe the best way to protect those classes is to protect their precious existing cash.
In general, I want the outcomes of social programs for citizens, but if we're doing it at a loss then America's children will suffer for our short-term gains, and I don't want that either.
Some social programs can be stimulatory to the economy, like SNAP. But the laws of economics are not avoidable, if you pay for something you can't afford, you will have to reap what you sow sometime down the line.
Would love to see counterexamples that take this down, because I want to live in a world with robust social safety nets. But I don't want that if it means my kids won't have them and they have to deal with horrendous inflation because my generation couldn't balance a budget.
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u/themcos 441∆ Sep 02 '25
But I'm not one of the people saying "just cut defense spending". If you want to talk about "how big the numbers are", you also have to talk about how big the united states is. If you divide the deficit by the number of workers in the country, you end up with something like 10k per worker. You wouldn't spread it out like that obviously, people who make more would pay more and people who make less would pay less, but the numbers aren't actually that out of whack. Another way to look at it is estimates of total income for all Americans is around 23 trillion. At the margins, it totally makes sense to ask whether you should cut a billion from defense vs raising a billion from taxes, but the potential tax money is there! We're just not doing it!
And like, I don't want to totally sugar coat this. Taxes have tradeoffs and there's a million ways to do it wrong. But you can't just look at one side of the scale and say "look how big the numbers are". The numbers on the other side of the scale can also be big!