Start booking cheap private rooms via airbnb in population centers. Check the hosts' listings to see if they offer multiple rooms in the same apt. The more the better. It's like a hostel environment but you can retreat to the privacy of your own room whenever you like. I'm a host and list 3 private bedrooms individually in one of my apts. I've seen friendships randomly occur between guests who would've never met otherwise. My guests can range from medical students doing clinicals and residency interviews to traveling nurses to digital nomads to adventurous 19 yo Europeans.

My wife works in healthcare and caught some random respiratory illness in December 2019 that lingered on for 3 weeks. Her o2 levels the entire time was hanging around 94-96% so eventually we went to see her PCP. He found "adventitious" sounds in her lungs via stethoscope and prescribed her some steroids. It had an immediate effect and I thank god everyday she was diagnosed and treated before MSM made covid the black plague.

USA has similar unemployment stats with subsets of their population demographics. This subset largely survives and thrives due to section 8 and EBT/SNAP entitlements.

Well, survive maybe but certainly they're not thriving. The welfare state has all but ensured that those people will never get out of their situation. Maybe their kids have a chance but it's clearly a major contributing factor of generational poverty. It's unconscionable what it has done to black Americans. It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters as a way to help people but ultimately it only serves to make those people wards of the state.

So many people "make it" in the off the books economy that the welfare eligible rungs of the social ladder deal in but they can't get up to the next rung because they can't amass the capital to make a clean break and the state will screw them out of everything if they try and go legit slowly.

Imagine your a highly successful under the table mechanic. You have a few under the table employees and work out of a leased space where the owners look the other way. Everything is done in cash or similar. If you want to start a "real shop" you can't just get an LLC, rent a real garage space, put up a sign and move all your tools then slowly start a rolling upgrade process to get all your stuff on the books and above the table as you acquire more profitability to absorb the overhead that entails. The city or state would instantly show up and fuck you over twenty different ways for being off the books and out of compliance. The only way to go legit fast enough is to get a loan and you can't do that because you have no assets, no history, no credit, despite the fact that you are basically already running a successful business.

> It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters

Has it? I don't think I have talked to a single person who likes the current state of welfare in the USA. The problem is that some people think it is too generous, and others think it is not generous enough; so we end up with a clearly dysfunctional system as it accumulates changes changes born out of polar opposite views of the problem.

Yes. The well-meaning but ill-informed voters are the ones who think it isn't generous enough.

Seems like a pretty arbitrary way of framing things. You could support programs that would help poor people become more independent while framing this as being a more generous social program.