China

They handed out loans, grants and even farm animals to poor villagers. Officials visited residents weekly to check on their progress.

And this is part of why they can't stand countries like China, who serve as a living example that a better world is possible and it's not an inevitability of "human nature" for some people to have to suffer horribly. Countries like China who serve as examples that the US and its allies in imperialism aren't tragically limited, but well-meaning governments - rather, they are parasitic systems that ignore solutions to suffering and write articles about how reducing suffering isn't in the budget, vilifying and attacking anyone who attempts it.

Cool thing is that they don't really show that it is unsustainable. It's just deficit hawk fearmongering of government expenditure.

In the first bit, they even show an example of a positive return on investment where the man sells his cow after having gained two calves from her.

The screeching about housing projects is the more dumbfounding one for me. It's an investment you make as a lump sum upfront and the maintenance costs a fraction of the original. It doesn't really have to be "sustainable" because of that.

The factories receiving subsidies is unsustainable because... no one knows really because they didn't tell why. Are the subsidies drying up? Are the factories operating at a loss? God knows because these journalists definitely don't.

New York Times, the champion of the poor and downtrodden, is very concerned about some people who were poor enough to receive the benefits but didn't. The gaping holes in the emerging social safety net and thoughts of the crippling burden of medical debt keep their good samaritan journalists up at night.

On a serious note, the contradiction between urban and rural development is so far an unsolved problem. I can't say about the specifics of the long term effects of this program because I'm not in the know. It could be less than ideal if they end up relying heavily on direct cash transfers. But the cool thing is that there is no other country in the world that is giving this problem a thought, let alone trying to solve it. The best India can muster up for example is MGNREGA which is pretty shameful. People in rural China are now able to sleep without the fear of their mud roof collapsing on them on a rainy night. No other country in the global south following the capitalist doctrine and IMF stipulated economic policies can claim credit for something remotely close to this. I would like NYT to write about the rural populations of US allied third world countries and see how that turns out.

What exactly in their minds make it unsustainable? What do they think that the human beings that they've helped would evaporate? Do they think that the food that feeds the nation will suddenly not sprout from the soil? Will the buildings they reside in levitate away?

At the cost of US hegemony.

communism is when goverment gives you cows!

The British Diaspora build their countries on stolen fertile land that receive good care from Aboriginal populations, free child slaves from the Indian Residential fake schools that secretly continued after 1997, and free stolen inheritance from the fake cultural assimilation policy; why is wrong with a government subsidy program that worked in practice when Pax Americana have welfare policies that are supposed to compensate for Capitalist problem at a much larger cost? Furthermore, do the Western European diaspora now need to import a huge number of foreign workers to compensate for their failed politico-economic system and parasitic lifestyle that depends on free riding of Aboriginal children and colonized people of color?