It’s Super Bowl Sunday, a day when tens of millions Americans with jobs will sit on their sofas instead of working and paying taxes associated with working, e.g., payroll and personal income tax.
We have been gifted by far-sighted and generous politicians whose dreams of an improved cradle-to-grave welfare state for roughly 50 percent of Americans have been spoiled by the laziness of Americans who have jobs but don’t work enough hours to fully fund progressive dreams.
Imagine the boost to tax revenue if working Americans worked all weekend instead of watching games on TV. What if we augmented televisions and streaming services with EBT card readers and only those with active SNAP/EBT/food stamps would be able to watch NFL, NBA, MLB, etc.? (It’s easier to get someone who works 50 hours per week to instead work 60 hours per week than it is to get someone who works 0 hours per week to toil for 10 tedious hours per week.)
I pointed this out yesterday, but it is worth pointing out again today: Santa Clara County just recently issued a mask order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 (below) and today they’re going to host a COVID-19 superspreader event. #Science!
As Phil pointed out in earlier articles, we already allow SNAP/EBT recipients to get in free to museums, gardens etc. This would be another admirable step forward in addressing important inequities in our nation. (sarcasm)
I think the plan would fall flat as the reason many of the 50% of working Americans perform work is to come home and watch sports (or to watch sports while getting paid at “work”), so there would likely be outrage in restricting their viewing. See already the fermented hatred of working sports fans when one overpaid athlete is traded to a team they don’t like or an overpaid coach goes “here” instead of “there”.
In fact, if Phil’s policy was instituted, we might just very well see mass resignations. Could this be the solution to an aging job market (give your job to a younger person in exchange for exclusive sports access)?
Working Americans also work to pay for housing and food. Since they weren’t smart enough to get into public housing when young they would have a 10-year waiting list if they quit their jobs now and tried to switch to the welfare lifestyle. The case of watching sports at work is even more of an argument for my proposal. Think of the productivity loss! That’s almost as bad for employers as a closed border and having to pay the resulting higher wages to native-born Americans.
> (sarcasm)
So Phil wasn’t being sarcastic? I hope at least he was being satirical. The working class has to have some time to sleep.
About Santa Clara – our city council is diverse, progressive and basically owned by the football company.
https://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-santa-clara-city-council-results-2024-19898141.php
> In 1990, the United States imported 38m pounds of avocados; by 2023, that number was 2,789m, mostly from Mexico…in the lead-up to this Sunday’s game, Americans are expected to devour nearly 280m pounds of avocados, a historical record.
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/feb/07/are-avocados-healthy-super-bowl
We could also clandestinely send Americans down into Mexico, drafted through a lottery of individuals who don’t qualify for food stamps, using any vacation time they have accrued. With their earnings from picking avocados, we could send boxes of fresh avocados to EBT card holders for their Superspreader Bowl parties. Or just directly smuggle the avocados back in empty trucks returning from fentanyl runs into the U.S.
We also should find a way to seamlessly link those EBT cards into the sports betting network. As always, Phil, your Progressive ideas are inspiring. We live in a TV Lagrange point between metro areas, so we don’t receive the game over the air, and none of our friends are rich enough to pay to see it. And as you pointed out yesterday, through their selection of half-time entertainment, they are already giving documented people an incentive to not watch. So, I’ll be working through it anyway. Back to the grindstone.
> Or just directly smuggle the avocados back in empty trucks returning from fentanyl runs into the U.S.
Correction: I grossly overestimated my knowledge of the fentanyl supply chain and the pharmaceutical manufacturing capability of Mexico and China. According to this infographic from the DEA, in addition to importing undocumented foreigners, the U.S. appears to be a net importer of fentanyl. There might be room for avocados in trucks returning from delivering fentanyl precursor to Mexico, IDK. I was just brainstorming here, sorry for technical errors.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FENTANYL_FLOW_TO_THE_UNITED_STATES_2019.png
It may be small change to Greenspun, but the amount of money being collected by streaming services & advertizers is still huge for us plebians. The biggest drag on revenue is having the superbowl become the Patriots bowl. They seemed to generate a lot more content about the location than the game this year.