Comment by JOnAgain

Kids. Kids are the piece of this policy you haven’t considered. Poor people have kids too. Then you have starving babies in the street and 5 year olds trying to find work to pay for food. Then you might think, “okay, maybe we take care of kids. Healthcare? Food? Education?” Great. But do you have forced separation from parents in order to provide these services just to the kids? What if the parents eat the kids food because they’re starving. Now you have to feed the parents. And providing care for orphans costs more than healthcare for parents, so probably rational to give them healthcare too. And do you want to create a system where having a kid gets you food and healthcare? Probably don’t want that incentive. So now you’re maybe giving food and healthcare to people without kids.

So, whenever you think about purely capitalistic policies with no social policies, we just have to be okay with having a large number of babies and toddlers starving on the streets in front of us.

When you hear about republicans cutting $900 billion from Medicaid, and millions of families losing coverage, that means children. Almost 50% of Medicaid recipients are children. Most of the other 50% are their parents. So millions of children now do not have healthcare. Your post advocates for millions more to lose coverage. That translates to children dying and having lifelong disabilities from otherwise preventable illnesses.

The other inevitable outcome of policies like this is exploitation of women. It might start with “voluntary” sex work, but it becomes a bigger business that invites true exploitation and rapidly leads to human trafficking. Btw, that “voluntary” is there because it’s usually a choice between sex work and spiraling into homelessness and poverty - so not super voluntary to begin with. And we’re not even counting women more women who stay in abusive relationships because they are fully dependent on their partner for sustenance and shelter.

All that is to say that anytime advocate for a certain set of social policies over another, it’s usually informative to look at how they impact the most vulnerable in our society. Start with kids, then consider disabled and women. And finally ask why we’re generally okay with men starving on the street but not toddlers.