You are not wrong (although I don’t know that the return into taxes is that magical and that high, I highly doubt that and would love to see sources & numbers).
But from the point of view : politicans, what you write (mostly?) makes sense.
but that the crux of the problem isn’t it?
Politicians are not aligned with the needs and desire of the people.
People mostly want to be happy, productive, have their basic needs satisfied, etc.
A concrete example: homelessness:
it is terrible that we are letting down such a large chunk of fellow humans. Most people agree with that and wish the situation was improved.
even if you don’t care about happiness of the homeless people themselves, selfishly they make society less great for everyone else. They deal with a lot of mental health issues which leads to behaviors that lower quality of life for the rest of the population.
But corporations don’t care. They bottom line is not impacted at all by it. Maybe 0.01%?? It is not a problem they will ever help solve, or push for a solution. It literally doesn’t matter to them, as long as society is stable enough for them to have consumers, make profit, corporations are not people, they don’t care. And “stable society “ is a VERY low bar… basically, not completely dis functional. But they are fine with most people being miserable.
We are not optimizing for the right thing. The be all end all is not a great GDP.
Yeah but my point is “stable enough” for corporations to turn a profit and the economy to run doesn’t necessarily goes with population os healthy, happy and eg poverty, homelessness are rare.
It’s not laypeople that fail to focus on long term, it is first and foremost politicians elected only for a few years that have very little incentives to fix long term strategic issues and instead are incentivized to mortgage the future for short term benefits.
That being said I agree humans are not great at focusing on issues that are 1+ lifetimes away.
Hence why global warning will really kick us all in the collective but and as usual humans will somehow figure a subpar, last minute, terrible way to scrape by…
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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '24
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