But then if poverty is the best predictor for crime, that begs the question why would any country want people who are inherently more prone to crime in the first place?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to precisely discourage that type of immigration if you were trying to bring crime down?

The thing about Japan is complex for several reasons. On the one hand, late payments only affect your PR application if they took place within the last two years. So it’s not like you’ll be perma-banned from the PR if you paid your National Health Insurance slip late once because you forgot.

But if you do pay late consistently, that’s when it affects your PR. And again, you need to be consistent for two years to be eligible again.

Interesting! Thanks for the fact check. I always assumed giving money away would at best just be a temporary bandaid solution since you need a stable income to actually get out of poverty.

Of course, this isn’t a problem with a stable UBI, I imagine.

Nah man, I’m poor as fuck right now, I barely make minimum wage, but I properly file my taxes and you know what? Because the system in my country is good, I don’t have to break the bank to do so either.

Fraud, debt evasion, tax evasion etc are not a consequence of poverty and instead do affect all other people who do things right. You can’t benefit from tax money and from the system if you’re actively cheating it.

The reality though is that most millionaires and really rich families and people aren’t really the main problem with our current system.

Even if your family had tens of millions of dollars available while you were growing up, you’re many orders of magnitude closer to a minimum wage worker than to any billionaire.

The reality is that if most societies redistributed a fraction of the wealth of their top 30 wealthiest individuals, almost no one would be harmed and thousands of people could benefit significantly.

Now, of course, if you just give money away, that’s no good at improving people’s lives, so it makes sense to use the money to fund hospitals and schools, to provide adequate conditions to the disabled, the elderly, single parents, the homeless and our most vulnerable. And oh, would you look at that, that’s just a tax reform.

I’m from a middle upper class family, so, I never lacked any necessities but I also couldn’t afford luxuries every day. But I hold no contempt for people who got to grow up living in wealth and luxury beyond what my family could afford. I hold contempt for people who could dramatically improve their entire communities’ conditions and choose to evade their only tax obligations and only invest their wealth to accumulate more and more.

I think societies should at some point put a cap on wealth. No human being should be as rich as Elon Musk.

I really think you guys need to wake up to the fact that they don’t care about distracting from the Epstein files because they know they can’t be held accountable whatsoever.

The reality is every file could come out unredacted tomorrow and absolutely nothing would happen (maybe one or two major donors would get house arrest at best).

They’re not trying to distract from anything because it doesn’t matter. No one will do anything.

They are just furthering the US’s economic and military goals by toppling unfriendly governments because they can. They don’t care about optics, but they do care about whatever goals they have underlined for themselves.

The most likely unsettling reality for most American progressives, I imagine, is that toppling Iran, establishing a friendly government and gaining military power in the region, benefits them as well, just like with Venezuela, but it is a dark reality for most of the rest of the world. Not because Iran’s government was great, they were absolute shit, but because that means the US will just extort whoever they want whenever they want.

Some Americans probably prefer to believe this is a distraction than to see how this ultimately does benefit their own country’s immediate military interests at the expense of almost everybody else, not to mention setting an incredibly grim precedent for the future.

Basically, I think people are being naive or deliberately playing dumb when they pretend they don’t understand how this benefits the US military industrial complex, and instead think it’s all a distraction. Yes, what benefits you guys actively harms other humans. That’s the sad reality of geopolitics sometimes.