The main political realization I had with growing up lower class, still live in poorer areas, and …

I don't remember all that well but I think there aren't really sharp welfare cliffs with financial aid. The expected contribution of you and your family is subtracted from the total cost, and you are eligible for aid to pay the rest. The money you get from working is supposed to be more than your financial aid deduction anyway. So say if you made an extra $10k, it ought to reduce your financial aid by less than that. >It makes the program exponentially more expensive to maintain because you have to hire people to track who gets it and who doesn't, look for fraud, monitor for when the income threshold needs changed, etc.. We already have a system for that. It's called the IRS. The cost of a basic fraud detection system is less than the actual fraud would be of course. They have to worry about things like people enrolling and never going to class. >It's just terrible policy all around. We …

What we learned from COVID is that it's absolutely disastrous to send everyone a check, because most of that money gets stolen. Better to give away resources that are valuable to consume but expensive to transact in. And what we learned from taxing high earners is that the highest earners hide their money and don't pay the expected taxes.