yeah. i find this tendency on the fake-left to do away with what they call "means testing" to be rather bourgeois, when you look at it closely.

i'm going to suspect that it probably came out of a historical movement to push back against governments that were creating unrealistic cut-off points. so, rather than fight about who is poor and who is deserving, they just argued to throw the whole thing out the window. i've also heard people like david graeber argue that you'd actually save money if you eliminated means-testing, which is something that may be true sometimes, but shouldn't be generalized too dramatically.

i highly doubt that it cost anything close to 20 billion dollars to administer this program, and these kinds of numbers are kind of necessary to keep manageable when you're dealing with credit ratings agencies that want to come in and push imf reforms.

the flip side is that a lot of this will get clawed back at tax time, and that's fine. but, this isn't the time to write checks for the wealthy, if there ever was one. and, i wonder when the left will re-embrace progressive taxation and wealth redistribution, like it used to.

if a lot of wealthy people benefited from this, it's just another reason to raise their taxes to at least get the deficit manageable enough to keep the vultures out, if freeland isn't one herself.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/up-to-22-billion-in-covid-aid-may-have-gone-to-high-income-canadians-fraser-institute-study