> It shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed someone that doesn't want to work, study, or pass a drug test

This would make sense if every person was given similar opportunities, like providing quality education to all of our youngest and making higher education a mission rather than a business as a starter.

As a society we move at the speed of the weakest among us, we only move forward when we start lifting and helping the weakest and most vulnerable.

You also need to realize that not doing that work is also cause for other taxpayer money to be spent elsewhere, such as spending an average of 37k $ per incarcerated person, and that ignores all the damage that criminal might've caused, all the additional police staffing and personal security that is needed to be spent outside prisons, etc.

Those are complex systems, are you sure it wouldn't be better to spend the same gargantuan amount of money that's spent on millions of inmates and fighting crime into fighting the causes that make many fall into that?

Again, those are complex, but closed systems and the argument of "we shouldn't spend on X" often ignores the cost of not spending on X.

The US already spends 38% more than the OECD average on education per student, just lagging Luxembourg, Austria, Norway, etc - if you’re a student in America, you have access to plenty of resources.

You’re right that these are complex systems, and just pouring more tax dollars and more debt into them isn’t working. Portions of our society need to value education, value contributing to society instead of taking, and reject criminality - but those changes require more than blind spending.

No that’s the system working as intended: there’s good private money to be made on incarcerating the poor and uneducated!