That would simply make food and housing more expensive, as it would devalue money, as it increases circulation, because it wouldn't produce more housing and food - just increase demand - unless they "donated" (tax) that 2.5% to increase production, and not to subsidize poverty.

If you could subsidize your way out of poverty, Venezuela wouldn't be poor. They tried printing money and handing it out. It doesn't work. If you don't have enough housing and you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, you still don't have enough housing.

Anyone who thinks "as long as we have higher than 0% vacancy rates, and homeless-ness, we have enough housing," is a moron who has never been on the market to try and rent an apartment or buy a house.

We don't live in a perfect world. You need more than the perfect amount of housing.

The vast majority of home owners in this country are massively against increasing the supply of housing, so good luck 1) convincing them to pay more tax, and 2) spending those tax dollars on the exact opposite of what they want to spend them on.

Homeowners are almost 75% of voters most years. And in most counties (housing is largely a local issue, not a national one) can be >90% of voters.

Homeowner here, and I do agree, it would be a great investment.

But there are lots of great investments that will never happen, because many people would shoot their own head off before they did something that benefited everyone, but didn't benefit them the most.

There's literally a million things we could do to make healthcare more affordable. But we also won't do any of those because of entrenched interests in healthcare, admin, and insurance - and, perhaps especially, people's entrenched interests to continue living unhealthy lifestyles and exporting the cost onto others as negative externalities.

Food and housing would get more more expensive but also food and housing are getting more expensive without this redistribution