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.
OAG: I’m serious. If the U.S. is ever going to pay down its national debt, either people who don’t work will have to start working and paying taxes (an absurd pipe dream) OR the workers will have to give up alcohol, sports, healing marijuana, and other pleasures that blunt their productivity and reduce their taxable earnings.
Philg: how about just hyperinflating national debt away? It worked for Weimar Republic!
@philg
I apologize for seeing the humor in squeezing the middle class (now defined as anybody who works at all?) even more for the benefit of the idle rich and the poor loafers. It won’t happen again. We’re in for some “Great Reset”, I fear — no joke — with serious solutions like yours. Ta.
Phil, why would anyone need to work and pay taxes when we have Somalian immigrants to grow GDP?
Steven, thank you so much for highlighting the vibrant and smart Somali culture. While we start off with genetically inferior DNA, which makes our IQs among the lowest in the world (even within the lowest of lows Africa), we try to make up for this with our proud incestual traditions, which we are told by our elders enhances our IQs dramatically. Hence our tremendous enrichment to America and Western Civilization generally wherever we get infested.
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
I had Section 8 tenants. They were not notably interested in museums, gardens, etc. I do recall that they were avid consumers of high-fructose beverages, judging by the prodigious quantities of bottles that filled my dumpster. This despite my dwindling efforts to interest them in the ‘recycling bin’ concept. Ever the public-spirited citizen I would encourage them to vote. Come election day they had other fish to fry.
> 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.
The rich (about top 5%) earn almost all their income from investments, if you have to work, you are not rich. How else would you have time for all your hobbies like golf, travel and mistresses if you have to work. The bottom 40% do not work, since the economy is still growing, most likely they just do not have the intelligence or skill to get any job worth doing. They would be pretty much worthless to the economy, except there are a significant amount of people who’s income depends on suppling the bottom 40% food, housing, cell phones and video games. The 15% just below the top 5%, do reasonably well, but they have to work to have a good life, if they stop, straight to the tent city you go. The 40% between the bottom and top are increasingly involved in the hunger games, which will only get more competitive. If the predictions on AI getting more and more capable turn out to be true, there will be no paradise, companies will hold one on one battles to the death, to see who gets one of the jobs doing things that AI cannot. Once the top 5% find out they do not need the bottom 95%, we will be liquidated, except for a small percentage of entertaining slaves.
If the GDP is growing, reducing debt will slow down the economy, for the financial system to work, ideally debt should rise at the same rate as the GDP, if dept goes faster than GDP then you have inflation and if it is slower, than the growth slows down. If GDP can go to infinity than so can debt and the system will just keep functioning. The main limits are energy and resources.
Many EBT, SNAP, TANF, etc. recipients also use their available funds to purchase lottery tickets. This is why lottery winners are mainly among lower-income individuals.