Exactly, and they love it when people waste time and energy blaming businesses for not providing charity. This whole tweet storm should not be directed at Google, but directed at the US federal government.
> This also sounds like you think it’s easy, without considering the implications. (If govt resources is the solution, why do we still have a problem?)
Because it is purely political. Stalling progress on providing essentials for life helps keep people from getting help, and hence keeps taxes lower. If the US government can do identity verification for passports at USPS offices, it can do the same for other purposes.
>We don’t have municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook, and there are reasons to believe programs like that would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
If the world’s leading country cannot setup email infrastructure, then we have huge problems. Presumably, it already does for the how many million federal employees?
The debate parent mentioned is what to do with the money, not where to get money. You can see that there are lots of possible options, right? But you say use taxes like it’s ‘duh, easy’ or something. Now we’re in the realm of the debates actually happening every day in the US, whether to provide social services at all, before we even discuss how much money they need, what to do with it, and where to get it. A huge portion of people this country seem to believe that they don’t benefit from taxes and would prefer safety nets for other people not come out of their pockets.
> The correct answer is […] using government resources to provide methods for identity verification, communications, and various other bare minimum needs for living.
This also sounds like you think it’s easy, without considering the implications. (If govt resources is the solution, why do we still have a problem?) We don’t have municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook, and there are reasons to believe programs like that would take a long time and cost a lot of money. The ‘bare minimum needs’ have changed dramatically in 20 years, and will probably keep changing just as fast for a while, with the homeless population growing in the mean time because the tax-funded social safety net we have isn’t doing the job.