Ah, well, here we run into some problems. For example, the majority of people who receive food stamps are employed and 90% were recently employed, so it's not clear that simply telling them to work is going to eliminate their need for "handouts". Some countries provide a basic income to their population and that seems to work pretty well, so it's not clear that a large proportion of people "depending on the government" equates to a clear and present problem with anything. Apart from the 'fundamental unfairness', that is.

What I'm reading is that you have no plan, because you were too busy dropping a hundred million people into the "lazy shiftless layabouts who profit from plundering my parents' hard-earned income and should get a job or starve" box. Which renders your inveighing against the great moral calamity of taxation so much ivory-tower smoke.

Now, to the tariffs. You intend to fund government by raising prices and counting on people to buy the products anyway. That sounds rather a lot like what a sales tax accomplishes, doesn't it? You've just buried the transaction a few layers distant from the cash register. Moreover, this means a person's income doesn't buy as many goods/services as he could purchase without the tariffs, since the goods are more expensive; this sounds rather a lot like the impact of an income tax. Tell me again what the moral distinctions are here.

I might get to the rest of this later--whether power vacuums remain empty, whether reducing immigration is an effective way to fight unemployment, and so on. But I think the objections already raised are sufficient to warrant reexamination of your base premises.

"TrPrado, international trade is greater than ever. I see no reason why tariffs would not work today."
And yet that is precisely WHY tariffs wouldn't work. Increased international trade and globalization have made all countries more reliant on others to supply part of the economy, to the point where very few products are made 100% in a single country. Levying tariffs still happens as part of international sanctions from time to time, but no one is out there enough to think that they can levy tariffs so high that they can support a government on it. We would become an economic pariah (meaning at some point the world would just stop trading with us), and our economy would be crippled by the drastically increased prices. It could only work if you first want to throw the US back into an age of economic isolation, which would still shrink our economy considerably due to how many international corporations are still based here and contribute to our economy.
And if you don't want to wholly replace revenue from income tax with tariff, but still make such a decent amount of our economy based off of it while doing away with the income tax completely, then there would have to be a massive defunding purge in the American government just to fend off the most unhealthy deficit the US has seen. If such a purge happens at a rapid rate, you're putting American livelihoods quite deeply at risk. This plan would be harmful to Americans.

@_leon1122 you are making very little sense with your contribution. First you argue that unemployed individuals shouldn't get modest help despite the fact that many have probably been workers and taxpayers.. then you argue for a form of "welfare for innefecient businesses" with your tariffs. Unless there are compelling reasons for trade sanctions (eg North Korea ) then tariffs are harmful to both the nation that has them as well as other nations who want to trade with the nation imposing tariffs.
There are,all sorts of trade barriers that harm the global economy, not just tariffs. And the good old USA, allegedly the home of free market capitalism has plenty of restrictive trade practices to restrict imports..especially in agricultural products..and you suggest more protectionism, not less..that's just nuts in my opinion.. No help for individuals, but more government fiddling to "help" businesses... just a touch inconsistent.
Tariifs also have the long term problem of protecting inefficient businesses.. they stifle competition and innovation

I suspect i missed the boat on this one.

Feeding the world isn't a technical problem, it is a social one (of how do we dostribute our resources) Going into space is a technical problem.

We can work on both at the same time, certainly, but social problems require compromise (at least in democracies) And at present humans are not good at conpromising on large scales.

Considering we evolved in social groups of up to around 150 (see dunbar's number) the fact that we can live in cities is impressive (though even there social illnesses like depression seem to be increasing) Still democracy fails at large scales (it worked really well for Iceland's 300 thousand, as they took their prime minister to court for mismanaging the economy, but the US's 300 million do not have the power to do the same with their president - which is, to my mind, the greatest example of the failure of the demos in democracy)

The space program was also a collaboration of thousands. Perhaps 100,000 people worked on the early space program. And there are those who claim that humans are not good at working together in larger groups. (How the largest wars were organised may be an interesting question)

Sorry, what were you talking about?

"Levying tariffs still happens as part of international sanctions from time to time"

- notably seen as an alternative to warfare. Like a tool in the diplomats toolkit. "We don't need to threat you with war, we can start out threatening sanctions'

The topic of this thread was about the value for money invested in Space exploration, and whether that was / is a good investment, and pondered whether that .money could have been used to solve social problems here.
I think you can do both, explore space, and work to solve problems caused by inequalities in the distribution of wealth...the first step in solving problems of inequality here is to get beyond our basic selfishness... would I like five Bentleys.. yes..but I'd be happier driving a modest car and giving the money for the five Bentleys to a well run charitable organization that helped individuals in need.
Additionally the idea of the "deserving" poor and the "undeserving" poor should be somewhat passe in the 21st century, it's an antiquated "Victorian " attitude that is wonderfully satarised by G Bernard Shaw in his play Pygmalion.
One of the things that I've done that has given me much satisfaction was to sponsor children in poverty, specifically young girls in Muslim communities. I'm still a selfish individual, but it's a work in progress

@"Third world countries would possibly be angry, and they might shift some of their market to Europe. I'm sure our allies would have no objections to receiving more trade. However, the largest market remains in the US, so the developing countries are forced to continue trading with us."

Actually, the EU may not be a single political block, and corporations may need to jump through different hoops to setup business, but it is a single market/economic zone (actually the EEA, which includes Norway and Switzerland)

Collectively the EU has the largest GDP, and this i'd be surprise if it wasn't also te biggest market.

@"I think you can do both, explore space, and work to solve problems caused by inequalities in the distribution of wealth...the first step in solving problems of inequality here is to get beyond our basic selfishness... would I like five Bentleys.. yes..but I'd be happier driving a modest car and giving the money for the five Bentleys to a well run charitable organization that helped individuals in need."

I think you can do both - but you can't equate the technical problems of space travel with the social problems of poverty relief.

And you social problems don't scale linearly. The more people you need to feed, the exponentially more organisation you need to do.

And as far as 'should we spend this or that...'

We can agree to spend 20 Billion going back to the moon. Or 50 Billion on a new fusion reactor technology.

But we can't, thus far, agree how to feed all the humans. So we don't, not that we shouldn't keep trying; merely that we don't know how to solve it. (Though i disagree with the pessimistic views that it can never be solved.)