Comment by MantisShrimp90 14 hours ago
Remember, in other countries, especially eastern ones, the recommendation of even your local city means allot. There is a deeper trust of government bodies so this will likely have an impact.
And starting small is probably good, lets the idea iterate before rolling it out wider and this often comes down to making a choice, this city just thought this would be best and I suspect unless this goes horribly wrong it will help
I live in the 23 wards of Tokyo and certainly do. The local governments in other countries I've lived seem to just take and give very little back (while paying their unelected c-suite ridiculous salaries), but ours has given us thousands over the years for child related expenses.
Your child related expenses are not “given”, other taxpayers have paid for it. And for them, they have very little given back, if we factor in very high tax load in Japan.
Just because someone ride the wave of payouts for kids doesn’t mean government is giving back a lot. Japanese government, just like any other government out there, extremely inefficient and corrupt, absorbing huge amounts of money in taxes and giving very little back. Particularly to those who actually earn those money.
Having a base level of trust in your government can have incredibly positive effects on society. In the US, I dream of the day where government could try out ideas without the pitchforks coming out. Sure, some ideas will be terrible and that’s OK as long as we throw them in the trash can.