Subject: Re: Fox News Freaking Out
Free buses, free day care, and a rent freeze are an immediate and huge injection of income into poor

I’d be careful of the law of unintended consequences.

Free buses led to homeless using them as living quarters when it was tried in LA during the pandemic. I don’t know what the mechanism would be to prevent this, but it needs to be addressed, lest the buses become *less* popular, not more.

Free daycare is similar. I expect it would be overwhelmed in short order. I have a neighborhood example, where a young woman (whose husband was serving in Iraq) agreed to host some (latch-key) kids after school until their parents got home from work. Within a couple months she had more than a dozen showing up because other parents heard about it and took advantage (and she couldn’t say no, apparently), and she was wholly unprepared for anything of the sort. (It began as a favor to one neighbor.)

And “rent freeze” comes with its own set of problems, because landlords have costs that are not frozen. Maintenance is the only realistic way they have to cut, and they will. Rent control seems laudable, but comes with its own set of issues.

I’m not sure if a “government board of reasonableness” is the answer to a lot of this, but easy sounding solutions are, well, easy. Solutions that don’t have deleterious long term implications, not so much.