Ask Lemmygrad

It's a problem of budget allocation. I'm not saying the way governments budget nowadays is good or necessarily the best, but start from where they're at and gloss over that point lol.

There's a budget for tons of stuff. The amount of money even local governments pull is mind-boggling. And if they can't rake it in, they take indefinite loans. Every government, even local ones, are indebted. And they loan the money in good times, and it creates this web of loans where everyone borrows and loans from/to everyone else.

When people say "this'll cost an extra 14 million a year!" that's nothing. Even 14 billion a year is nothing. It looks like a lot to us but when allocating budget, officers look at the bank statement that says 74000000000000000000000 and then start cutting chunks out of that.

The usual argument is "if we didn't pay for that, we could lower taxes". Could, but won't. Budgets are allocated at the beginning of the year and then each office has that much money to last them the whole year. If they don't use their budget, it'll get lowered next year because they showed they didn't need that money. That's why sometimes government offices spend their money on frivolous stuff and maybe that's a more pressing problem to tackle than someone getting a measly 400$ a month from the government.

People only look at the taxes they spend at the beginning of the year because that's a huge chunk of money coming out of their own finances, but we pay taxes all the time. You pay a tax on cigarettes, on gas, on everything you purchase through the VAT, toll roads, postal office, etc. This makes a lot of money to national governments too. They also have their own companies that don't really count as public interest (like water or public transport would, though most governments have also privatized those), like research institutions. Those work with the private sector and make money too.

If the gov needs to find money, it has the resources to find it without necessarily increasing taxes. It's gonna have to pull itself by its bootstraps and find solutions.

If you want to actually make taxes efficient you have to reduce the red tape. Not the services, but the access to such services. But rightos are not ready for that conversation, because despite their protests of wanting "smaller government" what they really want is to reduce social services. Applying for welfare benefits for example is usually a long, difficult process and this is done on purpose to prevent people from actually applying. All this red tape has a cost; the months you spend trying to apply for benefits are months someone needs to work on your case and assign you the paperwork. Tons of studies have shown that reducing oversight saves more money overall. It's the same thing in subway stations; cities pay police to catch people who didn't buy a ticket and spends more money doing that than it costs them in fare-dodging.

And yes like others have said, I'm not really concerned about someone barely being able to afford groceries because they get like 400$ a month from the government while you have rich people parking their millions in tax havens that they'll never spend. Let's get our priorities in order.