A "Groceries and Essentials Benefit" is basically a wage subsidy, and you can bet the grocery chains would raise prices by just a little less than the benefit, and if it's like food stamps in the US, it'll be chipped away at and rendered humiliating and useless.

We've seen this play out with gas tax reductions: resellers know a lot about price elasticity, and any savings from a tax cut gets quickly eaten up by price increases.

Here's what we could do:

• Tax the rich until we can afford to pay for services again
• Raise marginal and corporate rates, forcing companies to re-invest instead of hoarding profits
• Make stock buybacks illegal
• Significantly raise capital gains taxes
• (this is tricky) find a way to tax net worth as income