I think the point of the person you responded to is it's not really reasonable to tell the poor and homeless to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to work some low wage job during a pandemic. The problem is until the world manages to find a safe way through this problem, we should have a social safety net for those who can't work--and the thing standing in the way of getting there is a few people who have enough wealth to wholesale purchase a medium sized country if they wanted to.

Yes, there are some jobs that we do need done and are safe to do, but the labor bubble probably isn't big enough to accommodate all of those currently suffering.

I spent nearly six years homeless. I don't qualify for disability, though I am disabled.

If I hadn't tried to establish an earned income, suicide would have been my only way out of my predicament. No one was going to rescue me.

With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone. The only way to fix this mess is to find ways to get people working again. There is no other real solution.

I get really tired of hearing pie in the sky talk of how people in lousy circumstances "shouldn't have to" do x, y or z. In practice, it winds up being a means to trap them there and give them no way out.

> With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone

Other countries seem to manage it. Bigger income taxes and use the money to help those who are out of work

I know it may seem like your actions are being criticised, I really don't think that's the case, we're all grateful for the efforts that you're making. But as someone else pointed out, you're walking through the trenches distributing band-aids. At the same time we need to ask ourselves why there are so many people in the trenches in the first place, whilst others are living in mansions 200 miles behind the front lines.

Exactly. Arguing that there's no possible way to help everyone, while the top 1% are hoarding more and more is exactly how that same 1% want it.

Don't tax the job creators! Those billionaires earned every penny and didn't exploit anyone! We need to cut Amazon's taxes or they might not build another distribution center here that pays less than a living wage!

Just note that a lot of more socialist countries do not have clearly higher taxes, and they look much better financially when you factor in the ridiculously high price US folks pay for healthcare

While your circumstances are unfortunate, this is about the government maintaining stability during a widespread disaster. If a fire burned down half the country, nobody would be saying “well those people should get back to work.” We’d have politicians rushing to win votes and support those afflicted by the disaster until we could come up with a good way to get life back to normal.

The current course America has now is to pretend things are normal during an ongoing disaster. It hasn’t been working. People working low wage jobs during this just because they’re struggling to pay rent are quite miserable—more so than before.

In other countries, people would have come to rescue you, the government would have been able to provide you with housing and enough money to live. Not everyone can work and those people deserve social net to be able to live comfortably.