Instead of winning lotteries, let’s just give everyone UBI and take billionaires wealth. It will be good for society, good for kids, and we will destroy the powers that are destroying our planet.
The dental one hits hard. The fact that it's a totally separate, worse insurance system (as is vision which is even worse than dental) is fucking criminal. The fact that medical anything is a crippling cost is just fucking evil greed bullshit.
TBF dental I get. Lost a tooth in an accident. I remember the nurse that stitched my lip telling me that she's sorry, she could have helped get everything else in my body fixed - just not teeth. Oh well.
Man, the couple years I qualified for $175 a month in food stamps was great. I still had plenty of things to worry about, but eating wasn't one of them.
Then I got promoted at work with a .25 cent raise and lost the benefits, effectively making me poorer than I had been previously.
Still qualify for low income housing, though, which is nice.
The thing about welfare cliffs is that both sides acknowledge them and want to solve them, but either side will fight to the death to prevent the other side from implementing their solution.
We have two separate forms for the past in turkish. One for things directly experienced, one for things just passively experienced (e.g. read about). Maybe something like this?
Honestly, I suspect it would be difficult for me to let go over being stingy about grocery shopping and Id probably still stress over being efficient with the price even if I got no tangible benefit of it, just out of habit.
Oh yeah, your circumstances embed in your consciousness. I'm assuming you're too young to have met many people who lived through the great depression, especially as adults. The ones who fought through those years of incredibly bleak poverty had it stamped on their psyche. This is where the old meme comes from of a grandma giving a kid a dollar and saying don't spend it all in one place. We were laughing about this in the 90s.
Edit to add- if you ever watch the show hoarders you can see what poverty mentality can cause. If you see an old person who can't let go of a scrap of paper, they likely learned that from their depression era parents. This is all US centric of course.
I make really good money these days. I live a comfortable life in a middle class neighborhood with a larger house than I need. I pay for it all myself and I still have money at the end of the month for healthcare, fun, retirement, and can pretty much buy anything I could want on a normal day to day basis.
I still have issues with things like buying groceries or leaving lights on. I can drop hundreds of dollars on something useless online while grocery shopping and still be calculating the unit price per once on crackers.
I felt like I was committing robbery when I found out Aldi sells jerky for around $1/oz in my area. I don’t eat it but my spouse does and that shit is expensive!